I've always been on my own as far as expenses and stuff, which is good, since it's going to have taken me 15 years to get my degree!

UMB is very different, though. Most of the people I go to school with work and have their own loans and stuff. Many of them get nothing from their parents, even if their parents are very proud of them.

Huh, I've never got an allowance. I got a paper route at age 11 and I've been employed ever since.

My parents gave me something like $700 at the beginning of the year and that was it. Of course, I had worked every summer since 14, so I made a lot of my own spending money. But it sort of sucked when my roommates all had Visa cards for which their parents paid the bills.

Not only did I get no allowance in college, including I paid for my own books, I had to contribute to my tuition annually (I think it was $1500 a year, in those halcyon days of $20K private college tuitions) and when I went home for vacations, I had to buy my own train ticket.

Possibly relatedly, our student paper had an editorial by an undergrad whose parents are a Cracker Barrel manager and school gym teacher, and who noted that according to admissions, 3700 (of 6200) of our students don't qualify for financial aid. AND all students with family income under $200K pretty much qualify. Which means that 3700 of the undergrads here come from families that are making in the top 5% of incomes nationwide. It is to sigh, for lil' ol' progressive me.

{{{Cashmere}}}

{{{Kristin}}}

Ah. This is The Knife vid I thought would appeal to Jilli [link]

Ooooh, you're right. I like that a lot.

I didn't get an allowance once I was 16 and could work. I did have my mother's VISA that occasionally had to be used for grocery store trips in college. It was nice to have that safety net, especially since our caf didn't exactly promote healthy eating.

One thing that has changed parent-student relationships on campus is the cell phone. It wasn't long ago that undergraduates talked to their parents once a week on Sunday night. Juniors and Seniors less often. Now there are many undergraduate women who talk to their mothers several times a day. Every difficult exam. Every foreign-born instructor who is hard to understand. Every social slight. Every bureaucratic inconvenience. Every purchase gone wrong. All discussed with mom in the hallways and outside the building entrances.

It's good to have emotional support. It's good to know what's going on with your kids. But I think that pushed too far, it can interfere with the business of moving from adolescence to young adulthood. You can go a whole day without maternal reassurance!

Of course, I may be biased because it also means that I get e-mails from parents who insist that my exam must have been unfair because their daughter is a very good student who would never get a D if the test was fair. Sometimes within minutes of the end of the exam.

I had jobs here and there, but nothing steady during the school year. Also, I spent a fair amount of time in the Netherlands. I did a lot of non paying theater gigs as well, both during the summer and the school year.

I was not as industrious as y'all. I just sort of scrapped through with $100 a month, some research testing here and there, and... christ, I don't even know.

I took out oodles of student loans which I'm still working through, though. Neither me or my parents were anywhere near affording my education at the time it was procured.

Cashmere, ugh! I can only imagine how stressful this must be.

Can you just unplug the phone? Run a longer cord and stick the phone in the hallway?

Alas, no. There's no hallway, for one thing. Just an outdoor walkway.

I totally got an allowance in college. I don't remember how much it was, but my parents were my main source of income. I did get work study jobs, but not I think until my sophomore year (and then worked up the coolness ladder, until the inevitable bookstore job).

I tell you, I think cell phones are fabulous and wondrous, but they've completely changed the assumptions people make about communication. For me, it's a wondrous new thing that means if necessary I could make contact at almost any time -- for my students, it's just a fact that they ARE in contact at all times. I actually haven't had any problems with my kids this year, but there's definitely this weird generational gap where to the teachers it's a phone and to the students it's more like... a mouth.