<p>"I know a lot of kids that I would put in the middle to sometimes upper middle class range (that definition is so loose...hard to pin exactly) who are very unsympathetic to the difficulties of being poor."</p>
<p>My personal opinion based on nothing but experience (so take it with two f<em>i</em>s<em>t</em>f<em>u</em>l*s of salt) is that you are absolutely correct in your observation. Many truly wealthy folks have a noblesse oblige about them (in fact, that is one of the qualities I envied, and tried to learn from) which is often lacking in folks working so hard to try to climb the social ladder. And the only true way to climb the social ladder is to leave other folks behind, preferably very far behind. I have seen that in my own extended family, and I have seen that in others. There are many social and economic analysts from Thorsten Veblen to C. Wright Mills to others more recent who have written extensively about this phenomenon.</p>
<p>As college students, we all had so much to learn! And at prestige, private colleges and universities the opportunities we have are so vast. This is just one of them, but I would suggest one of much greater importance than has been given credence here.</p>
<p>The issue Calmom, that was determined long before I got there, was the child did not benefit if the parent was not supportive of them becoming part of the community where they were going to school.</p>
<p>As as you bring it up, it is my personal belief that children should be shielded as much as possible from a parent's financial problems. This does not mean I believe they should buy things they can not afford. I have seen parents create money fears for life in children. One friend from Harvard to this day can not enjoy spending what she makes, she needs to watch it pile up in the bank. Her children will be very wealthy.</p>
<p>Mini, of interest to me if that Kerry has often been quoted about what it was like to be the poor kid at prep school in the 60s and the only Catholic.</p>
<p>Yep. Poor kid. He was the upper middle class social climber from Groton at Fessenden and St. Paul's from a much, much wealthier extended family (his great-aunt paid all the tuition), and he only got to spend summers on the Forbes family estate in the south of France. (And, yes, I bet he WAS uncomfortable, and had no one he could talk to about it.)</p>
<p>And while at Yale, he had to work some to pay for his flying lessons.</p>
<p>There are stories we can all tell ourselves if we try hard enough.</p>
<p>why oh why must we mock the servants of the people? </p>
<p>are sports analogies still being used by politicians? I haven't heard much about the 30 yard line or men on base in the 9th inning recently. What language is replacing the sport's analogy in the national consciousness when it is time to make things perfectly clear?</p>
I think some of you are missing something in this discussion. Our son is a full pay student who is expected to earn all of his own money for books and entertainment. By the time we pay tuition + room/board for him, and tuition for HS student, we don't have extra money for study abroad or trips to NYC or even to send him any allowance. He feels the pain of textbooks that cost $150, and has become quite adept at buying used books, selling his old books or borrowing from friends. I think it's good for him. I expect that one day he'll be self-supporting and will have to make choices about whether to eat at a restaurant or make his auto insurance payment. </p>
<p>Without diminishing anyone's personal experience, I don't share the angst over students or kids who have friends who are richer or poorer. That's life. There will always be someone who is richer, thinner, brighter, better looking or whatever. To limit experience because someone might be found to be of a lower socio-economic status or might not be as bright seems foolish to me. If you never stretch, you don't learn as much. </p>
<p>I came from a very modest background and I look back at what I learned from those experiences as being very beneficial. I can get by on very little, and can economize more than most of my peers. Struggling a little in college is good for the soul.</p>
<p>sjmom:exactly the same situation as D. Amazing, the money that can be saved on textbooks. She had to give up study abroad to but now says she knows how to survive and that grad school and life after should be easier because of her money management skills and having learned the difference between needs and wants.</p>
<p>D is at Harvard. We are definitely middle class. All of her roommates receive some financial aid. She has a work study job working for Harvard Educational Publishing as an assistant editor and loves it. She does fret over money at times. She really hated calling to tell me that one of her classes requires over $300 in books (16 books, mostly low volume and hard to come by). She has friends in her entryway that are very wealthy, but they walk to class in the snow and eat in the dining hall like everyone else. Day to day, there isn't really much difference between the economic classes at Harvard because Harvard doesn't offer "A" housing and "B" housing like many large state schools. It doesn't have frat houses that you can live in. A very few join Finals Clubs, but the numbers are so low that it isn't a factor. 98% of students live in campus housing. Yes, spring break trips are likely different, but no one really has a car there. It really boils down to where you feel the most comfortable.</p>
