Thank you so much for answering. We have some things in common, such as working our asses off to get an education. I usually had multiple jobs at once, sometimes as many as four cobbled together to allow me to barely get by. I also had a way to obtain free expired food for a while, which helped immensely. I could never land a professional job during school. The college town was full of competition for those, so I worked $3.35/hour, mostly in food service and fast food. I lived in the cheapest places I could find. One was a basement with an open sewage drain and dangling wires. I didn’t have a phone most of the time, or a car until my senior year (when I got married). I did not have it easy. But one thing I could never get were student loans. I attended a state school 1984–1988, and at that point, I could not get a dime in loans because I had to claim my parents’ income, which was modest (Dad worked in a factory and Mom was a sales rep for a food brokerage company) but they had no debt and that, apparently, meant I qualified for nada, at least under the rules of that time. I am glad you were able to work hard and get your education, but please don’t claim you didn’t get any government help. It gives people the idea that it’s possible to do it without any help from anyone, and very few people can do it without any outside help, be it parents, government-backed student loans, or the good fortune to land a job that pays above minimum wage.