Isn’t one of the reasons low-SES students may choose to self-segregate because they don’t have the financial means to socialize with students of higher SES? They may decline to participate in certain activities because of cost, without telling others why they decline, so the other students wouldn’t even know.
Of course, that varies by campus. For example, at campuses where fraternity and sorority (or similar organization) life is important in social life and expensive, and rushing is a highly competitive admission process with heavy weight to “legacy” recommendations, it should not be too surprising that lower SES students are more likely to feel socially excluded. Or if social stuff is mainly in an expensive surrounding community, that can be another barrier. But this may not be the case at other campuses.
As if rich college students are always leaving college and jetting off? Everything they do costs big bucks? Are you “in touch with” this age group?
As if elite colleges are admitting poor kids who can’t possibly have, in some views, any worldliness? At the elites, these kids are chosen for activation, maturity, and more, including academics.
Of course there can be divides, some kids scrimping. And some running off on breaks, internationally. But that’s not how most of our kids form friendships. You’re looking at extremes, anecdotes, and judgments. Assuming nothing can be inclusive.
One of my D’s close college friends is so wealthy, theyve got a gate and security around the home. And a lot more.
And the other’s family lived on mom’s low salary, the kids had mattresses on the floor, she shared a room with two younger brothers. I’m not exaggerating.
Don’t assume.
Appreciated @Data10’s sharing the personal bit.
My experience was very much like what Data10 describes above.
I was definitely in the low income group. It wasn’t a factor in meeting people, there was no bubble. We were all college students living where we did by lottery assignment, eating in the dining hall, attending (free) on-campus events.
Some kids had cars (I’d get rides to places occasionally) but my college had a lot of kids, rich poor and in between, from NYC so not having one was not an SES indicator. None of us had them growing up in the city.
Less of an issue at “elites” (where that word includes being well funded), since these colleges generally don’t charge students for clubs, sports teams, levels of housing, on-campus events etc. My kid’s college covered the cost of anything a student wanted to do. Ski club? Here’s rental equipment if you don’t have your own. Outdoor club? Here’s a tent. Sailing club? No fees just show up. Want to live in a fancy apartment? No. Everyone has to live on campus and take part in the student housing lottery.
That said, for a school with lots of expensive off-campus stuff - say Columbia - SES differences in ability to socialize may be a greater factor.
@MWolf YOU asked ME if I was familiar with Posse. I answered. I didn’t think the existence of the program supports the argument that the division is worse at the most selective private colleges than at other colleges which is the point I thought, based on what you wrote, you were trying to make. But you then…
say
Lets assume you didn’t…isn’t that argument the point of this thread?
You seem to contradict yourself by saying
Your statement is an ASSUMPTION, NOT a FACT. As @BKSquared & @lookingforward explained, at some elite colleges most students do not divide along socioeconomic lines. IME, at others which are not especially elite, they do. And there are also elite colleges at which students do divide along those lines and non-elites at which they don’t.
@1NJParent asks
Yes, but this is linked to HOW students socialize. For example, if going to sporting events is an important part of student social life, there’s going to be a difference between colleges at which all students can go for free & they file into the stadium and choose any seat they want and those at which to get good seats you have to buy a season ticket & a lot of the best seats are bought as a group by Greek houses.
Moreover, schools differ in terms of the supports they offer “First Gen” students. So, for example, Brown, which is among the colleges at which you would expect students from low-income students to feel most isolated, has this https://www.brown.edu/ufli/home So, if a student feels he needs to connect with students from a similar background, it’s not hard to find them. Now, to be honest, I have rather mixed feelings about some of the “First Gen” centers & their programs., but if MWolf’s point is that it’s harder to find students like yourself at the elite colleges, if you are poor, I don’t think that’s necessarily so.
The article @MWolf linked is interesting, but…it is focused solely on the experience of poor black students. Are we to assume that the experience of poor whites, Asians and Latinos is the same? I don’t know. Do you?
Second, the article ignores what IME is a real divide among Black students at elite schools–the divide between those who are the descendants of American slaves and those who are the descendants of Blacks who immigrated voluntarily from Caribbean and African nations. Anyone who isn’t an ostrich can figure out that the latter group makes up a disproportionate percentage of Black students at most elite schools. (Amy Chua’s & Jed Rubenfeld’s controversial book about the most successful groups of recent immigrants to the US has Nigerians in the top half dozen.)
