“Without financial aid I wouldn’t have been able to attend this fancy place. Now, two decades later, I received financial aid to attend its reunion. All I had to do was ask, and then tell how much I could afford. When I thanked the woman at alumni affairs who made the arrangements, she told me to thank my classmates. It was their doing. There was a big push to get as many people as possible to come back.
How come? Why are reunions important? What purpose do they serve?“
The writer, coming back for her twentieth, finds no one there like herself and wonders if she ought to be looking forward instead of back… or more ashamed of what she had (not) become in the face of everyone else’s success. Oh, yes, and of their financial support of their alma mater.
“Creating a sense of nostalgia for a place where people spent a little bit of time a long time ago seems a good way to get them to open their hearts and wallets.” (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
