Every summer of her college career, Jocelyne Cardona ’14 (San Jose, Calif.) wondered if this would be the year she couldn’t afford to return to campus. “It was always a struggle to know if I could financially work it out,” she says. Melissa Larson ’14 (Round Lake, Ill.) spent her college summers not traveling in Europe or racking up impressive internships but working as many hours as she could get at the nearby Six Flags amusement park. Jinath Tasnim ’16 (Dallas) regularly declines invitations from classmates to visit their East or West Coast homes. “There’s no way I could justify that expense to my parents,” she says.
First-Gen