My friends did not do group trips to islands on breaks like twoinanddone described. We took friends home with us for holidays— for example, I had a friend from Alaska and another friend from Kentucky who spent Thanksgiving break at my house.
Among my friends at Williams were a Jamaican orphan who had lived part of his life homeless on the street, a daughter of Indian immigrants who owned a motel, a Latina whose parents worked on a lettuce farm, two African American students who visited the used book exchange at the start of each semester, a middle class white girl from an NYC borough, a few upper middle class white kids from northern Virginia and Maryland including some whose parents worked for government agencies like NIH, a boy from California who had attended a northeastern prep school, the son of a southern general practitioner doctor, a Quaker recipient of the Tyng Scholarship, a boy from a middle class Long Island town who was the son of a postal worker, and a girl from one of the wealthier towns on Long Island. They were a mix of ethnicities, religions, and socioeconomic levels— and so much more interesting as real, complex individuals than these limited descriptions can begin to touch! Did it matter that they were from different socioeconomic levels? It did not divide us, at least from my perspective. As I said in my post above, if there was elitism, I was oblivious to it.