Reply to Daily Beast: Ivy League freshman says rich classmates are frauds, faking first-gen and poverty

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Keep in mind that the average poor, first-generation kid can only dream of going to an elite university. Most are going to the local community college on loans. [/quote]

This.  My dad was a blue-collar factory worker And for most of my childhood my mother was too disabled by depression to work.  Despite frequent admissions to inpatient hospitals for suicidal ideation, she never qualified for actual disability. Which, of course, I now know it’s partly because we didn’t have any money to hire lawyers to advocate for us. While people who are not actually disabled can scam the system if they can hire advocates who can get them qualified.

When I was in high school, I was on no one’s radar as someone who could attend an elite university.  I couldn’t do athletics, both for financial reasons and because I always had after school and weekend jobs.  My parents had no idea what parents were doing in our community to prepare their teenagers for college. I thought I was ahead of the game by buying myself an SAT prep book. I knew nothing about college counselors I never even heard from my own high school guidance counselor other than when I would make my schedule each year. It wasn’t until senior year when I scored the highest score on the SATs in my graduating class of 400 that my guidance counselor seem to wake up and wonder what colleges I was applying to. We have never discussed it before. And I assumed that I would go to the local branch of our state university, because we couldn’t afford anything else.  And, out of nowhere, and fall of my senior year here is someone telling me that I should be applying to Ivy League schools.  And when he suggested that I should apply to several, he was a palled that my number one reason for not applying was that there was no way I could afford all of those application fees.  I did end up getting accepted to the one IVy I had applied to but ended up going to a lesser-tier large private university that offered me more merit aid.  I had absolutely no clue that the parents of my classmates were hiring private college counselors, hiring people to write essays for them, hiring private tutors to keep up with AP level work.  And when I got to college, one of the girls who lived on my floor was getting more financial aid than me, But from her dorm decorations and clothing and photos of her family’s house and the vehicle she had at home, it was clear that they were insanely rich.  Her father was a patent lawyer and her mother was a stay at home mom. But her parents never married and literally never put her father on the birth certificate precisely so she would appear to be a student from a destitute home. I couldn’t believe that a family that was already Rich was going to go through a 21 year scam in order to save themselves money that they certainly could have afforded.  I truly have never gotten over how much I hated her family. I had to take out loans each year, while she got nearly a free ride. The only money she had to pay was the equivalent of what would have been work-study earnings because her parents did not want her to be distracted by a work-study job. So she had to make up that part of her financial package herself.  People like this are soulless.  [/quote]

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