That fits with experience and experiences I have heard from my friends/family as well. During HS, there are often many reminders of wealth that are often less prevalent at typical “elite” colleges. For example, if you visit a HS friend’s house you see whether they live in a good/bad part of town, how nice their house is, what type of car they drive. You may meet their parents and get to know them, including their occupation. When you go out, you and your family have to pay for almost everything. You get to learn which other parents will gladly spend money on you and which will make comments about money. If your family is struggling financially, money is often a common topic of discussion among family members. Kids may be encouraged to take a job to help the family out and need to explain to friends about the job. If your parents were anything like mine, there may be a lot of comments comparing your family to others with more money. For example, talking about where wealthier family x went on vacation, or wealthier family x getting their kid a car, or generally keeping up with the neighbors. Kids are also generally less mature in HS.
In contrast, at “elite” colleges, most students live on campus. Dorms often have the same cost, leading to both wealthy and less wealthy persons being the same dorm. At many “elite” colleges, cars are uncommon, so you don’t see whose parents have the more expensive car. You also generally have little interaction with parents, including knowing whether they are wealthy or not. I can’t recall anyone ever asking me what my parents did for a living while at Stanford, but it was a common question during HS. I recall one HS class in which the teacher asked everyone in the class to say what their parents did for a living in front of the class, as part of an introduction. There are also generally fewer day to day external costs at “elite” colleges. Campus food is often free after the boarding costs, and campus activities also often have no additional cost, such as sporting events.
There is likely to be some interactions at “elite” colleges that exemplify wealth differences of parents, but I wouldn’t assume that kids do not see similar reminders prior to college or that the such interactions at college are worse than HS, even though there usually are a higher concentration of children who have wealthy parents at colleges than at not upper SES HSs.
In the real world, most families can’t save enough for college. So there’s that.
And there is definitely a birth lottery. It doesn’t mean those who didn’t win it can’t go to a prestigious school, but they are surely starting from behind.
@Data10 D knows her close friends’ parents (indeed even I know them, now), and some are a lot wealthier than we are. But it didn’t have the impact on her that her high school friends’ wealth did.
She may have outgrown the envy (I feel it peaked late middle school/early high school when kids got cars at 16 with a bow on it and wore designer clothes and went on big vacations), but I think it’s also, as you say, that it didn’t impact her daily life at college. They still all ate at the one dining hall, lived in the same dorms, did their social things, classes, etc.
If she had gone to our flagship or an OOS one, the differences would have been more in-your-face.
@Leigh22 Thank you. Most families are living paycheck to paycheck or real close to that.
A back of the napkin calc shows to be able to save up around $200K for college it would take $350-500 per month depending on how the market does. That is per kid. So if you have two kids like most do you are looking at $700-1000 per month.
Even if you knock that $200K down by half you are back to looking at $350-500 for two kids. And remember that was 18 years ago to start.
Considering the increase in housing and medical over the last 20 years it isn’t surprising people can’t save enough.
Another aspect people don’t always think about is generational wealth. Passing wealth down to future generations. My baby boomer parents couldn’t go to college. There was no money for it. Both could have gotten degrees, especially my mom. They had two kids. My brother and I went off to college. I received plenty of need based aid, but still had some hefty loans. I married my college sweetheart that had loans as well. We paid them off and progressed with life. My kids will be able through parent contribution and merit money to make it through undergrad without loans.
My kids won’t be able to pick wherever they want to go. Cost will and has played a large factor. My D19 had to pick choice #2 instead of #1 for school if she wanted no loans.
I got thinking maybe my grandkids will be able to pick whatever college they want to go to without having to worry about money.
But see some of my grandparents were immigrants who had little to nothing starting out. Over time each generation just tries to get a little better off. It takes some hard work and a little luck. My kids know the family story and it keeps them grounded for sure.
I won’t lie to you though, there are days I wander what life would be like if my wife and I had zero loans coming out of college.
Why? As each loan got paid off, we took the money that had gone to the loan servicer and put it in a college savings account for our kid. And then another kid. Repeat every month. By the time my final loan was paid off I was ready to buy actual living room furniture (house looked like grad students were camped out in it). Spouse objected- said that our tastes would change, and that one year florals would be in and the next year it would be geometrics- but that a college savings plan would never go out of style.
