In that case, just double tuition?

But it seems that this idea betrays a sort of static thinking about the University budget that misses the underlying issue: Given that the University funds itself partially from tuition payments, why could we not reduce tuition and let every student decide what charitable thing he wants to do with the rebate? It does not seem obvious that an educational institution has some sort of advantage in allocating charity. “Oh no,” you might say. “Those selfish brats will never use the money to help others!” But why not encourage the University then to double its tuition and, Robin Hood style, redirect large sums of money from affluent Princeton parents to the needy of the world? Need an orphanage in Ghana? Let’s raise library fees to fund it. A new elementary school in Trenton? No problem, if we make the compulsory meal plan even more expensive.

The point is that if there is a good reason that this University exists as an institution of higher education and not a poverty-relief fund, then it seems highly questionable that it has any business using its means to create a warm glow of charity which makes the ivory tower of learning look a little more like a soup kitchen. To paraphrase Zizek, there might be something absurd about buying indulgences to repent for our narrow focus on academics at the same time that we pay for our academic education.

That’s not the only strange use of our academic resources, though. The most valuable resource we might have at our disposal inside this hamster wheel of excellence is time itself. Nonetheless, besides giving money — raw and dirty — for various purposes outside of campus, be it breast cancer research or banana farmers (yes, I am looking at you, you little un-fair trade bananas at Cafe Viv!), we are constantly encouraged to help others by doing community service and putting our raw manpower at the disposal of others. No problem with that — as long as we acknowledge that the main purpose of these service activities is to provide pleasant and enriching experiences to ourselves and to enrich our theoretical studies with some field experience and practice in empathy.

“But above all, we do good for the poor children in Trenton,” I can hear the charitable battalions exclaim. If the benefit to the world of driving a food van or teaching kindergarten were what service is all about, I would conjecture that there are two much more charitable things to do with your time than to execute these tasks yourself: Either get a high-paying job and pay several other people to help those poor kids — people who have a much lower opportunity cost of time and might even be trained to do those jobs — or use your comparative academic advantage to the fullest to provide the world with new insights and inventions to make everyone better off. If you think that your goal is to help the world the most, perhaps the road does not lead through that warm glow of instant redemption.

Don’t get me wrong. A life devoted to helping others and making the world a better place is a very worthwhile and admirable pursuit. But at our age, perhaps the investment in our own gifts and advantages might better help the world’s disadvantaged further down the line than the immediate rush to the trenches of the fight against poverty. Above all, just because something is “good” on some ethical scale, it is not necessarily best, and the dynamic effects of a blessing to the few might be pernicious to the many. So is it the best use of our money to help the poor if we pay triple the Wawa price for a banana, hoping that the extra profit will find the needy and not distort incentives along the way? Perhaps. But if you are not sure, there is no reason to take it on faith.

Gregor Schubert is an economics major from Leipzig, Germany. He may be reached at gregors@princeton.edu.