Shagbark

My parents were, it turned out much later, upper-middle class, but you wouldn't know it at the time. They were tight with money. When I was a kid, my allowance was one nickel a week, and if I went to my dad and asked for another nickel, he'd tell me to come back in a week. My mom's chief love was music, and all she had was one AM radio, one record player, and about 10 records that she played over and over again. I never heard rock and roll until high school. At that time financial aid for college was calculated this way: Add up the value of all your parents' savings and assets. This effectively included retirement savings, since there were no 401Ks and the max yearly contribution for an IRA was about $2000. If it's more than the tuition for one kid for one year of college, you get no financial aid. So families with retirement savings or a house got no financial aid. Families with more than one kid were supposed to pick one to send to college, I guess. I could have gotten into any college, but there were no more merit scholarships at the top colleges. These had been done away with in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the financial aid available came with a disclaimer saying "If you are a white guy, f--- off." If you couldn't get financial aid and you didn't have cash, you could try to get a loan, but the maximum college loan the government would make was $10K a year, which was 1/3 to 1/4 of what you'd have needed to attend a highly-ranked college. The white male middle class of my generation was shut out of all the top colleges. In my freshman year of undergrad, my parents gave me my college fund which they'd been saving all my life for my college education, which was then $3000. It lasted most of that year. That was all the money they gave me until long after grad school. I had 4 different scholarships in undergrad and 2 or 3 fellowships in grad school, and took odd jobs to cover the rest, and just squeaked by. I couldn't go to movies. I couldn't go out drinking. I couldn't go out to restaurants, ever, not one time in my 4 years as undergrad. I ate oatmeal, Ramen noodles, and macaroni and cheese, and sometimes I had none of that and sprayed my roommate's spray starch down my throat for dinner. As a guy, it meant I couldn't date. I had no money, so I couldn't take a girl anywhere. I had little social life. It was a repetition of my childhood, when I couldn't participate in after-school activities because I had to deliver newspapers every day for a few bucks a week. I was at a college full of rich kids, and some of my rich housemates cheated me on the phone bill, making long phone calls to Greece or Lebanon that they didn't pay for. The more money they had, the less likely they were to pay. Grad school was similar, though I had more money owing to the small stipend. Years later I found out that by that time, my parents had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Christian missions, and saved up even more for their retirement. They didn't mean to be cheap. They didn't know that college cost money. When they went to college it was, like, $500 a year tuition, and they lived at home and paid nothing for room or board, so they just didn't think of college as a thing you needed to save money for. Maybe they would have given me money if I'd asked. I don't know.