If you’re healthy enough to go to college, you’re healthy enough to provide for yourself.

Period.

And if you can’t afford to provide for yourself, then you can’t afford to go to college. It’s that simple.

Unfortunately, many college students do take welfare. Whether it’s direct public assistance, or a housing subsidy or WIC or Medicaid or Food Stamps. There aren’t many statistics on it, but it’s happening everywhere.

In California, for example, 18 percent of the people on welfare are able-bodied college students. In that state, 10 percent of all college students are on public assistance of one kind or another.

A few years ago, the National Education Association estimated that there were 700,000 welfare recipients enrolled in America’s junior colleges – with an unknown number at four-year institutions.

It’s insane.

It is a perversion, and it extends into graduate school where there are law and medical students who are being subsidized by the taxes of plumbers and waitresses. The entitlement mentality has so gotten out of hand that these money grubbers think society owes them a free ride. They argue that someday they’ll pay the money back in taxes and so they’ve got a right to it now.

Which is bunk.

If you want the taxpayer to pick up the tab for your education, try the GI Bill – not the welfare office.

That’s the general principle. But I want to make a specific point. I want to talk about one small subgroup of college students – Mormon college students.

Not because Mormon college students use welfare at a rate any higher than anyone else, but because Mormons who take government welfare while in college are not only bad citizens, they are also not living their faith.

At least that’s my view.

The Mormon Church has a specific teaching and ethic about self-reliance and assistance during times of need. Nowhere in that, as I read it, is any kind of approval for taking government welfare while going to college.

Government welfare – the “dole” – was described as “evil” by Mormon Church President Heber J. Grant.

“The aim of the church is to help people help themselves,” he said.

And so, for more than 65 years, Mormons have been taught this simple hierarchy of responsibility in times of need: Yourself, your family, your church.

Each of us has the primary responsibility for supplying our own material needs. If we cannot, then we have recourse to our families – parents, children, cousins, grandparents. If our family cannot get us through a tough time, then we should go to our church, to the local leader, who assesses and meets the needs.

That is the general rule.

And nowhere in that does it allow for able-bodied young college students to go down to the government welfare office.

And yet recently I spoke to an obstetrician in Provo, Utah – home of Brigham Young University – who said that 70 percent of the babies he delivers to BYU students are paid for by Medicaid. Another person with whom I spoke, who belongs to a Mormon congregation associated with the University of Utah, estimated that between a quarter and a third of her fellow worshippers were on some form of public assistance – including a man who held a responsible position in the lay clergy.

At a Midwestern medical school, a sizable portion of the student members of a Mormon congregation take public assistance, I have been told, and the wife of a Mormon law student angrily told me of what she considered her family’s right to government welfare.

All of this is wrong.

At least that’s my take on it. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

People who belong to a religion which touts self-reliance as a virtue cannot line up for government welfare, particularly as nothing more than a convenience.

If single, we all have the obligation to provide for ourselves. Period. It’s our job. If you want to eat, then work. In a family, the husband has the obligation to provide for the family. Certainly, others in the family will sometimes work, particularly during the college years. But it is always ultimately the husband’s responsibility.

He has to do it. It is his fundamental job.

And being in college is not an excuse for shirking that job.

If you are in college, and you can’t buy food or provide health care for your family, then you should drop out of college. You should go to work. Discharging that responsibility is more important than schooling.

If you have to take a semester off, to work and get money ahead, then do it. If you need to go in the service or find some other way of paying for school and your support, then do it.

But you don’t take welfare.

It is shameful for all, and sinful for some.

Specifically, I believe it is sinful for Mormons. Again, not that this problem is more pronounced among Mormons, it is merely – from my point of view – more disappointing.