Our kids are done with college and we continue to put “our loan payments” into our retirement accounts every month. It’s just automatic at this point.
So the gift was having a monthly obligation which required living below our means. But it’s meant no loans for our kids, and what we hope is a healthy retirement fund for us. And yes- my couch is still ugly but when I move to my “retirement condo” I’m hiring a decorator!!!
The much more limited availability of AP classes at poorer schools and in rural areas is fairly well documented. So please do not dismiss this as “because you know of some”.
We can’t discuss issues poor kids at elites face, if we change it to summaries of the fewer opportunities, overall, at many underresourced high schools.
Common on CC is the idea poor kids have next to no opportunities. (Or minorities, unless they’re rich.) You didn’t like my comment that one needs a sociological perspective to examine school and social issues k-12. But really, we’re speaking (or were) about kids who DO end up at elites. Qualified.
The Ivy-Plus colleges are elitest. I think it was katliamom who said you had to be naive or disingenuous to think otherwise. Students from the top 1% are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college than students in the bottom quintile of parental income. You can argue over what mix of that is genetics, educational opportunity, parenting, or ALDC preferences, but there’s no denying almost all students attending an Ivy-Plus college are at least middle class.
We had no AP classes at or high school and even now I think there are only 5 or 6 offered at that hs. It is semi rural (in a city but city is itself rather isolated). It’s a fairly top high school in the state. I think the reasoning is that there is a state university about 1/2 mile away so if the student wants to take a college class, go take one and it will not only be ‘just like college’, it will in fact BE college.
Why offer AP when the need can be filled with the real deal, a college course.
The Ivies Plus colleges get singled out, but there are many more problematic colleges than the Ivies. For example, students from the top 1% are ~125x more likely to attend a NESCAC college than students in the bottom quintile or ~110x more likely to attend a Patriot League college (the study does not count West Point and USNA as part of Patriot League) than students in the bottom quintile. Among individual colleges, top 1% students were at least 200x more likely to attend the following colleges than students in bottom quintile income.
Some of the better ratios among selective colleges include the following. There are some clear patterns in what types of selective colleges tend to have better and worse high/low SES ratios.
UCSD – 3x
Berkeley – 10x
UCLA – 10x
Cooper Union – 12x
WPI – 12x
Stevens – 13x
GeorgiaTech – 14x
Smith – 15x
Grinnell – 18x
MIT – 18x
Some of the less selective 4-year colleges I have heard of that achieve a <1x ratio are below. All of these have both <1% of students in top 1% and >20% of students in bottom quintile.
Alabama State – <0.7x
Kentucky State – <0.8x
UT El Paso – <0.8x
Cal State, DH – <0.9x
Cal State, LA – <0.9x
CUNY System – <0.9x
That’s very interesting @Data10 . The selective colleges with an economically diverse student body tend to be technical or engineering type colleges. I was surprised CalTech wasn’t on the list.
I see the same thing. I know a couple of teens from highly wealthy families where the kids get something like a 12 year old Chevy Suburban. And learn how to maintain it.
Please provide citations to back up this claim with actual data, please.
And IMSA, one of the best high schools in the USA, doesn’t provide AP classes because they, rightfully, consider them inferior to their own classes. However, these are exceptions. The vast majority of small rural schools are not in the vicinity of colleges which provide dual enrollment.
Caltech was near MIT, just short of the cutoff from my earlier post. A more extensive list of selective college with is below. Some of the factors that appear to be correlated with better SES ratios are:
-Less selective
-Public college, especially public in CA
-No tuition, To far lesser extent good FA
-Engineering college
-Located near lower income groups, particularly within cities and Mexico
-HBCU
-Womens college
Some of the factors that appear to be correlated with worse SES ratios:
-Highly selective
-Liberal arts college
-Private, 4-year college
-Need aware
-High cost to parents, with limited FA
-Religious college
Top 1% income is listed times more likely to be student than bottom quintile
Ozarks – <2x
UCI – 3x
UCSD – 3x
Binghamton – 4x
UCSB – 9x
Berkeley – 10x
UCLA – 10x
Cooper Union – 12x
WPI – 12x
Stevens – 13x
GeorgiaTech – 14x
Smith – 15x
,
MIT – 18x
Caltech – 20x
…
Columbia – 50x (Best in Ivy League)
Cornell – 55x
Harvard – 65x
…