Growing up in a lower-income family in Minnesota, I never gave much thought to college. My parents didn’t attend, nobody in my extended family had a degree, and to the limited amount of contact I had with “rich kids,” college seemed to be part of their world, not mine.
But then I fell in love with flying and quickly discovered that all the major airlines required their pilots to have a four-year degree. So I begrudgingly incorporated college into my plans, ended up mostly enjoying it, and went on to have a pretty typical career path for a 2002 grad, with 12 years from graduation to major airline.
