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<p>I participate on a guitar forum where we show off our guitars. However, one gets “Nice!” or other complimentary comments regardless of guitar posted. </p>
<p>One will get it whether posting about a low-end sub-$100 guitar which looked like it’s been through a war with stickers or a $6000+ custom-shop/made models.</p>
<p>Yep, that’s how guitar guys are. But they all get nicer ones, if they get the money. The thing that distinguishes a player from a collector is whether they keep the lesser ones as they move up.</p>
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<p>This can vary as I know established musicians who sold off lower-end guitars when they moved up, kept all the guitars they’ve owned, or who sold off higher-end guitars after finding the newer lower-mid end guitars matched/exceeded what they perceived in terms of quality/what they wanted out of their guitars.</p>
<p>Granted, the last group tends to have a modder/tinkerer bug so their preference is for low-mid-end brands with a high-enough quality to serve as a base to add/subtract pickups, bridge assemblies, tuners, electronics, etc.</p>
<p>cobrat, the totality of your posts shows that you’re very sensitive to having been lower-middle-class, and therefore if anyone has anything that’s “nicer” than what you might have had or been able to afford, you often tag that person as being snobby, show-off, pretentious, etc. and you revel in “taking them (and authority in general) down a notch.” In that regard, you aren’t all that different from the OP, who’s got a major chip on his shoulder over the fact that there are wealthy kids at HYPS (of course, there are wealthy kids everywhere, but his comment was about elite schools). Most people don’t spend nearly the amount and effort to count other people’s money or to make judgments about character based on possessions. Just live life with what you have. Someone else has more? Good for them, hope they enjoy it.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl,</p>
<p>It isn’t just working or lower-middle class folks who dislike conspicuous consumption of this type…even if it is unintentional. </p>
<p>I know some upper-SES families who feel such conspicuous consumption is a sign of a noveau riche person who was raised with poor manners or in your past words…“raised in a barn”. :D</p>
<p>In fact, defending the right to be open about one’s conspicuous consumption would from their perspective, betray you as someone with noveau riche sensibilities. </p>
<p>This is a difference of cultural preferences…and it doesn’t necessarily always correspond with one’s SES.</p>
<p>Look, cobrat, it’s evident that anyone who has anything “nice” you regard as “conspicuous consumption.” That’s your own hang-up. That doesn’t make it so. There is absolutely nothing conspicuous-consumption in the example I cited. Sorry people can’t have nice things – logo’ed or not – without offending you, but so be it.</p>
<p>So . . . I just came back from my college reunion (at a fancy, single-initial Ivy). One of my classmates there, who came to college a working-class football recruit, has spent most of his career as a sixth-grade teacher. He was a great guy in college, and he’s a great guy now. Easily one of the most popular people in the class then and now. At our class dance Saturday night, women were lined up to dance with him, some of them wearing clothes and jewelry that cost what he makes in a year. People think what he is doing is awesome.</p>
<p>Now, there were other working-class students I knew in my class in my dorm. One recently retired as an investment banker. One clerked for the Supreme Court, had a great career as a government lawyer, mainly, in his home state, and is now a federal judge. One is a sports agent. One is a TV producer. One dropped out of college sophomore year and hasn’t been heard from since, and another transferred to her state flagship and is a tenured professor now. I think most of them – including the middle-school teacher, not including the dropout – think they were well-served by their college, and that it opened up opportunities and perspectives to them they would not necessarily have gotten elsewhere. I know the dropout and the transfer felt somewhat oppressed by the wealth and privilege of their classmates, and that was the main reason why they left. (The dropout, by the way, had gone to an ultra-fancy boarding school for four years on full scholarship, and had been captain of this and proctor of that, so you might think he would have been used to it, but it turns out he wasn’t.) The others, I think, felt accepted for who they were.</p>
<p>Rich people can have problems, too. The most unhappy person I knew in college was a developmental admit whose grandfather was a trustee of the university. He struggled to pass classes. He thought everyone looked down on him for being rich and dumb (and essentially he was right about that). He felt bad about himself 24-7. And even he wasn’t dumb enough to think that he could try to buy people’s friendship without having them disdain him even more. Basically, his best quality – his wealth – was a social liability.</p>
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<p>I’m puzzled as to how you’re focusing this conversation all on me when I am making a generalized observation about how preferences for/against a campus culture of conspicuous consumption like the ones at GWU or NYU is a matter of individual taste and that they’re all valid for each individual student concerned. </p>
<p>What’s so bad about a student having a preference which causes them to reject campus cultures where conspicuous consumption is encouraged/commonplace? Must all students bow down before the o so superior divine wisdom of Pizzagirl? :D</p>
<p>It’s no different than choosing on basis of campus size, population, level of racial diversity, sports culture or lack thereof, types of fraternity/sorority cultural environment or the complete lack thereof*, etc. </p>
<p>*Many Oberlin classmates I knew cited the lack of fraternities/sororities as one of the key reasons why they chose to attend. On the flipside, I wouldn’t be surprised that Oberlin’s 130+ year ban on fraternity/sorority organizations caused applicants desiring to join such organizations to summarily rule it out from further consideration. </p>
<p>Likewise, those same classmates also cited the campus culture’s rejection of mainstream upper-middle class fashion norms/conspicuous consumption as another factor for attending. On the flipside, my clotheshorse cousin who enjoyed his time at GWU would have found Oberlin to be a miserable experience for that very same reason.</p>
<p>The back & forth on guitars made me think of one of my favorite musicians with his favorite instrument.
