<p>Does this sound right to you. From a profile on a local area candidate for Congress, from the Seattle Times:</p>
<p>"Burner was the middle of five children growing up in a Roman Catholic military family. In a recent interview, she described wearing hand-me-downs and being aware that her parents were living on a budget. Family vacations were to national parks, she said, not theme parks.</p>
<p>Burner and a brother, Tim Gibbons, were adopted. Her dad retired from the Air Force when she was in elementary school and supported the family by working as a teacher in Nebraska’s farm country.</p>
<p>She paid her own way through Harvard University, working weekends at the Little Peach convenience store, delivering campus newspapers and taking two years off to save up tuition money."</p>
<p>I don’t know about Harvard, but I do know that Yale and Stanford both did a complete rehab on their financial aid package in the last few months. At Stanford for instance if your household income is below $60,000 and you are admitted, you pay NOTHING!!! If your household income is between $60,000 and $100,000 you pay no tuition at all which is about $32,000 per year. I know that the private Universities that have huge tax exempt endowement funds are being scrutinized by the government and have been told that if they don’t start using some of that money for the students, they will likely change the law and make them start paying taxes on their funds.</p>
<p>Not sure. When my parents went to Princeton, financial aid was much more limited…my grandfather was a brick mason and my mother worked and took out a lot of loans to pay for school, and she has always given me the impression that she received very little, if any, grant aid. Today she would probably be within or at least close to the magical $60k/yr cut off. But, that was nearly 40 years ago.</p>
<p>I’ve lived near Harvard for more than 20 years and don’t recall seeing a L’il Peach convenience store nearby. I wonder where it would be located.
On the purely financial front, I am a bit suspicious that a student could pay his or her way through Harvard. True, tuition, room and board were lower, but so were wages.</p>
<p>Maybe she flew back to Nebraska on weekends to earn her way through college at the Little Peach!</p>
<p>I don’t know what Harvard financial aid was like 20 years ago, but I know what work-study jobs were available at Yale 30 years ago. No one who needed money was working at a convenience store. People who were eligible for financial aid got great, high-paying jobs – much higher pay than you could make at an unskilled, tipless job off campus.</p>
<p>It’s interesting. The story says she met her husband working for him at a Harvard computer lab – which sounds much more like it than working at a convenience store. although maybe she did both. They married when she was 22, but she didn’t graduate from college until three years later. So . . . not the usual path through Harvard, in any event.</p>
<p>One of her profiles mentions that she majored in computer science and worked in the computer lab, which is how she met her husband. In the very early 1990s, a computer-savvy undergrad could probably earn a decent amount of money (she claims she worked 20 hours a week) since most faculty, administrators and many students would not have been. I don’t know about the mid-1990s when she graduated.
Tuition, room and board would have cost nearly $20k in 1996.</p>