If you’ve ever been to Cambridge after temperatures dip below 50 degrees, you’ve seen it: The throngs of students with hands jammed into waist-length pockets, strutting down the streets of Harvard Square with Canada Goose’s trademark red and white circular patch embroidered into their sleeves.
A Georgian, I had never owned a real winter coat, let alone been one to opt for brand-name puffer jackets. But after witnessing the winter-garment homogeneity of Cambridge’s streets and being woefully unprepared for the arctic onslaught of my first New England winter, I resolved: I was going to invest in a high-quality, durable, stylish winter jacket — specifically, a Canada Goose winter jacket.
When I voiced my purchasing intentions to a wise and frugal friend, though, she was quick to recoil, informing me of the hefty cost. “Oh, a seven-hundred-dollar investment? Well,” she paused. “I hope it’s worth it.” When I finally checked the Canada Goose website, the price exceeded even my friend’s lofty estimate: $1495 for a single mid-thigh length winter coat, the hood-liner of which alone sold for $95 apiece.
I was flabbergasted – first by the magnitude of the sticker price and second, remembering the flock of black Canada Goose jackets that shuffled across campus each day, by the sheer number of students who had taken on that kind of expense.
Although more than half of Harvard students do qualify for financial aid, it’s often easy to forget the gaping wealth differentials that exist on campus. Note that I speak only from my own experience and without judgment for the people I am about to describe. Certainly, there are some students who are quite ostentatious when presenting their upper-class origins, broadcasting expensive spring break vacations on their social media, proudly advertising their private school pedigrees, or excitedly sharing their last experience meeting a head of state during casual dining hall conversations. But for the most part, Harvard students don’t usually talk about money: It’s awkward, odious during small talk, and, for lack of a better word, slimy, confirming all of society’s worst Harvard stereotypes. Consequently, while there are a number of other silent indicators of wealth’s indubitable campus presence, winter — when the Canada Geese migrate to Cambridge — is one of the most jarring reminders that you are just as likely to sit next to an heiress in class as you are to a first-generation, low-income student.
When wealthier students do talk about money, their tone may often be self-flagellating. Many express discomfort with their wealth, associating it with guilt about coming from positions of privilege, especially as campus life presents many upper-class students’ first encounter with peers from disparate socioeconomic brackets. Indeed, according to both personal conversations I have had as well as anonymous student conversations I have seen held on the app Sidechat, wealthier Harvard students even confess that they feel “bad” about their money and report uncertainty about how or whether to use it.
This phenomenon, commonly known as “wealth/financial survivor’s guilt,” is present beyond Harvard’s gates: During the COVID-19 recession, therapists nationwide noted that their clients who kept their jobs while millions were furloughed reported severe anxiety on account of inequitable employment conditions from which they benefited. Psychologists also say that their affluent teenage clients often resort to lying to their friends about their backgrounds, their high schools, or their neighborhoods in order to feel “normal” by concealing their financial circumstances. At Harvard, while there is certainly a spectrum of willingness to disclose financial privilege, similar concerns about “normality” and some degree of internalized negativity regarding wealth are present.
This ubiquitous societal tendency, however, alludes to an intriguing irony: Many wealthy students feel the need to seem less wealthy, especially when in financially diverse environments — but Canada Goose continues to saturate Harvard’s winter closet. How do we explain this discrepancy?
The answer to this question may be two-fold. First, it is necessary to uncover what might motivate wealth guilt and why a student might find it beneficial to cover up their wealth status. The cases I have mentioned find that guilt about socioeconomic background stems from the extent to which a person’s financial context deviates from the norm. However, at Harvard, this norm is hardly low- or even middle-income. Despite the University and College’s vast strides in financial inclusivity, more Harvard students still hail from families in the top 1% of the income spectrum than in the lowest 60%. Moreover, even among students receiving financial assistance, household incomes can exceed $200,000 — well above what most would consider the threshold for upper middle class (around $100,000 annually).
It’s clear: The “norm” at Harvard, while not universally ultra-rich as some misconceive, is considerably better-off than the norm nationwide. As a result, even if one’s wealth guilt reflects a desire to “fit-in,” doing so may not require abstaining from the purchase of pricey clothes — it just might mean not buying even pricier clothes. At Harvard, you can have your cake and eat it too: invest in the thousand-dollar jacket, pass on the five-thousand dollar Prada coat, and still avoid seeming too rich for other’s comfort.
Social pressures to veil one’s socioeconomic upbringing are even more prevalent for low- to middle-income students, who are often egregiously underrepresented in campus’s unconscious effort to realize the simulacrum of an upper-class-but-not-too-upper-class Harvard. At least this was the case at Yale, where 57% of surveyed FGLI students reported that their culture was “at odds or incompatible” with Yale culture. The result? Where normalizing pressures inspire “wealth guilt” among wealthier students, they precipitate “wealth shame” among those who come from less privileged means.
Indeed, most people have a desire to accommodate to their perceptions of “normality,” and when the baseline of normal at a place like Harvard is privilege, lower or middle-income students often feel the need to replicate the presentation of that privilege, even if it means altering the way they speak, selecting a more wealth-affiliated concentration or internship, or, yes, saving up to add an article of Canada Goose clothing to one’s closet. On more than one occasion, in fact, I have heard from students whose parents, despite it being well-beyond their means, were willing to set aside money for such a purchase to help their child better align with the social landscape. My own parents have even repeatedly expressed concern about my having to assimilate to an environment vastly disparate from the one in which I was raised.
And so we pamper our primal desire to, as some psychologists say, “be the same” — concealing individual realities, ashamed of upbringings and cultural contexts in which we should take pride, buying jackets we can’t afford, and feeling guilty about privileges we should be leveraging for the greater good. But shame and guilt about money encourage silence about money, and just like any burden internalized or bottled up too long, they fester. Consequently, the “Harvard norm” becomes ever-more pervasive, moving us to continue disguising ourselves as people we are not, perpetuating our silence and ultimately, reinforcing a vicious cycle whose least severe impact is the drain on our wallets. It damages our mental health, amplifies our anxieties, and builds higher barricades between students.
At least in my experience, we are more willing to verbalize common stereotypes about college finances — facetiously exclaiming something to the effect of, “I’m broke … I have $10 to my name …” or “there’s a millionaire in my seminar” — than we are to candidly talk about our socioeconomic circumstances and the emotions that undergird them. And while such statements are accurate to an extent, their superficiality only moves us to perpetuate an unrealistic socioeconomic standard that prevents students from embodying and leveraging their identities with complete authenticity. We keep chasing Canada Geese only to find that we drape the coats over the things that define us.
What is the solution, then, to our chronic lack of honesty with ourselves and our peers? For a problem so entrenched, the answer is surprisingly simple: Talk about it. Experts on the “money taboo” have suggested as much, noting that financial social stresses are best handled, much like other emotional struggles, with therapy and communication. Only through intentional discourse that addresses and includes students from across the income spectrum, then, can we truly guard against the toxic guilt and shame of an opaque but financially performative campus and end the goose chase for good.
