Heart Rippage

I found out tonight that my sister got her financial package from her top choice school. Bastards seem to think she and/or my parents can somehow afford $20,000+ dollars per year...and all I can think is, are they out of their minds? Did they *see* my parents' financial statements? Oh, they are nowhere near destitute, but come on now... and do they really think a kid going to a film program can possibly afford to graduate with almost ninety grand in debt?

Bastards.

As you can tell, I'm a little upset. I think this college financial game they are playing these days -- the one where private colleges seem to want to make themselves affordable only to rich kids -- plain sucks. My sister had her heart set on this school, and she got in with a (albeit small) academic scholarship. She deserves the chance to go and get that education she's been dreaming of.

Okay, I know, lots of kids deserve an educational experience they aren't going to get. Etc etc ad nauseum. But still.

I'm proud of the fact that I put myself through college, and I think my sister will be similarly proud, in the end. Sure, I got jealous when I saw friends or dormmates jet off to China or Guatemala or somewhere similarly exotic for Winter Term, and I resented, just a little, people who could afford to take unpaid internships. I still get angry when I see do-gooder organizing jobs offering a starting pay of $19,000, because the only people who can afford to take a job for that little is someone who doesn't have student loan payments. And lord knows I would love to be a little less in debt.

All told, however, I don't regret my college debt -- and, in fact, I think that independence has been good for me.

But my 30 or so grand in debt is not 90 grand. (Oh, and I feel guilty about that too...I got to go to my dream school, so it seems only fair that she should get to go to hers.) If I have a hard time making ends meet sometimes on my half-way decent PR salary and limited student loans, I have no idea how a film student (or graduate) could possibly strap together the cash to make that high of a monthly loan payment. Basically, she's been screwed.

So I've jumped into hyper-big-sister mode...strategizing ways of negotiating with the Financial Aid department, looking up programs she could apply to late, bugging her to send me her scholarship essays, wondering if I could somehow help spot her the money, trying to dream up a way she could take a year off, have a really fabulous experience somewhere, and somehow find a better, cheaper school in the meantime...and on and on.

I'm a classic oldest child, a distinction I come to better understand more and more each day. Even better, I am that particular variety of older sister that is just enough older than her siblings as to feel personally responsible for their well-being. I'm almost seven years older than my sister and another couple on top of that older than my brother. I didn't grow up playing the same games with them; I grew up babysitting them. We were never childhood playmates (a fact I regret, sometimes; there's a special bond there we'll never have). But they are mine in a way that I think only an older sister can really know. It was my job (self-appointed, perhaps, but my job none the less) to protect them from everything -- from the world, from other kids, even, at times, from getting in too much trouble with Mom & Dad. (There's the distinction from mother & older sister...the older sister runs interference with the parents as much as she does the rest of the world.)

I'm her big sister, and all I want is to make it better...and I'm realizing that the only way I know to make things better is through sheer force of will and a pretty good understanding of how to work the system.

But for all this flailing, I don't think I'm going to be able to make it better this time. I don't know how to protect her from this one. And it just rips my heart out.