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The Daily Tar Heel

Opinion: The expense of typical college life can be alienating

Later tonight, spring break will begin at UNC. Many students have already left town and begun their southward exodus. After the long, cold slog of the first two months of the semester, spring break, understandably, almost becomes a pilgrimage in the imaginations of college students.

But the popular imagining of spring break, that of well-tanned and happy college students cavorting around on cruise ships or island resorts, tends to obscure the fact that spring break, like so many other college traditions, comes at a price that not all UNC students can afford to pay.

The exclusivity and exoticism of this idea of spring break is certainly part of its allure. But it is also part of a larger problem with college culture, where wealth remains, by and large, internalized as the norm. For students at UNC for whom money is a chief concern, the expense associated with the celebrated “work hard, play hard” mindset can be alienating.

In an interview with The Daily Tar Heel in the fall, Shirley Ort, the director of scholarships and student aid at UNC, cited keeping up with the social and recreational expenses of attending college as a barrier to retention for students from poorer backgrounds.

Stories of college athletes who have supposedly been given a “full ride” scholarship going hungry or otherwise struggling to make ends meet suggest that anticipated costs of attendance rarely match up with the reality students face once they arrive on campus.

For four-year in-state students living on campus at a public university, the College Board estimates tuition and fees constitute just 39 percent of an average budget.

Granted, UNC has shown it is relatively sensitive to this fact. Subsidies allow all students to see world-class art on campus for the price of a meal on Franklin Street and participate in a broad array of activities for a fraction of their real-world cost. Larger initiatives like the Carolina Covenant and Carolina Firsts attempt to account for some of these social barriers in their programming.

But we, as students, should shoulder some of the burden of breaking down monolithic conceptions of the college experience that presuppose a certain amount of wealth or parental support. This can be as simple as remembering when inquiring about spring break plans that for some students, break means returning home to a less-than-relaxing family situation.

More broadly, we all ought to keep cost in mind when planning outings among friends and not pressing too hard when a friend declines to attend an expensive get-together.

The aristocratic roots of higher education unfortunately linger in our understandings of what college life ought to look like and who it is designed for. But a collective recognition that productive and rewarding college experiences can take a wide variety of forms could help students from less wealthy or nontraditional backgrounds feel that UNC is a place where they, too, can belong.

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