Paying for college now a middle class problem

Where I come from, we talked about a college education from the very start. I mention this because we started in the Latrobe Housing Projects, 1103 Abbott Court, over by the Maryland Penitentiary, where nobody had money but plenty of families had big plans.

The rent was $29 a month, and still my parents talked about college. In those 1950s postwar years, we lived on the GI Bill, which was $120 a month and helped finance the schooling my father missed when he dropped out of college to join the war. That’s what we lived on, $120 a month. You can adjust for inflation all you want, and $120 a month is still a long way from solvent.