Yep. My Bride traveled in Europe twice as an undergrad but our family never has. Our two cars have always been a hauler and a car with good gas mileage to travel between court houses, with a focus on reliability and being inexpensive. Put our son and daughter through college, law school and library school with a refinancing of our home and a 30k personal loan. The personal loan will be repaid in two years. Our home will be paid off three years after that. Our son paid 60k to retire his remaining loans, finishing up in January of 2020. We will be taking care of our daughter’s remaining 38k of student loans. (They went to college, law school and library school 2010-2018.) The nineties were in some ways better days than these, but they were hardly a financial nirvana for the middle class, and it is still possible to live well on a middle class salary if one is careful and avoids high cost areas of the country.
Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Amen, Don. My Dad, a college professor, never earned more than $17,000 a year, and my Mom did not work outside the home until my brother and I had gone away to college. We both took out and paid off loans for about 75% of our college costs, worked summer jobs to help, and Mom and Dad paid the rest. We boys never lacked for any necessity, and always had enough non-necessities (toys, games, sports equipment, books, records) to feel happy with our state in life. Mom and Dad did without many things they would have enjoyed, such as expensive vacations, newer cars, etc., to ensure our contentment. I was almost embarrassed to earn more in my first year out of law school than my Dad ever made in his life. He couldn’t have been more proud of me. But even more importantly, Mom and Dad taught us what are now widely regarded as old-fashioned, if not pernicious, morality and values that have been our foundation ever since. We were in reality a very rich family, though not solely in terms of finances.
I think he meant “middle-class family on TV”. Either that or he doesn’t know how hard his parents worked and how close to zero their bank account sometimes got. I had about the kind of upbringing that Jacob Shell was talking about in the 1980’s, and my dad supervised 150 people.
I’m guessing these students came from upper-class households;
Students occupy campus building to demand high gr…: https://youtu.be/eHZa02_N8vs
He’s describing the professional-managerial stratum, more or less. The common-and-garden middle class did not live like that. He also does not acknowledge that most people are hourly employees. Some children of the working class see the inside of ‘solid 4-year colleges’, but for most it’s community college, technical college, apprenticeship programs if it’s anything at all.
If old TV and movies, and old memories are anything to go on, people didn’t start worrying about their “lifestyles” until the 1980s. Folks just out of college expected to life sparingly in their first decade of independence. Of course, housing was cheaper in those days.
I’m guessing these students came from upper-class households;
More likely professional-managerial, with an abnormally large contingent of faculty brats. The New School differs from other institutions in that it was foundationally leftist. Ordinary people would never send their kids there.