I recently read an article about a brilliant girl who went to Stanford. The only caveat was she was only barely able to afford the school. She spoke of feeling sort of left out in a school where most students’ parents were rich CEO’s that could buy fancy cars, restaurants, etc.
If I did get into a school like Stanford. I would be in a similar situation. I am just wondering what that would be like socially?
I am not saying that I am worried about the students being stuck up or mean about it. I just worry that in that sort of situation it might be hard to find people you can hang out with.
What are your experiences with this?
How widespread is this? How much of the populations at schools such as Stanford, CMU, Cornell, WPI, Northeaster etc are super rich?
You can look in the collegedata.com entries or common data sets to see what percentage of students are there with no financial aid (often about half of the total). At expensive private colleges, one would have to have family in the top few percent of the income and wealth range.
However, even within this group, there is a distinction between the very high income (e.g. two parents who are computer engineers, physicians, etc.) and the super-rich (e.g. parent(s) who are CEOs of medium to large companies, successful Wall Street types, successful entertainers, or inheritors of vast wealth). The latter are less common than the former, although the subset of the latter who flash their wealth may be more noticeable and memorable.
But someone who can barely afford college may find that what are “normal” expenses for those from high income (not necessarily super-rich) families are unaffordable to him/her. E.g. that spring break trip somewhere.
At the Ivies you have a fair amount of students receiving FA. My son has found a wide variety of backgrounds at Yale and has found a diverse group of friends. I’m sure there are some pretentious types but they could easily exist at many schools. I think how you approach the community of students at a given school and how confident you feel in your own skin play a larger part.
If you look in the Parents forum, there’s a long thread about how much legacy and donations matter for admission to the top colleges. What’s interesting in that thread is the argument one of the main benefits of attending HYPS is the chance to network with the children of the rich and powerful.
The students at some schools are much more down-to-earth, egalitarian and humble on average than at other schools. All schools have a mix, of course, but the overall feels differ a lot. Examples of more socially comfortable schools: MIT, Swarthmore.