The hardest working guitar in show business!
[Glen</a> Hansard - Hardest Working Guitar - Takamine Guitars](<a href=“http://www.takamine.com/hwg/glen_hansard]Glen”>http://www.takamine.com/hwg/glen_hansard)</p>
<p>My husband is currently attending Columbia to finish his bachelor’s in mathematics (after taking 4 years off to serve in the military). He wishes to be a public school teacher.</p>
<p>Some students achieve in high school not because they want to make six figures and drive a Porsche, but simply because academic achievement makes them happy. I know I get a lot of intrinsic joy from performing well on academic assignments. And it’s not like the networking benefits go away forever. First of all, teachers need to network to get jobs, too. If they ever decide to leave teaching, they have still networked; and if they ever decide that they want to go into administration, they also have their networks.</p>
<p>I’ve worked with undergrads at my Ivy. They’re not bringing private planes to school. Some of them do bring expensive cars or other expensive things that we sometimes see or find in their rooms or hear them talking about. But one of the things I’ve noticed (and smiled about to myself) is that the wealthy kids and middle- and working-class kids, on average, tend to socialize together and learn from each other. I hear them making jokes about their own stations in lives and asking questions of each other, and they learn from each other.</p>
<p>And MADad, the education major is the way to get credentialed in early childhood/elementary education (K-5). If you want to teach middle and high school, you do need to major in an academic discipline, but you can indeed get a teaching license if you major in education - elementary education. And at a lot of schools you can get licensed by majoring in education for 6-12, too - they have programs like “music education” or “mathematics education” or “social science education” that require 20+ credits in education and student teaching in addition to the subject matter.</p>
<p>I think that there are two separate issues that should not be conflated. First, do students who are not wealthy have the same access to later opportunities as students who are better off? To this, I would say that from everything I know, the answer is an emphatic “yes.”</p>
<p>Second, will students who are not as well off experience awkward moments, or times when their friends just don’t get the reality of their financial situations? I think the answer to this is also “yes,” as TheGFG pointed out in the first part of an earlier post.</p>
<p>QMP’s roommate’s parents came to freshman parents’ weekend in a private plane.</p>
<p>In my own experience, interacting with some HYP etc. grads during grad school, I did find that they didn’t understand economic limitations. My family came to visit at the end of my first year (long trip). When she got home, all of my mother’s friends wanted to know if she thought the expense of the trip was worth it. They stayed at a fairly inexpensive hotel. I talked with a group of my fellow grad students about where we had gone for dinner the previous night, to a relatively cheap and not-very-good restaurant in town. One of the H crowd asked why my parents took me there, rather than to one of the more upmarket places. He was in all other respects a kind and thoughtful friend. I think he just had no idea. </p>
<p>Of course, I thought that my fiance’s family was “rich,” because their towels, shower curtain, and throw rug in the bathroom were all color-coordinated.</p>
<p>Finally, in my official role as Nemesis-to-Pizzagirl :), I’d bet that I can identify a Kate Spade handbag from across the room these days.</p>
<p>Teaching is a fine profession. It has higher status in the UK than in the US, Teach for American notwithstanding.</p>
<p>To add a minor clarifier: I didn’t think that the person from the H crowd was flaunting wealth, or in any way trying to make me feel bad, since I interacted with him a lot. He just had no relevant experience.</p>
<p>I don’t consider you my nemesis, QM :-). I’m kind of fond of you!</p>
<p>I agree that kids of lesser means may have awkward moments around those of greater moments, but I don’t see what that really has to do with Ivies (etc). There are private-plane-and-Porsche kids at pretty much every state flagship, too. I think it’s naive and mistaken to believe that rich kids are concentrated at elites. Don’t forget - the vast majority of rich kids aren’t necessarily any more qualified to get into Ivies than anyone else – nor are they all falling over themselves to attend. PLENTY of rich kids who are being groomed to take over the family business are more than happy to go to Fun State U and have a good time socializing for 4 years, don’t find it “statusy” to have 2400 SAT’s and a 4.0 GPA, and would have zero interest in attending an Ivy League or similar caliber school. So if you think by avoiding Ivies you’re avoiding well-to-do kids, think again.</p>