It’s not as if people can instantly see those differences. If you’re a second generation, born in the US child of parents born in Ghana or Nigeria or Jamaica or a 5th generation US born Cape Verdean, you’ll be seen as “African-American.” You’ll be lumped in with everyone else in the racial statistics. But there are major cultural differences between the two groups & there are some divisions among them at elite–and I assume other–colleges.
This, of course, has more to do with racial/ethnic divides than with socioeconomic divides.
High school students from poor families need to investigate the colleges of interest to them in depth IF they are worried about being socially isolated. You really need to do a college by college analysis. Again, don’t just look at the percentage of poor kids & the percentage of rich kids and draw conclusions.
And the faculty who live in on-campus homes pay property taxes as well. But since much of that campus land is in unincorporated Santa Clara county, they don’t pay property taxes to the local city of Palo Alto.
Btw, it’s not just the wealthy privates.
“The vast majority of public and private universities and colleges are tax-exempt entities as defined by IRC Section 501(c)(3) because of their educational purposes—”
You can follow the link within this:
https://www.aau.edu/key-issues/tax-exempt-status-universities-and-colleges
I don’t doubt that financial means can make it difficult to participate in some social activities at some college. However, I believe this is less likely in my Stanford example, as all campus activities I can recall did not require additional financial costs; and as noted, students spent the overwhelming majority of their time on campus.
[As an aside, someone upthread was talking about Stanford not being in the same county as Palo Alto. As far as I know, all or almost all of Stanford is in Santa Clara County, along with Palo Alto. East Palo Alto, and Menlo Park, just north of Palo Alto, are in San Mateo County (which is no slouch, either). A couple of the holes on the Stanford golf course may be in San Mateo County – the dividing line is a creek that runs through the front nine on the course.
Where Stanford isn’t is Palo Alto, however. Stanford is its own locality, abutting Palo Alto but not part of it.]
It really is a scandal, how Stanford just sits there sucking all the life out of Palo Alto and not paying any real estate taxes. Everyone knows what a blot it is on the vibrancy of the Peninsula, and how much better off everyone would be if all that property were in the hands of a private developer!]
For what it’s worth, here’s my experience: I was friends in grad school with a number of students from Ivy League schools, mostly from upper middle class backgrounds and a few from quite wealthy families. I did not find it a barrier to friendship that they went off to Greece on vacation and I did not. I did not find their unspoken assumptions to be a barrier to friendship.
On the other hand, I recall to this day that when my parents came to visit and took me out to eat, one of my friends asked why we had gone to that restaurant, and why didn’t we go someplace better. Practically all of the restaurants where we ate during their visit were like that restaurant, i.e., places where students ate frequently as it was, which were low in cost and (to be honest) not that great. We went there because my family would not consider spending as much on food as the better places cost. The comment hurt a bit. It didn’t cause me to stop liking the person who asked, but it did make me aware some automatic assumptions that he had and I did not.
It is interesting to me that lookingforward mentioned “worldliness” as a quality that the elites look for in students. This put me in mind of Romans 12:2, “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect . . .” In my opinion, it is a challenge for a young person to combine worldliness with the kind of idealistic leadership that improves a society. A lot of the worldly undergraduates I have known have pursued worldly success. There are advantages to that, of course.
The complaint whould be to one’s local, state govts and the feds, who endorse the tax exemptions.
Let’s not forget that college kids come from many subcultures. It’s not all about money.
@jonri To me it seemed that “helpfully” providing me with the link to Posse’s list of partner colleges was an assumption that I’m not familiar with it, and that I was speaking from ignorance. So I apologize for making my own assumptions and responding snarkily.
Back to the discussion at hand:
I don’t know why people keep on responding to my statements about the experiences of poor kids at “elite” colleges with counter arguments about income segregation, or lack thereof.
I talked about rich kids growing up in a bubble, not about what happens to them in college. However, it’s difficult to think otherwise, if they are attending a college with 5% poor kids and maybe 10% with below median income.
Many kids from a wealthy neighborhoods or suburbs attend a school which is 90% upper middle class and wealthy, then go to a high school with similar demographics, and then attends an “elite” college, or a “prestigious” flagship or public college (like GTech), and then get a high income job. How are these kids ever leaving their bubble?
The “elite” colleges are the “home territory” of the wealthy and the upper middle class.
