This could be interpreted as the student being highly motivated to work very hard as a result of knowing how much his/her parents were paying. I graduated from

This could be interpreted as the student being highly motivated to work very hard as a result of knowing how much his/her parents were paying. I graduated from a hard school 20 years ago that still has a reputation as a place that resisted grade inflation. My parents had to pay most of my way, we were fortunate enough to have to pay but not fortunate enough it was easy to pay for, 20 years on my parents have not been able to retire at the normal age because they had to pay pretty much all of the tuition for 4 kids. We got academic scholarships but 0 financial aid. I had almost no money to my name during school, I'd go through a month spending < $100 including my phone bill and stuff like that. (This was in the 1990s when college students did not have cell phones.) I had good internships in the summer and would build up about $8k in savings and then go through that paying for books & expenses during the year. I paid some of my dorm & food costs too out of that, those were big upfront expenses right at the beginning of the year that would result in my bank account being near empty and then I'd watch my finances very closely till the next summer when I went back to work. (I worked part time in school some semesters as well but barely made anything.) Because I was so aware of the money I worked very very hard and never took it for granted. I knew plenty of fellow students who had serious money problems to get through school. There was always a weird separation of students in college: - Students who came from such means that they had everything thing they could possibly want. New cars, buy anything they wanted, credit cards they could run up and their parents would pay, etc.. (I could probably count on one hand the people I knew in this category in school.) - Students whose parents made enough to have to pay everything but the family budget was then really tight cause college was such a huge expense, so these students lived frugally and never seemed to have any extra money - Students who were on financial aid and yet seemed to have nice cars and spending money which made no sense. I would have said most people I knew who had cars were in this boat. - Students who were on financial aid who really seemed to actually need it and had no money. Different schools seemed to have different makeups of these different groups. My sister went to an Ivy, when I'd go visit almost everyone at her school seemed to be in the case where the parents had so much money that money didn't matter. She had lots of friends whose parents came in and bought a house for their daughter to live in for 4 years for example.