<p>I’d also submit that wealthy people don’t get to or stay wealthy by spending money where it needn’t be spent. I’m sure there are plenty of wealthy people who come to visit their kids who rent moderate cars, go to casual restaurants instead of Le Fancy ChiChi, and stay at Hampton Inns versus the Ritz. Wealthy does not equal “throw money indiscriminately at things without thinking of the value.” For my money, if I visit my daughter at her school, staying at whatever place I can find on Priceline is smarter than staying at the Ritz.</p>
<p>The standards do seem to have changed somewhat. When I was in college at one of the snobby places, any kind of conspicuous display of wealth by a wealthy kid would instantly turn him or her into a social pariah. He might have a Beemer (an old one), but that didn’t count, because the parking garage was two miles away and you rarely saw people’s cars. But throwing money around? That was a huge faux pas. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t lots of examples of simple insensitivity of the sort QuantMech described, though.</p>
<p>And everything is relative. When my kids went to a fancy private school, the buzz in my daughter’s class was about a boy whose parents bought him a Hummer when he got his driver’s license. People were pretty scandalized by that. (The mother said, “You know my son. I couldn’t possibly be confident he won’t run into something. I just want to make sure that when he does, he and his brother walk away from it.”) The next year, my kids were at a public magnet, where over half the kids qualified for free lunch. The school was a mile walk plus 50 minutes of two buses from our house, or a 15-minute drive. We let our daughter drive herself and her brother (and friends) to school in our 9-year-old Dodge Caravan. (There was a large parking lot that was never more than half full.) Once when I was talking about the kid with the Hummer, my daughter interrupted me: “You know, at our new school, given how few kids drive, and what the kids who drive have to do to keep their cars running, our minivan stands out as much as the Hummer. We are the kids with the Hummer.”</p>
<p>JHS, your daughter is very observant.
;)</p>
<p>I really can’t say I ever saw anyone “throw money around” at college, ever – even some kids who were quite wealthy. It was known that some people came from well-off families, but that’s different from “so-and-so throws money around.”</p>
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<p>Here’s where I am in agreement with Pizzagirl. The Ivies of the last 20-50 years aren’t anything like John Kerry’s or George W’s undergrad days in the early-late '60s. </p>
<p>At the very worst, if one does get jerked around by the snobby set, emulate these guys:</p>
<p>[Horrible</a> Histories - Literally: The Viking Song - YouTube](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qSkaAwKMD4]Horrible”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qSkaAwKMD4)</p>
<p>:D 
:D</p>
<p>Cobrat, no one needs to get “jerked around by a snobby set.” If you don’t like certain people, then just ignore them. I swear, you give other people – who probably aren’t giving you the time of day anyway – so much mental power over you by your constant worrying about whether they like you, and are they snobs, and how much money they have, and what they wear / carry / have and what it says about them, and how can you thumb your nose at them for your own amusement. If you find someone a snob, why don’t you simply ignore them and move on with your day?</p>
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<p>Because there’s some amusement and sometimes good food to be had from annoying, irritating, and raiding their food supplies. </p>
<p>:D :D</p>
<p>I guess it depends on the college and the distance between home and campus, but most people don’t bring a car to campus. In my opinion, it’s pointless to have a car at Harvard as it’s a major pain to drive in Boston. Also, I don’t think people at HYP would necessarily know how to dress. They certainly didn’t at MIT (though obviously HYP-ers probably pay more attention to their clothes on average.) So things like differences in wealth wouldn’t necessarily be noticed at all. </p>
<p>In fact, I think the people without wealth are probably more sensitive to markers of wealth than people who are reasonably affluent. By “reasonably affluent,” I mean the children of professionals. I have no experience with people who summer at the Hamptons and have private planes, etc.</p>