Just because a small number of poor kids are allowed into the bubble doesn’t make it any less of a bubble. The wealthy kids don’t enter the life of the poor for the four years they attend college, it’s the poor and lower middle class who enter the life of the upper middle class and the wealthy for their college years, or are at least allowed access to that world. The fact that many of the wealthy and upper middle class kids freely interact with the poor kids doesn’t mean that those wealthy kids are actually stepping out of their bubble.
All of these stories about how the kids cannot tell the difference between the poor and the rich kids at their “elite” college are NOT about how the rich kids are learning how to understand how the poor live. They are all about how the poor kids learn to understand how the wealthy and upper middle class live. It’s about how the poor kids learn to navigate the rich people’s bubble, not about them interacting outside of that bubble.
Read any book or report or personal story, and the main way that kids who grew up in poverty succeed at “elite” colleges is by learning how to navigate the world in which the upper class and the wealthy live. What also comes through is that the upper middle class and the wealthy very rarely learn much at all about navigating the world of poverty (hearing stories isn’t the same thing). Almost all continuing interactions between wealthy kids and the poor kids they may have befriended after graduation occur in the world in which the wealthy/upper middle class kid grew up.
On that topic. There is a world of difference between growing up in poverty, growing up lower middle class, and being broke. I’ve been lower middle class through much of my childhood, and as an adult, and I’ve been broke as an adult (including being on food stamps), but l know the difference between this and growing up in poverty. The divide between my situation and growing up in poverty is much more stark than the divide between middle class and upper middle class.
PS. The problem isn’t the bubble. any more than the problem is ever with privilege. The problem is with the refusal to acknowledge the bubble, to acknowledge that people have extremely different experiences growing up, and the refusal to acknowledge that, at “elite” colleges, be they private or public, the poor are the ones who are “out of their element” (to use a different metaphor) and having a difficult time because of this, while the wealthy are not.
@MWolf Do you think rich/upper middle kids who go to less elite colleges leave the bubble but only at elite colleges they don’t? I’m confused.
I can’t imagine your familiarity with poor kids at elites. But what makes you think they’ve never experienced anything but poverty? What? Never rode a bus or asked a teacher for support, never belonged to clubs or organized something? Never knew any richer kids or went to the movies or the mall, visited a library voluntarily, or participated in music? You really miss the breadth of types out there, the merits in individuality, seem to think they have no sophistication. Sorry, that’s my reaction to what I read.
The elites are looking for kids who can fit and thrive and there are hundreds of ways to do that, on most college campuses.
Rich kids take advantage of college life, too. And can be just as individual. It’s abused by some, but to see rich kids as some simplistic characterization is to miss a lot about how kids do interact.
There are extremes, but there’s a vast middle gound, good kids of all sorts.
I agree with this. But given that our society is basically run by the upper class, is poorer kids learning to navigate that world inherently bad? I suspect that’s part of the reason lower income kids go to elite colleges, to gain exposure to a world they’d like to enter.
Agree. And college itself is a bubble all on its own. Once kids graduate and start working they will live in some other type of bubble as well.
It seems to me that MWolf’s post #131 is accurate. Re OHMomof2’s post: Of course, students whose families are poorer but who learn to navigate the world of wealth and privilege while in college are gaining an advantage, and it is good.
In my view, the issue is whether the students from wealthier families are learning much about what it is like to be substantially less well off in America. Why that matters: Some fraction of the “movers and shakers” at the elite colleges will go into politics. The policies of the administration and the Congress are pretty heavily set by the wealthy. If students from wealthy families learn at some point what the lives of the less advantaged are like, their policy making will be better for the country.
Mortgage lending to people who could not possibly afford to pay off the mortgages, and buying houses that were ridiculously overpriced, contributed to the financial meltdown of about a decade ago (I know that there were additional causes). The financial packages presumably looked sensible to some people who lacked perspective on the economic lives of 60% of the population (I know there was also some out-and-out dishonesty involved). It is part of being well-educated to understand the society in which you live.
I don’t know that wealthy students who attend less-elite colleges learn to understand the lives of average Americans that much better. One of the Econ profs at my university was fond of asking students what they thought the average household income in the state was. Virtually to a person, the students guessed about twice the actual value. And this was at a large public university. It would be an interesting experiment to run at the elite colleges.
