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Phil's article struck a nerve.I went to Harvard as a freshman (on one of the few merit scholarships available in 1982) but dropped out after a year when the scholarship ended. I wasn't eligible for financial aid because my mother, who had made poverty-level wages the year before, maintained a savings account (she works in an industry where year-long unemployment was fairly common, so she set aside savings for lean years). It turned out that the financial aid algorithms required exhausting all savings before a student becomes eligible for any significant aid. I knew people at Harvard who were getting more financial aid than I was offered whose families had yachts and vacation homes. Apparently these don't count against financial aid the way a savings account does. All the private schools used the same algorithm for aid calculation.
I dropped out, worked for a year and ended up at UCSC, from which I eventually graduated (paying most of my own way with so...