Absolutely people do, some more than others. I look at how many are on need based aid, no question. When buying real estate, I want to know how many at a gradeschool are on the free lunch program to gauge a neighborhood, not that different. My friends at the higher end, as mentioned before, where it is comfortable to spend 250k on their kid’s education, want their student’s in the same kind of social circles they are used to for future friendships, connections, and while many won’t admit it, looking for a spouse. A direct quote from a friend over lunch, “If I’m gonna spend 250K for my daughter to go to college, who is likely to quit work within 5 years of college to raise a family, I am gonna send her somewhere she is more likely to meet someone with money and shares our socioeconomic background.” Most schools are quite diverse in many ways, but there are some people who are putting a great deal of emphasis on SES criteria and not just academics, it’s the way of the world for some, silly to think it is not. Agree with @pizzagirl, there is a lot of stereotyping of people that actually pay for college on this forum. But in general, everyone just likes to hang with people they are comfortable with while meeting all kinds of people.
Re: Michigan. I’m an alum. Way back in the days of dinosaurs when I went to Michigan it had a reputation in at least some parts of the state as a school full of “snobby rich kids.” My mother didn’t want me to attend for just that reason; she thought I’d have trouble fitting in, maybe become socially isolated, or simply spend beyond my means trying to keep up with my classmates, None of that happened. It was eye-opening to me seeing how freely some of my classmates spent money on clothes, cars, vacations, concerts, dinners out when their dining hall meals were already paid for; and how they didn’t need to work either term-time or summers to have all that cash. They were often surprised when I didn’t join them, but I quickly got used to saying, “No, I can’t afford that,” or simply, “No, I need to study.” Most just shrugged and accepted that; a few were quite insensitive about it and looked down on me for it, but it quickly became clear to me they weren’t people I wanted to spend time with anyway because at a fundamental level we just didn’t share the same values. I befriended others in the same economic stratum I was (including a wonderful woman who became my steady girlfriend for the better part of my college years, but that’s another story). I always worked both term-time and summers to improve my economic standing. Most of that money went to help pay for core college expenses— I was actually able to pay for about half of my COA out of my own earnings, including one semester off from school to work in an auto parts factory and money I had saved from working while in HS, something very few if any college students would be able to do today. But I was also able to divert some of that cash flow to allow myself to do some of the more fun and interesting things that some of my more affluent friends were doing–but only some. And some of the more affluent did become lifelong friends. I suspect it was also eye-opening to them, if they were sensitive enough to see it, that there are also good and interesting and intelligent people who aren’t blessed with the same financial resources they had, but who were nonetheless worth knowing and spending time with and caring about as friends, even if they didn’t have the financial means to do all the same things and spend at anywhere near the same level.
Even back in my day, Michigan had a large contingent of OOS students who generally (though not universally) came from quite affluent backgrounds. But it was true then and is still true today that Michigan’s in-state students also skew much more affluent than the state as a whole. Roughly 2/3 of Michigan’s undergrad student body comes from just 4 southeastern Michigan counties, Oakland (NW Detroit suburbs), Wayne (Detroit, Grosse Pointe, and western suburbs), Washtenaw (Ann Arbor and environs), and Macomb (NE Detroit suburbs), in order of largest to smallest representation. Those counties comprise less than half the state’s population, about 43%. Oakland and Washtenaw, which together provide roughly 40% of Michigan’s in-state students despite comprising just 16% of the state’s population, are by far the most affluent counties in the state, along with Livingston, a sparsely populated county on Detroit’s exurban fringe, and it’s a good bet that a sizable fraction of the Wayne County kids hail from Grosse Pointe, a high-end suburban area, along with some of the more affluent pockets in the western suburbs. Michigan State, in contrast, gets a smaller percentage of its in-state students from metro Detroit, substantially fewer from Oakland County, very few from Washtenaw County, and many more from a broad arc of counties outside the metro Detroit area that include most of the state’s secondary metropolitan areas, where median household incomes are roughly at or near the state average, in some cases below. As a consequence, MSU’s student body, while it certainly includes some affluent students, skews less affluent than Michigan’s. This helps fuel the traditional stereotyped view held by (some) Michigan students that MSU students are a bunch of backwater hicks, and the stereotyped view held by (some) MSU students that Michigan students are elitist and arrogant. Of course, there’s a lot of demographic overlap, but the stereotypes are rooted in real demographic differences at the margins.
