Like most students, my parents put pressure on me from a young age to go to college. To this day, I still think they did that mostly in the hopes that I’d be able to pay for them to live once they retired (joke’s on them since today’s college grads have such a hard time finding jobs that one in four is underemployed, but good try, Mom and Dad.)

Still, I did it. I was the first in my family to go to college, thanks to the inspiring and pushy advice of not only my parents, but their friends, my teachers, and just about anyone who saw me and thought, Hey that poor kid looks like she needs some life advice! Really, there was never any question that I’d go to college. It’s a necessity in today’s world. But in their well-meaning “Go to college!” speeches, there were a few things left out about what the poor student’s experience would entail.

1. You have no choice in which school you go to.

You should have seen me my senior year of high school, all full of hopes, dreams, and delusions about going to school as far away from my lame parents and peers as possible. Looking at tuition fees and costs of attendance made me a little more realistic in my choices, but it was the application fees that really made me realize how limited my choices were, just because I didn’t have hundreds of dollars lying around to blow on college applications. In the end, I only applied to four schools, and only that many because I was lucky enough to have gotten just-barely-high-enough grades to have application fees waived.

Of the four schools I applied to, I was accepted at three of them. One was in a state across the country, one was in a private school I couldn’t have afforded if I’d sold a kidney, and one was the state school thirty minutes from my mom’s house. Considering I barely had money for school in the first place, let alone to take a road trip across the country or to pay for a private school hours away from home, I ended up at a state school.

“Wait a second,” you say, “why didn’t you just go to a community college first?” I was more or less set on my English major at the time, and only one nearby community college offered courses that would go toward it. And by “nearby,” I mean two hours away from my house, with no dorm options available. Whether we like it or not, most poor students heading to college have extremely limited choices in where they go to school.

2. Your new rich classmates probably get more aid than you do.

College still seems to be mostly a place for rich people to send their rich offspring so they can learn how to perpetuate the system of oppression that leaves most people poor and unable to take care of themselves. Uh, I mean, so they can make the world a better place. Yeah. That’s it.

Federal student aid, grants, and scholarships are supposed to help get less fortunate students in the doors, but they don’t help nearly as much as you’d think. The majority of financial aid isn’t need-based, but given to those who have overachieved academically and athletically. And, statistically speaking, it’s the well-off who are doing the best in high school and participating in sports, usually allowing them to nab those scholarships. Why? Because it’s a lot easier to focus on school and extracurriculars when you aren’t constantly worrying about whether your part-time job is going to be enough to help Mom with the bills this month. And even when poorer students do manage to get these scholarships, it’s extremely rare that they cover all costs of attendance. And if you come from a family that was too worried about keeping food on the table and electricity in the light bulbs to put aside much for their future college-attending children, that gap between award money and cost of attendance could very well leave you unable to attend.

3. Your social life gets expensive to maintain.

Speaking of rich kids, they’re probably most of the people you’ll run into on campus. If you’re lucky, you’ll fall in with a group of down-to-earth people who don’t mind just hanging around on campus, chatting and studying together. But it’s also entirely possible that you’ll find a group of people that you click with in all the right ways and suddenly have to shell out money just to hang out with. And it gets so painful and awkward telling your friends that, no, you aren’t going on that trip because you have $10 in your bank account and need it for gas that week that you kind of just start giving in and throwing around money you don’t actually have just to keep up. One week it’s dinner at the trendiest and most expensive restaurant downtown, the next it’s being expected to drop everything and skip class for a few days to go party in another state. Which is an even bigger problem if you actually are on scholarship.

4. If you f*** up a semester, you’re SOL.

Say that, against all odds, you’ve got a merit-based scholarship helping you pay for college. All you have to do to keep it for four years is keep your grades up. Easy, huh? No. Not at all. Because this means that one bad semester can screw you out of valuable scholarship money. Fail a couple classes because you were out sick one too many times and just couldn’t keep up? Kiss your merit-based scholarships goodbye.

In fact, you don’t even have to do badly in class to get those scholarships yanked away. After my freshman year of college, I was doing pretty well academically. But mentally, I was miserable, so I decided to take some time off to deal with my mental health issues. I came back to school a year later and didn’t even have to re-apply. But despite keeping my grades up freshman year and technically still being enrolled in school because I’d only been gone a year, my scholarship was taken away. Clearly, it doesn’t take much to lose that precious aid money.

5. You’ll be in debt. A lot of it. Forever.

Most likely, you’ll get a little bit of aid money, and a lot of student loans. Awesome! Four (or more) years of barely scraping by in class and in life, and you’ll suddenly find yourself responsible for paying back thousands of dollars, or more. With interest. In 2014, the average student loan borrower was over $28,000 in debt, and that number is only expected to climb. A college degree is the new high school diploma. There’s almost no chance of getting a decent-paying job without one. But even with one, you know that, like many other student loan borrowers, you’ll likely struggle just to pay the interest. And that knowledge of your impending doom will follow you around throughout your time in college.

6. You realize how limited your life has been.

I know people who toss out their phones every time a new iPhone comes out, people who can offer to pay for everyone’s meal at a five-star restaurant and afford it, and people who think nothing of popping over to Europe for a few weeks, or months, whenever the opportunity comes around. As a 20-year-old who is only just now applying for a passport (and only because my state license looks and is treated like a fake you could buy at a gas station) finding out that so many of my supposed peers have left the country not once but several times was shocking. Neither of my parents have passports, and there was never any discussion of taking us anywhere, certainly not to another country just because school was out for a bit, or sending us on a study abroad trip just because it would be a "great experience."

And it isn’t just your peer group that drives into you how deeply limited you’ve been. Your professors will gush about their latest trips, telling their classes how important travel is and how you should definitely visit Shanghai one day and how you should seize every opportunity you get to see another culture. Your campus will be papered with flyers advertising study abroad trips to countries you’ve only dreamed of visiting. You’ll be staring at your scholarship applications and dying a little inside every time you see “for students studying abroad” because you know that probably won’t ever be you. Getting out of your comfort zone and exploring the world is great, but being poor AF in college reminds you just how unattainable some basic life experiences are.