Let’s face it: college is expensive. It is also usually a necessary evil due to the advancement of education. When someone asks me how I manage to pay for college, I tell them that I get a full ride. In fact, many students that I know have full rides as well, or they come very close to having one. Every year in the U.S. about $46 billion in given out in grants and scholarships. In the University of Tennessee alone, about $47.4 million in scholarships were awarded to students who met the criteria.

However, not everyone gets funding, and in some cases, some get funding that they don’t actually need. I consider myself lucky to get the funding that I have, and I am grateful to this day that I didn’t have to put my family through the financial burden. Yet, everything comes at a price. While conversing with a friend at lunch about the struggles of college, she mentioned that her loans had gone through and asked if I had had to take any out. When I mentioned that a got a full ride, she grew upset and started a ranting about “the unfairness."

This was the first time someone had reacted in a hostile way about someone getting a full ride.

In some ways, I understand why she got upset. It’s a lot of money to pay each semester and taking out loans is stressful. Almost $1.5 trillion dollars is owed in student loan debt in the U.S. After that, I felt ashamed of mentioning anything about full rides or scholarships. I had never intentionally bragged about it, but now I sought to cover it up and hide it. Nonetheless, I couldn’t simply walk away from the conversation. She asked me how I had received the funding. Had I lied on my FAFSA or was I lying about my parents’ income?

The answer to both: no. In fact, the county that I am from is rural, and many people are lucky to have any job that they can get, let alone a high salary job. I also do not live with my parents. My mother passed on when I was younger, and my grandmother gained custody of me. Sadly, my story is not unlike many others. As I mentioned earlier, I know students with a full ride. Many, if not all of them, come from rural areas like mine. Some have one parent, others do not have either. Of course, there are always people who excelled above and beyond in academics, and that’s how they pay for college.

However, the main theme of these full rides are the ones who would’ve gotten left behind without this chance. Not everyone has parents to help them, and not everyone comes from an affluent area.

“Yet even the highest-income white students from rural areas are less likely to go to college right from high school than their well-off white city and suburban counterparts, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, which tracks this data: 61 percent, compared to 72 percent from urban schools and 74 percent from suburban ones. Overall, 59 percent of rural high-school grads—white and nonwhite, at every income level—go to college the subsequent fall, a lower proportion than the 62 percent of urban and 67 percent of suburban graduates who do, the clearinghouse says. Forty-two percent of people ages 18 to 24 are enrolled in all of higher education, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, but only 29 percent come from rural areas, compared to nearly 48 percent from cities” — Jon Marcus and Matt Krupnick, “The Rural Higher-Education Crisis.”

Being left behind should not be an option anymore. For every person in my county that was blessed enough to go to a four-year university (full ride or not) or even a 2-year community college, there are dozens that do not have the chance to go at all. No one is blaming the kids who are well off or came from a better school or a wealthier county.

We grew up with giant banners that read “no one gets left behind” in elementary school. In middle school, they told us that if you tried hard enough, you could achieve anything. In high school, they told us that opportunities were within reach. When applying to colleges, they told us to become factory workers and farmers until we could afford a different path.

It’s not to say that the world has it out for rural students. It’s just harder to achieve what most consider a given. I am blessed with the fact that I was given such a great support system in the form of my grandmother and my aunt. When I became dejected and disheartened, they pushed me to try harder, and there’s nothing a southern woman can do better than to try.

So, the next time someone tells you that they have a full ride, stop to think about why they have that ride. It’s more than likely because they come from a place where they cancel school because some form of angry wildlife (in my experience, a bear) is causing a ruckus.