[TBH]

Hey, Brandon, I must say you can take a jibe with good humor. I regretted being snippy. My apologies. I probably read too much into your statement. I'm overly quick to get annoyed when I think white people are implying that people of color have an easy ride. We (so called white folks) are privileged in so many ways, and we're statistically more likely to go to college in the first place. So if a little extra funding for people of color evens the odds a little, I'm all for it. (getting off soap box now).

My grades were good, but I also went to a very small school, and since I was only sixteen years old when I started I think the university thought I was an interesting case and gave me some aid. I was also lucky enough to finish right before they hiked the tuition way up (I think it cost less than 15k a year when I graduated in 1997, and went well above 20k the next year). My parents were very recently divorced, so their finances were sort of in a tangle. But no, I'm not from a low-income background. More like middle class, maybe upper middle class.

One of my scholarships was a creative writing one, which I won by submitting some writing. The rest were federal grants. I also had work-study, some loans, and my parents were able to kick down some money. I was extremely lucky and graduated with only 3k in loans, which my parents helped me to pay off in my first year post-college.