Which is why cities on islands gets trickier to make the comparison. 
Honolulu is a little different too, though not NYC different.
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Great point about perspective. This is an article from 2017 about college tours that I found quite interesting (not that I would advocate skipping the college tour): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/well/family/skipping-the-college-tour.html?_r=0. TLDR: when doing a college tour, be mindful of the fact that your instantaneous impression based on one or two things you see may not be accurate.
Iâve read quite a few comments here on CC where somebody comes back from a college tour and says something like: the students at this college are not friendly or not collaborative â they were all walking around with headphones on looking at the ground. The person probably saw 2 people doing that but then the mind fills in the rest. Iâve sized up the campus culture! But in reality you could be totally off base and have been influenced by one or two random encounters.
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You have the students that donât like the on campus residency requirement. So they pay for the dorm and rent an off campus place. They walk into a high end store and buy something for multiple hundreds of dollars just because they felt bad because nobody bought anything. Having a discussion about a current event and finding out that one person is good friends with the daughter the person at the center of the discussion. Googleing your new friend and see that the first picture of him is a very famous singer kissing him on the cheek. Having a discussion in an Econ class about the 2008 financial crisis and realizing that some of the kids in the class parent were at the center. These are all things that happen to my DS last year. He came out of an upper middle class neighborhood. But the exposure to that life was still eye opening.
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Ahh, gotcha. My kids like to rag on Jeff Bezos (as well as Zuck and others) and every so often I remind them that their dad is like 1-2 degrees of separation from Bezos. (A friend he went to high school with ended up with a guy who ended up being very high up at Amazon. Heâs stayed with them on their estate in Washington when he had to go out there for work.)
I think it would be different for the kids to have classmates like you are describing. We see our friends/acquaintances on TV from time to time and that is cool, but they are not those types. We donât know any famous finance people.
Yes, I have been skeptical of the value of visits, especially as it appears how they are commonly done (apparently without doing pre-visit work to determine what to look for on a visit), in making college choice decisions, since they can easily lead to getting superficial random experiences or observations that may or may not be representative or that important when actually attending the college.
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How about descriptors for SES groupings and how flexible they seem to be. For example, on these forums:
- âMiddle classâ: commonly describes the writerâs SES group, even if the writer is in the top 5% of income and/or wealth in the US.
- âWell offâ: commonly has a lower bound of income and/or wealth substantially higher than the writerâs income and wealth, even if the writerâs income and/or wealth is high.
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One of my sons went to college in a small PA city. I still remember him asking me why he never knew what Carhart shirts were. (To be honest, at that point Iâd never heard of them.) He said fellow students also thought he was weird for driving a car, rather than a truck.
The high school I retired from hosts French students in an exhange programâthey come here for 2 weeks and our kids go to France for 2 weeks. Stay with host families, etc. They run weekend field trips for the French kids, usually to NYC, as we are in MA. The French kids often ask if they could go to Chicago or Florida or LA for the weekend instead! They do not understand the hugeness of the USA as compared to France.
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My kids went to public school for years, then switched to private. They were shocked by the cluelessness many of their peers in private school had about âwhat people have.â Many of their peers just assumed everyone had what they had. If they didnât, they were âpoor.â It bugged my kids, who went to public elementary school with kids who lived in huge houses on a lake & kids who lived in travel trailers ⊠and everything in between. Then my D went to college with people whose parents had ridiculous amounts of money ⊠she wondered if the kids from high school realized that there are people out there who would consider THEM poor, if they used the same logic the high school peers had used.
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I came from a middle to upper-middle class religious Jewish family and was fortunate to be able to attend three of the most elite universities in the world. I met the sons/daughters of extraordinarily wealthy and/or prominent folks regularly. One friendâs family name was one of the names of the most prominent law firm in her state and many generations of her family attended our college. The family of one of my GFs came over on the Mayflower and they were also Nth generation alums (the mom was pretty anti-Semitic, which added local color). Another classmate invited me to her familyâs Marthaâs Vineyard home for the weekend and John Hersey came over for drinks â all these families were very good at drinks â and they had real Dubuffets and Renoirs in their coop overlooking Central Park. I looked at this as a great part of my education. I was learning how to walk in the pathways of power.
Over time, I have had the opportunity to meet a number of very wealthy and/or famous folk â some of whom have become clients â and I am grateful for the education I received in college on how to to deal with that segment of the universe. And I certainly know quite a number of famous finance people.
My kids, because of our general connections and the town we live in, are much more experienced with wealthy folks than I was â though I knew more Nobel Prize winners than most. My son went to a very top business school and got more of a glimpse of the lives of the mega-wealthy. He is very clear that he doesnât aspire to some of the lives he has seen. As just one example, one of his classmates invited him to his familyâs 25 BR home in St. Tropez and the host took everyone out clubbing and purchased $1000 bottles of liquor. My son called me and said, âThis is really interesting but it is not a life I want to live.â
One of my relatives had a friend who took her skiing with his family on the private company jet and they stayed at their place in Aspen or Vail.
Another of her friends is a âtrust fund baby,â and naively doesnât understand why others donât have trust fundsâmakes life so much easier. That friend too her to the family time share also in Vail of Aspen.
