Student debt

My parents, who were farmers, would probably have been considered middle class, though we never seemed to have much money.  I remember one vacation growing up, and that was a three-day trip to Niagara Falls.  Nonetheless, when I went to Ursinus College, a private school with private school tuition, somehow they scraped the money together to pay for my education.  I helped with employment in the college kitchen, doing odd jobs for professors, and working summers, and I had a small scholarship (which I lost one year for misbehavior), but I know that most of the bills were paid by my parents.

(In grad school I was a T.A., and that, along with summer jobs, paid tuition and was enough to live on.)

It always amazed me that so many students at San José State received no help from their parents.  Some students were working 40-hour a week jobs while trying to attend school full time, a near impossibility.  In some cases, of course, parents had no money to spare, but many times upper middle class parents living in the suburbs simply refused to help their kids with college.  The attitude was that they were adults and deserved no more support.  

I wonder how many of those people with student debt, which under the Supreme Court decision they must now pay and pay, have parents who refused to help their kids.