Becoming a professional player

[Blarg]

I would have to say, most everything.

And...what is enabling these guys to accomplish that? What on earth kind of loans are these guys getting?

Most people do not have or get scholarships or anything remotely like the student aid you are describing, so relating that kind of whopping good fortune as attainable for all or even a particularly large percentage of college kids or people who want to attend college is misleading.

School providing room and board and even a stipend? Usually you pay school, it doesn't pay you. 30k AFTER TAX money per year, and then again three more times, for an 18-year-old kid being relatively easy to come by? I have to admit I have no idea how those circumstances could come about, as the vast majority of Americans with full time jobs who already have college educations would have difficulty scraping up $30k after taxes per year, especially if they had to do it next year too. And the number of college age kids who can is proportionally vanishingly small in comparison to that. Most 18 year olds can't even make 30k a year, much less clear it after taxes and then still be able to clear it after living expenses, if they're on their own, and probably even if they're not.

20 hours a week working contributes next to nothing to college for most people, going toward living expenses, and not all of them at that. The average college age kid has minimum wage level skills and employment opportunities. Even working 40 hours a week isn't going to put a lot of spare change in his pocket.

I'm seeing talk of poor people all being drunks and having new cars and wearing $75 nikes in this thread, and it makes me think a lot of people here have absolutely no idea what's going on outside their extremely tiny and very protected frame of reference. I've met an awful lot of people like that, and been good friends with some.

Here's an example I'm put in mind of when I was going to college and was standing out in the rain waiting for the bus and getting soaked. My very rich friend was there with me(I've had quite a few of those), and he asked me why I wasn't wearing a jacket. I told him I couldn't afford one. He asked me, Why don't you buy one?

Zoom....right over his head. His reality was not about to disturbed by anyone else's, least of all by the likes of me, even when contrary evidence was right in front of his face. Reality existed for him only at his convenience.

That's why discussions like this are usually futile. Generally if the well off think of others at all or even find it actually possible to do so, they do so just long enough to caricaturize and demonize them, and then promptly and definitively forget about them, if those people even really crossed their thresholds of consciousness in the first place.