Here on these forums, “middle class” families’ kids will not get college FA anywhere, but the families are unable to save up for even in-state public college costs due to the “high cost of living”. It may be hard to imagine being a median income household living on one fourth of the income…
Recent African and African Caribbean immigrants are heavy with people who initially entered the US on PhD student or skilled worker visas. I.e. they are a selected cohort with much higher educational attainment than the general populations of the US or their countries of origin. Immigrants from Asia and Europe are mostly similar in this respect. Is it a surprise that American kids of highly educated parents are more likely to do well in school (for either or both nature or nurture reasons)?
But since most people look at race/ethnicity first, they generalize based on that. So African (and European) immigrants do not set the stereotypes of their race/ethnicity, due to small numbers compared to those descended from generations ago (and educationally suppressed in the case of black people). This is in contrast to Asian immigrants, whose relatively large numbers compared to the existing Asian population in the US do set the stereotypes.
Again, my point is that navigating college is much more difficult for poor kids than for middle class kids, and that for wealthy kids it is far easier, and that at “elite” colleges this difference is magnified even more. Why is it so hard for people to admit this?
Most rich kids grow up in a different world than do most poor kids. That is a fact of life, no matter how many times people try to deny it, or pretend that poor people do the same things at the same places as rich people.
Here is a nice visualization to see the segregation by income: https://project.wnyc.org/median-income-nation/#9/41.9431/-87.6572
If you want to read up on economic segregation of schools, here you go (also some nice maps): https://edbuild.org/
“Elite” colleges are part of the world of the rich kids. I’m not talking about whether it’s good for poor kids to learn how to navigate this world. I’m talking about it being difficult for them, difficulties that rich kids do not have.
I am familiar because I have a good number of friends of that category, and my kid’s posse has a number of kids like that who are experiencing it now, though luckily they have support. I am otherwise involved in Posse, and have met more people with that experience, and have tried to make sure that I understand the issue just a bit.
I also went to school with a class which was about half made up of poor kids, and I spent a lot of my time in high school hanging out at their houses, and with them. None went to any college, though, and Israel does not have “elite” colleges in the sense that the USA or the UK do. My best friend in Israel grew up with 7 siblings in a two bedroom apartment. That wasn’t all that uncommon among people I knew.
So I am reasonable familiar with the issue.
Growing up poor doesn’t take a break because the kid went to a movie. A poor kid who had a good time at the beach doesn’t suddenly stop being poor. When a poor kid has a good time hanging out with friends, their high school doesn’t suddenly acquire teacher who teach AP classes and honors classes, enough counselors to deal with all of the kids, a decent library, labs, etc.
“Individuality” doesn’t add AP and honors courses to a poor school, and “sophistication”, doesn’t provide the kids with a place to do homework, or a counselor who can help them.
I’m sorry, but observing poor people in the mall hardly counts as stepping out of one’s rich kid bubble, and poor kids don’t hang out at upscale malls because A, the malls not anywhere close to their homes, and B, mall guards will kick them out. Mall cops are pretty good at identifying poor kids who are coming to hang out at an upscale mall.
Public libraries in rich neighborhoods and suburbs are not frequented by poor kids.
Exactly how does a rich kid, attending a school which is also rich, meet poor kids when “participating in music”? That makes no sense.
How exactly does this relate to poor kids having a difficult time at “elite” colleges?
I was talking about how poor kids have a difficult time taking advantage of college life, and you respond by telling me that rich kids are able to do so? Of course, they can. Unlike poor kids, they’ve been prepared for college, and for life at an elite college.
I’m not talking about the middle ground, I keep on talking about the poor kids at “elite” colleges. Why are you telling me about other kids?
As the percent and number of rich kids goes down in a college, the more likely it is that they will step outside of their bubble, at least temporarily. At “elite” colleges, they make up the majority by a large margin. As you move down the prestige ladder, the proportion of rich kids drops, and the bubble weakens. Sometimes, they’re able to maintain their bubble, in less prestigious colleges with the help of inflated fraternity/sorority dues.
I keep on posting this one point about the difficulties of poor kids in “elite” colleges, and there are people whose only response is to post that I’m being unfair to rich kids, and how rich kids are great, and how they know some rich kids who treated poor kids OK, etc.
But they find it difficult to acknowledge the hardships facing the small number of poor kids who actually overcome the odds to attend “elite” colleges.
I’m now looking at the title of the thread in a different way…
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