But sometimes they can’t. Sometimes, in fact, the money moves the opposite direction.

* * *

Ian Williams grew up in a loving Milwaukee family surrounded by four siblings and hard-working parents who strove to teach their kids important values and skills, like how to share. For anyone, relinquishing a piece of something you want to another person can be decidedly difficult, even if you love them. Yet the experience of sharing can be different in very low-income families. Williams, for example, learned how to share with his brothers and sisters in a way many of his college professors and administrators likely did not: He shared his food.

Growing up poor, the idea that family members would help each other out as needed was a given in Williams’s home. “That’s how my mother raised us,” he explained in an interview, “If a piece of us falls, we all fall.”

Williams’s father made his expectations clear. “You’re always supposed to look out for your family, no matter how much money you’ve got,” his dad would say. “If you’ve got a dollar or something, if there are four quarters and four kids, then you give them a quarter apiece. That’s how we were raised and how ever since then I’ve been trying to do it. Whatever I come across, it doesn’t have to be much, as long as I come across a certain amount of money that can benefit me and my family, I’m going to try and do that as much as possible.”

When Williams became a college student, his family’s longtime practice of sharing continued. He shared his limited funds—from grants, loans, and work—with his mother and brothers. The financial-aid system assumed that Williams’s family was helping him by providing his EFC of $425 annually, but his mom couldn’t make that payment. Instead, Williams paid the EFC with student loans, and he used his financial aid to help her. He explained, “My mama was my motivation. She kept me out of trouble and that type of environment, even though it was hard for her because she was going to work most of the time … That’s why I’ve got to do something; I’ve got to help my mother out.”

Even though sharing that money meant that Williams himself had fewer resources for college, he explained that he benefited emotionally from this exchange: “It’s a lot of relief that comes off my chest … It’s an unexplainable feeling. I’m in the position to help my family out now … I know the only reason I’m in the position that I’m in right now is because of my family … The things they did for me and everything—that’s what makes me want to do more for them. That’s what pushes me through college so I can help them out a lot.”

Williams understood that other students might react differently: “Yeah, at times I probably feel like I don’t want to pay for this. But at the same time, when I look back and I needed this when I was younger, [my mom] worked hard and [provided] everything for me. So why I can’t I do that the same way? That’s how I look at the situation.”