Tonya Riley, a 24-year-old who works as a research assistant at a Washington, D.C. think tank, would now be considered middle class by most standards. But neither of her parents attended college, and she grew up with a single mother who lived below the poverty line. She excelled in high school and attended Brown University. But when she got there, she noticed that some of her peers had a distinct advantage: They could afford to take unpaid internships and spend summers abroad.

Riley decided to take out some small student loans to cover the cost of those activities. “It’s sort of a ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ thing,” she said. “Particularly when you’re in that atmosphere, you want to be able to have similar summer experiences…I wanted to be doing something I thought was productive.”

So with the help of financial aid and some student loans, she was able to keep up, completing two unpaid internships and a study abroad program in Russia. She also worked for her student newspaper, which was “very time-consuming,” she said, and wasn’t a lucrative job. When she graduated, she owed $11,000 in student loans that had helped cover the cost, including housing and commuting during her internships.

Riley’s problem was not unique. Young adults sometimes get flack for spending frivolously on Instagram-worthy trips, extravagant bachelor parties and avocado toast. But middle-class Americans who are transitioning from college to the job market have a reason for some of those luxury purchases: They believe all of that experience will benefit them when they’re looking for a job.

That’s according to a new study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Consumer Research from researchers at Bucknell University, Northwestern University and the University of Arizona, who studied how middle-class young adults act as consumers. “The middle-class emerging adults voraciously consume exploratory experiences in the present with their imagined future selves in mind,” it found. In other words, they spend money on expensive travel in order to gain more life experience and give them an edge in the job market, or so they don’t regret missing out on fun experiences later, when they have more responsibilities.

This is the new American dream

The new research also examined why the middle class spends money on experiences rather than physical items, said Jane Zavisca, one of the co-authors and the associate dean for research and an associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona. “This generation of the middle class has been raised their whole life, even as children, to be thinking about accumulating experiences as an investment in the future,” she said.

While they may be spending more than they can reasonably afford, it may actually pay off for them in the long run, Zavisca said. At a job interview, for example, a young middle-class adult who has been able to spend money on a study abroad program may make that a talking point. “You and the person interviewing you can both talk about those crazy trips you took during college,” she said. “It’s a way of creating a bond.” And being able to speak several languages can also be a huge boon.

That advantage is only available to people who can afford it, however, and it allows people from families with more money to burnish their job interview with casual conversation about expensive hobbies and similar taste in restaurants. Young adults with lower incomes are not able to invest in experiences in that same way, Zavisca said. “If you can’t afford to take a gap year before college and go explore, if you can’t afford to move cities to try another job, if you can’t afford to go out to eat at a different restaurant three times a week, you’re not accumulating that reserve of cultural capital,” she said.

Hiring managers look for more than skills, and also want to find a “cultural match” between candidates, their evaluators and companies, Lauren Rivera, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, found in her own research.

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Whether it’s international travel or charity functions at home, there can be a payoff in terms of connections and networking. But young working-class Americans may have fewer opportunities to meet adults who can help them, says Annette Lareau, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies inequality. “The dreams are there, but the resources aren’t.”

There are ways for poorer students to participate and make themselves “unique” in the eyes of employers and college admissions officers, Lareau said. They could volunteer to travel with a non-governmental organization or with a charitable organization at home (which may also be a good way to network).

And of course, not everyone in the middle class can actually afford these experiences, as recent debt statistics show. Millennials have increasingly turned to loans and financing programs to fund pricey purchases, and household debt has climbed in recent years. Americans now have more household debt than before the financial crisis, particularly on student loans, auto loans and credit cards.

The new Bucknell study could lead to criticism of internship programs, which can be difficult for young adults with low incomes to navigate, Zavisca said. (They’re also less likely to even get access to internships in the first place.) “Those are things employers and universities can do things about.”

Riley, meanwhile, isn’t sure taking the risk of completing unpaid internships and other “experiences” was actually worth it. She might have gotten the same full-time positions after graduation without those internships, she said, but it’s hard to know. She’s happy the total amount she had to spend out of her own pocket, the $11,000 in loans, was relatively low compared with the total some of her peers had to pay for their educations and internships. “For me, it was important to have the college experience and focus on a social life and studying,” she said. “I was able to make things work.”