It only took 2 years, and $50 (net) to make it happen, plus $200 up front money that was returned.
It also took not getting hit with huge medical bills, not having your car brake down when you will lose your job without it, and not getting arrested because someone didn’t like your face. Unless there’s a specific skill in avoiding these things, I’d say it’s not that simple.
I did not say it was simple... my point is that DH and another friend I know, have all the "privilege" that society grants educated (or high school graduated) middle class white males, and yet credit for both of them was not an automatic, they had a bit of trouble getting it started at first. (DH being new to the country and my friend because he did not go to university and trying to get credit with a low paid job is quite hard)
My point, even after reading Grim's post, is that credit does not hinge on privledge now-a-days. Yes there is a whirlwind of other dis-opportunity that society presents people, I don't recognize the direct link between credit and privledge. (indirect at best)
Only the "getting arrested because someone didn't like your face" is the item that did not apply to them (unless you count being detained for several hours by border patrol because they did not like the way they were dressed and the age of their car counts).
How exactly are you defining privilege? We may have a definition misalignment because I see four privilege factors already in your description of your DH:
- middle class background
- white (in a region where white is the norm; being the only white kid bused to a non-white school is *not* a privilege)
- male
- completed high school (as in, wasn't forced to drop out to support parents or siblings or to perform caregiving for a sick relative)
The first three things-- background, appearance, and gender-- aren't things people really pick for themselves. The last factor is one in which a student's choices and preferences do affect the outcome, however you may not be aware of the extent to which it's possible to be overcome by external events at an early age. Your DH's situation may seem like the norm, but let's look at the combined probability of having each attribute.
Here's a link to a Pew research study about upper, middle, lower-middle, upper-middle, lower, and upper class in America.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ According to the Pew paper, only about 50% of America is middle-class, but the un-privileged classes (lower and lower-middle) make up about 29% based on income. That means about 71% are middle-class or higher and the probability of being in your DH's "class" set would be about 0.71. The US census information from census.gov describes about 49.2% of Americans as male and 76.9% of all Americans as meeting the government definition of "white" (and that definition is an entirely different can of worms, as any child of Irish, Italian, or Slavic immigrants can attest). I found a 2016 Washington Post article saying that 83.2 percent of US kids graduate from high school, although the same article notes that kids from poorer families are still doing very badly-- I'll get to probability distribution later).
0.71 x 0.492 x 0.769 x 0.832 = 0.223 which means that if privilege factors did not correlate and were distributed uniformly (they're not), only about 22.3% of Americans would have the same privilege factors as your DH, or better.
Now, those numbers assume privilege is binary, but wealth isn't. For example, a female trust fund baby doesn't have the privilege associated with being male, and a star NBA athlete of recent African descent doesn't have the privilege associated with being white, but both of them probably are more privileged than your DH due to being wealthy. We can think of the end result of all the various factors-- a person's total privilege level, as it were-- as something that has a spectrum. Not being on the very high end of the privilege spectrum isn't the same as being at the low end. Yet on a day-to-day basis, there's just as much difference between the lifestyle of a person at the low end and a person at the middle as you'd see between a person at the middle and someone at the high end. The dollar difference between middle and high end is far bigger, but a lot of the things people on this board take for granted aren't available at the seriously low end.
Probably nobody came up to your DH and said: "Here's a free car/scholarship/movie ticket because you're <insert privilege factor here>". That's not how privilege works. It's seldom that overt.
I define privilege as a situation where the system you're in is set up to basically accommodate you: if you follow the rules, work hard, and do the "right" thing by deferring gratification or avoiding any egregious destructive behavior, you will generally experience success and get to keep a portion of the results of your labor. You may still experience bad treatment by individuals and incidents in which you're a victim of violence, or not given credit for your work, or not taken seriously when you report a problem, but those incidents will be isolated and not the norm. Such mistakes as you make will be less likely to produce long-term, life changing negative consequences, and opportunities to improve your situation will be available to you without requiring significant changes in your default behaviors.