<p>S does not find $ to be a big issue. What he finds is the 'tightness' or 'lack of openness' amongst his peer group. In his high school every body was open, all knew every one's grades etc. In college no one even mentions it. He is a campus ambasaddor for the company he interned last year. His job was to recruit - by collecting resumes from kids.</p>
<p>Many will not give their resumes - not because they didn't like the prospect of internship, but they didn't want to divulge their grades and the stuff they have done. Even though my son promissed not to look at them</p>
<p>It seems that people have misunderstood my posts. My daughter isn't upset by the fact that some students have a lot of money. She doesn't want what they have. It is their behavior that she finds appalling -- she is talking about well-to-do kids who make snide comments about where she shops and simply are generally snobbish or boorish in the way they treat others around them. </p>
<p>As I made clear in my initial post, this isn't a common about "all" or even "most" rich kids -- it is a small group. These students make a point of showing off their wealth and obviously think that this will impress others; they are cliquish; they tend to drink heavily. My daughter refers to these kids as the "country club" girls, because apparently they are always talking about how much they enjoy going to their country club. But to my ears, the behavior that my daughter describes is straight out of "Mean Girls" --this is apparently just what happens to middle-school Queen Bees when they grow up and go to college. The fact that my daughter is at a womens' college probably tends to influence the social dynamic somewhat -- not necessarily with respect to the social distinctions drawn, but with the underlying behavior that accompanies it. </p>
<p>I never said my daughter was unhappy or an outcast -- she simply has found other friends. </p>
<p>Because 2 of you talked about kids not buying books because of expense, I'm guessing this is fairly common. Why are books lumped in with kid's day to day expenses budget? Doesn't FA have books as a line item? If you have extra large book expenses because of the courses you're taking, can you not discuss with the aid office?</p>
<p>"How could a parent have a kid at Harvard and not know about the private social clubs on campus?"</p>
<p>The Harvard parent who pointed out the unified dorm system specifically mentioned the final clubs, so I don't know who (on this thread or elsewhere) has claimed they don't exist. The issue is whether they impact kids who aren't part of the scene; most people find that they don't.</p>
<p>I am shocked that someone would be openly rude about money at Barnard. Can you give us an idea of the context?</p>
<p>The one time I encountered real tension about money/class during college is when I was planning a group tour. We asked members to cover the cost of their own plane ticket if they were able to; no one would know who contributed to the tour fund and who didn't except the tour manager (me). Kids mostly made choices that made a lot of sense, given what I knew about their family finances. (One rich kid's very generous family gave enough to pay for his ticket and a lot more besides.) But one kid who didn't pay had recently acquired a gorgeous vintage Mercedes. THAT ticked me off. We had a limited pool of group money that had to cover all the tour costs for the kids who couldn't pay. I thought it was very low to take advantage of that pool when you could pretty much sell your hood ornament and cover tickets for yourself and three of your friends.</p>
<p>I'm sorry to hear that Calmom; my S across the way hasn't mentioned anything like that, though maybe it's less likely that a guy would encounter that. He knows who has money, but it doesn't seem to turn into a power thing.</p>
<p>At my D's college, there was a very strong ethic to not show money and a very strong bias against "the right clothes" mindset. The prefered clothes there were second-hand stuff repaired with duct tape. When they planned trips and activities, it was considered really bad form to make anything cost a price that might make someone in the group uncomfortable. </p>
<p>I think there is some variation from school to school. I am glad it's a small percent who have acted like this, though.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Why are books lumped in with kid's day to day expenses budget? Doesn't FA have books as a line item? If you have extra large book expenses because of the courses you're taking, can you not discuss with the aid office?