Why save for a funeral, while you could invest your child's education?

According to Karen Macgregor a shocking 40% of South African students drop-out of university in their first year, a major study has found. Financial difficulties among the country's large pool of poor black students are, unsurprisingly, largely to blame first generation students from low-income, less educated families are the most likely to drop out. While South Africa has a highly successful National Student Financial Aid Scheme, which supports about 120,000 of 735,000 university students, loans and bursaries do not cover the full costs of study, leaving poor students struggling to meet living and other expenses. One could say that a large number of this students drop out due to their parents failing to prioritize. For the purpose of this post, the research that was done shows that black parents focus on other things than on the education of their children. A teacher once asked: why would parents pay for a burial society every month and fail to save for the future of their children? This is a question that needs to be answered! Every weekend in the black communities, women gather in small groups in order to contribute money for funerals that are yet to come, with or without money for children to go to school. Nowadays, families don't have to gather in burial societies anymore. On the South African Broadcast Coorporation alone, advertisements about funeral covers are more than ten in a day. This only goes to show that black parents fail to prioritize, they would rather have a "dignified funeral" than save the money for the education of their loved ones Bishop Makhosi Ngcoza said funerals cost anything between R30 000 and R50 000. Most of the money was used to hire tents, public announcement systems and to buy groceries. Families who cannot afford these extravagant funerals or have no funeral cover ended up borrowing the money, sometimes from loan sharks, in order to meet the high standards that have been set. This only raise a question: if parents invested in the future of their children, rather than funeral covers, won't the children take care of their parents' funerals? REFERENCES Macgregor, K. 2007. 'University World News'. Available: http//www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20071025102245380 Ngcukana, L. 2013. 'City Press. Available: http//www.citypress.co.za/news/bishop-urges-community-not-to-show-off-with-big-funerals/