Support for higher education is a known and well-documented venue for financial transfers within families, but practices of family support beyond college are less understood. Drawing on interviews with recent master's degrees recipients who have student debt, I find key class differences in the process and forms of family financial assistance for…

Pursuing a college degree--and the open future for young adults it is believed to secure--anchors what it means to be middle class in the United States today. Acting on the conviction that the rising generation can and should do better than their parents is a middle-class inheritance, and getting young adults to and through college is at the heart…