Others of her friends work multiple jobs to make ends meet and was so happy when I told her about a reputable website where she could buy medications for her chronic condition from India at affordable prices.
My relative navigates the different worlds pretty well and finds the contrasts pretty interesting.
Weâve lived on a farm and in an apartment over a pizza place in a city and every type of place in-between (including a couple of times on military bases, which are their own separate culture from wherever they are).
In our experience everywhere in the country tends to blend together- and I find it to be a good thing and a bad thing. There is the same sprawl in the east, south, Midwest, and west⊠and everywhere has crime and gripes that the locals have. Iâd say the percentage of religious people (or their particular flavor of religion) shifts from place to place, and the mix of political parties shifts too- but there is representation of all kinds of people everywhere that weâve been (except maybe the military bases- weâve always been particular political/religious outliers on base).
I will say that I was surprised at how religious MN seems to be. I wasnât expecting that when we moved here at all. For some reason that I donât even understand I thought I was moving to atheist heaven. Ha. My husband makes fun of me for thinking that- itâs the Midwest, he says. Nowhere else really shocked me. California I wasnât expecting to feel any winter- and we had an apartment with no heat in LA, so it was a shock come February how much we missed having it. Ha.
Back when my kids were in public schools we tended to always rent the absolute cheapest/smallest place we could find in the best school districts that were otherwise outside our price range, so my kids friends were almost exclusively in a different income grouping than us (exception again being the military bases)- for instance, we lived in a 500 sq ft apartment to be where we wanted to be once. My daughter came home from her friends house once when we were living there and marveled that her friends one (there were 2?) pool house was bigger than our apartment.
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My parents retired to Lexington, Virginia after retiring from the foreign service. They were kind of taken aback that when they met people the first question was âWhat church do you attend?â Theyâd never been asked that anywhere else they lived in the entire world. My motherâs family is from Boston, and my Dad from the Chicago suburbs so they were familiar with other parts of the US as well.
We lived in a nice upper middle class suburb that was reasonably diverse. My kids went to school with kids of different ethnicities and religions. They were friends with kids outside our district that had different socioeconomic backgrounds.
Then we moved to a small rural area, that is white, more Christian and not as wealthy. My kids were in college but both spent a summer here working. My daughter was so upset to hear people using the N word and disparaging religions that she had friends from.
There is a school district in this area that some of the parents had a cow that a writing assignment was to write about white privilege. They want the teacher fired. This was high school.
So sometimes those bubbles are nicer and more open than you think. And I am pretty sure that there wouldnât have been a eye batted about that writing assignment.
One of my daughters graduated from one of the Seven Sisters that is a still all-women. There were groups of international students who came from uber-uber wealthy families, but she says they kept to themselves, forming chiques of uber-wealthy internationals. We are firmly middle class, and she was able to find plenty of other âregularâ kids to be friends with. Eight years out of college and she is still close with many of them.
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My kids have actually been asked that question every single place weâve lived. Now the reaction theyâve gotten when they said nowhere/we arenât religious/we are atheists was different from place to place. I would be shocked if no one asked that, tbh.
On a business trip once to an area in the US that seemed to have relatively low diversity, someone asked me where I was from. My answer of some other place in the US was apparently not what the questioner was expecting.
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I had this experience at a wealthy private school in FL for one of my high school years. Some other students had oceanfront houses with everything that goes with them and the first day âsummer recapâ had one student talking about her sisterâs wedding where the QEII had been rented (whole ship) for the wedding and guests with the married couple helicoptered off to a private island afterward and the rest of the guests getting chartered or otherwise private flights back home from England.
I know many get envious of that lifestyle and wish it were them, but Iâm with your son. Thereâs no way in the world that I want that life, esp since I see so many who donât even have the basics of life. I like having some money so we can help a few we come across whenever we want to, but I align a lot more with the Millionaire Next Door than I do with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
Itâs also probably part of why I donât care for extra âstuff.â Our splurge is travel, but we go coach and donât mind camping if itâs in a nice area, AirBnBâs are our usual otherwise. We will pay for a view or location. Weâre not high end resort people. With Covid restricting travel instead of pocketing that budget amount we just donated all of it to various causes worldwide helping others hurt by the pandemic. No regrets. My âtiny homeâ loving son has gone even further away from âstuffâ than we have.
I consider that year to have been well worth it in an eye-opening way, as is all the travel we do seeing how most of the planet lives.
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Long before they start college, itâs a parentâs responsibility to show their kids what life is like in other parts of the country and introduce them to people they wouldnât ordinarily meet in the course of their daily lives. So mine volunteered at a soup kitchen and at an old folks home. They met country people and city people, easterners and westerners. We drove cross country many times visiting relatives who lived in small rural towns. And now one kid is settled in a small town and the other is looking to settle in one.
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Didnât you recently live in No VA? Maybe Iâm mistaken. Iâm surprised that would be a question there though. I grew up in a DC area suburb on the MD side and have never heard anyone ask that question.
Iâve only ever lived in the mid-Atlantic and northeast, and a short stint in Hawaii and never had that question posed to me, but would never expect it in those areas. It would not at all surprise me if I moved to the Bible belt though.