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>While books are given a "line item" as part of your cost of attendance, it is very rare that a student is given book money. It has been out experience (indiviudal mileage may vary) that parts of the monies from the student contribution (summer earnings) and work study monies are used to offset this expense. While the cost of books are an estimate, I know that my D's freshman year, she took a bio class and a math class and each book was $180 each. In addition she had an english class like Bandit's D, which required 16 books, some were paperbacks, and others wer chapters out of hard cover books, but the cost does add up. I know now she swaps books with friends, purchases books through half.com and carefully reads through her syllabus (if she has a class with a long book list, she will check out books from the library to defray the cost of check out a book and make a copy of the section that she needs instead of purchasing the entire book). As SJmom stated, they work it out as I purchased books firs term freshman year and she has been responsible for purchasing her books and paying for her incidental charges out of her own money ever since (as I think that she does need to be a stakeholder in this). I do notice now that she "spends her own money" she has come up with alternatives that she would not have previously considered.</p>
<p>I have not seen kids being intentionally rude about money. I did witness an exchange between two students that showed thoughtlessness on the part of a wealthy student ("It costs practically nothing") and a certain amount of resentment on the part of a poorer one ("it's not nothing to me; I'm on work-study").</p>
<p>While FA covers a lot of expenses, some activities may require out-of-pocket expenses: tuxes for performers, for example, or sometimes travel money.</p>
<p>Regarding final clubs, lately S has received some recruiting emails from frats. He just ignores them. Finals and frats have no impact on the large majority of students at Harvard.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Because 2 of you talked about kids not buying books because of expense, I'm guessing this is fairly common. Why are books lumped in with kid's day to day expenses budget? Doesn't FA have books as a line item?
[/quote]
Most financial aid packages include an estimated cost for books, and they generally are lumped in with all incidentals. They are part of the overall cost of attendance for college, and based on averages.
[quote]
If you have extra large book expenses because of the courses you're taking, can you not discuss with the aid office?
[/quote]
College financial aid does not provide students with cash for expenses. What they generally do is provide a grant that is subtracted from the bill that is sent to the student, as are loan proceeds. The only time when a student would actually get cash from the college would be if they had such a low EFC that they grant and loans covered more than the total costs charged by the college for tuition, school fees, room & board. Since books are purchased separately (not included on the college bill), most kids aren't going to be getting any cash to help with those expenses. Almost all private colleges expect that the student will contribute to EFC from summer earnings as well as their on campus job. </p>
<p>Books are a HUGE expense because it is very common for a text book to cost well over $100. If the student is lucky, the text book can be purchased used. But often the prof has assigned a new edition of the book. My d. has a prof this semester who has assigned his own book for his class, and actually said to his class of 300 students that he wanted them to buy book new, so he would get more royalties. He also commented that he knew everyone in the class was "upper middle class" because that was the only way they would be at the school. He was probably joking with both comments.... ha, ha -- but it probably was not at all funny to the 20% or so of the students in the class who actually come from middle or lower class families. But that comment is an illustration of the cluelessness that kids like mine find so irksome. </p>
<p>It doesn't bother my daughter that she has to budget carefully to buy her books -- we knew books would be a big expense and it was something we discussed before she went off to college. What is bothersome are people who make the assumption that it is easy, or that kids can simply call up their parents whenever they need money.</p>
<p>Worse than books are art supplies, IMO, if you're taking art classes. The books at least you can resell, and I've gotten back about 75% of the value of my books so far by making a point of purchasing them in used but still nice condition, taking very good care of them, and selling them in the same condition I bought them for around the same price. The art supplies, however, can run $150 or more per class and obviously cannot be sold back. I remember that I got a $500 scholarship my freshman year and my parents and I decided it was going to be 'book money'.....and then I spent all of it in one chunk on a supply package for architecture school that started running out in 8 weeks anyway. :( I do actually know a fair amount of people who don't bother buying any textbooks...I guess they just go solely off their lecture notes, borrow someone else's book for a few days, or go and see if the library has a reserve copy of it.</p>
<p>I've never personally witnessed anyone being snobby about money, but I have heard lots of not-so-subtle hints about going to an "inferior" school and even had the pleasure of having some straight to my face insults about it, as well. Obviously that's an entirely different subject, and if you're already at one of the chosen few schools that obviously can't be turned against you, but it is sort of along the same lines.</p>