UCLA and Berkeley are outstanding schools, as are many other state schools. But it's almost never an option for a low income family to send their child to school across the country for school. Scrounging up money for a winter vacation plane ticket may be impossible for some of these students. A few friends of mine in school stayed with me over fall and spring breaks because they lived far away and couldn't afford to go home. And what about the kids who work part time through school to help pay the bills back home? Or need to save every penny they can on room and board by living at home while in school?

There are programs like "work study" that would help too (without being a "freebie"), the problem is that the government caps the wage a work study student can earn rather than paying up to a fixed amount regardless of the student's wage. So the government will give say, 3k in a work study grant, which then counts against other potential grants, but the student never earns the work study money because they can get a different job that pays better. The cap isn't very high either, when I was in school it was around $8 / hour, only a fraction of which the government pays anyway. Granted this makes the student an attractive worker because they cost the school less money, but then these kids get funnelled into the lower paying jobs at the school. And what's worse, when these kids with work study jobs earn as much as their work study grant permits the government to subsidise, they lose their job because the university figures they should go find another work study kid. I never used my work study grants because I got a job as a TA that paid too much, but damned if it didn't count against my eligability for *all* grant money, even non-federal.

[black]-"The further we go and older we grow, the more we know, the less we show."[/black]