Simeon McMillan | For love or money

"How willing are you to marry an average-looking person that you liked, if they had money?"

This simple question rekindled a debate on Internet message boards over a topic older than John McCain, Ben Franklin and even Valentine's Day itself - are relationships based on the quest for love or money?

Last December, The Wall Street Journal ran a column discussing the results of a nationwide survey in which they posed this exact same question to 1,134 Americans.

Since Penn students rarely read the WSJ for reasons other than faking their way through interviews, I'll bring you up to speed. According to their study, approximately 50 percent of men and 66 percent of women responded either "very" or "extremely" willing. These results appeared shockingly high, considering no Princeton students were asked to participate, to the best of my knowledge.

To see what the Penn community thought, I used the highly mathematical Web site known as SurveyMonkey.com to create my own questionnaire. For the sake of consistency, I used the same question to have a basis of comparison.

According to my unscientific analysis of 322 undergraduates, only 23 percent of men and 36 percent of women responded "very willing" or "extremely willing" - figures far lower than the national average.

You're probably thinking to yourself that something must be wrong with the data.

Wasn't Penn the first institution to have a college dedicated to the study of money? Huntsman Hall is practically a shrine to the greenback. And Benjamin Franklin is referenced in rap lyrics as scantily-clad women make $100 bills with his likeness rain from the sky. How could money not be more important in romantic attraction?

Just as you would in an exam, sometimes you have to reread the question to find the answer. Numerous Penn students who took the survey commented on its misleading nature.

"The question is incomprehensible," said Sociology professor Frank Furstenberg. "It poses too many choices at once. An 'average looking person', that you 'liked', with 'money'? You don't know what that means."

I tried reaching Prince and Associates, the wealth-research firm that administered the survey, but they didn't respond. While I don't doubt the firm's expertise, I personally find this survey to be as questionable as Roger Clemens' steroid testimony yesterday on Capitol Hill.

In anticipation of this, I included a reworded version of the flawed question in my very own survey that would be nearly impossible to misinterpret: "Have you ever found yourself more attracted to a fellow Penn student because you thought (or knew) they had money?"

The results this time were even lower than before. Only 19 percent of men and 27 percent of women admitted to being turned on by the size of a potential partner's trust fund. Based on some of the anonymous comments I received, these results shouldn't come as a surprise to all.

"Money does nothing for me, and I don't really care if a potential date has money or not," wrote a College senior. "I find personality to be much more important."

But others raised a less idealistic hypothesis to explain Penn's partial blindness to the color green.

"I don't think most people at Penn are outwardly concerned with money because there are a lot of rich people here," wrote a College junior.

Before you send this ludicrous notion of Ivy League kids having money straight back to the Department of Redundancy Department, let's hear it out.

In the WSJ survey, the population polled had incomes between $30,000 and $60,000; the median range for American households.

For our readers outside the Ivy League bubble, $60,000 is the approximate starting salary of the average Wharton undergrad. Were the richest person in the WSJ survey to go to Penn, they would qualify for full financial aid.

Regardless of what hypothesis you deem more credible - or if you think those who took my survey were gold-digging liars - I believe the end result is still the same.

This Valentine's Day, let's take comfort in knowing that the potential for true love isn't dead. Rest assured the majority of your peers will judge you by the content of your character and not by the present value of your future cash flows.

Simeon McMillan is a Wharton senior from Long Island, NY. His e-mail is mcmillan@dailypennsylvanian.com. Common $ense appears Thursdays.

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