Anyway, my mother was wrong. I did just fine in college, academically and socially. In fact, I had the time of my life. I couldn’t do everything some of my more affluent friends did, but I didn’t need to; I knew who I was and what I valued, and I knew my financial capabilities as well as my financial limits. Of those among the more affluent who accepted that, some became lifelong friends, and of those who couldn’t or wouldn’t accept that, well, who needs them? Social opportunities in college are nearly limitless, especially at a big school where there’s bound to be a lot of socioeconomic diversity. And frankly I think it’s a good thing, a growing thing, for students on both sides of that kind of socioeconomic divide to see “how the other half lives.”
@ucbalumnus I wasn’t trying to suggest Ole Miss was super selective, rather that it’s first goal was to serve in-state students and then to set a higher bar for OOS ones. Not only is the OOS price of $36,602 not the “most expensive,” it’s actually very cheap for an OOS school. Only a few flagships are cheaper.
@mstomper is right that in general Ole Miss students aren’t all that wealthy,. An income which would cause one to be viewed as “rich” in Mississippi would qualify as “middle class” in much of America. However, there are those who don’t like Ole Miss because the student body is viewed by them as “snobby.” In reality they are just uncomfortable with those from a different social background. The fact is that there are lots of people who would say Ole Miss students are “snobby rich kids,” but there are just as many who might describe them as backward hicks. It really depends on one’s background, and I think it illustrates that SES can be a nebulous concept.
And sometimes you just don’t know who the ultra wealthy are because they live no differently than the rest. In my sorority, there were some who were very wealthy but people didn’t know. One girl went to Miss Porter’s school and was an ‘old money’ debutant. Most people had no idea of the school or the requirements to be in that group of debs. Another girl was OOS and didn’t have to work while in school, so of course we knew she was from a wealthier family than most of us. She drove an old car, wore basic clothes like cords and turtlenecks. No one knew how really wealthy she was until her best friend traveled to visit her at her home. Maids, butlers, silver service at meals. Just in a different category of wealth than those who could go to an OOS college without loans or really scrimping.
post #63, that’s the old new England money. The new money as in nouveaux rich, they have $2000 pair of shoes littered in their BMW SUV and when they gave their sorority sisters a ride, they said to throw the shoes anywhere. That’s how people know. Not discrete.
Nope, this was old old Colorado money, so old they sent her to a New England boarding school that no one had any idea about (I did because I’m from New England). A deb with a group new money couldn’t buy your way into (no football player millionaires, no .com big bucks). I know she hated it, but had to do it because her grandmother, mother, aunts and cousins had all been debs in this group. If I remember, this girl didn’t have a car or anything else that would give a clue as to her wealth, but I think she probably had more expensive clothes than the rest of us, we just didn’t KNOW they were expensive. The other girl was from Pennsylvania, and again didn’t show her wealth in her possessions. She drove a Dodge Colt, and it wasn’t as nice as even that sounds! No shoe throwing, no BMW. They did not show their money at all.
I think our house was about 50/50, with half of us struggling to make the payments for tuition and the rest, but about half from ‘comfortable’ families. This second half had cars, new clothing, money for skiing and other weekends and didn’t have to have jobs; most of us just including these two girls in the ‘comfortable’ category, but they really weren’t.
And in the end it doesn’t matter. They chose the school and adjusted to the lifestyles of their friends, not the other way around. If they went on fabulous spring break trips to Majorca or Paris, they didn’t tell any of us.
And if they went to Paris over spring break, true friends would be happy for them.
@MaterS. That article brings up something my kids were bewildered by. The “public vs private school” stand in for " " not wealthy vs wealthy". Around here private school is often attended by kids who can’t hack it at our highly competitive public school. It’s not a sign of privilege as much as a sign of not being at the top of your game.
Re: http://www.browndailyherald.com/2012/04/25/lets-not-talk-about-class/
About half of Brown students do not get financial aid, so they presumably come from very high income and/or wealth families who can afford to pay over $62,000 per year. But even many those who do get financial aid would be considered high income in most other contexts.
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=163
Threads like this always make me wonder why we assume the wealthy (or merely well-off) kids are assumed to be spoiled and snobby and assume that everyone can have $5 cups of coffee everyday. It is possible to have money and still be a thoughtful, sensitive person.
Likewise, there are poorer kids who might be rude or have other undesirable traits.
I detest generalizations and it seems people have no problem trying to cut down people with money. I like a good Horatio Alger story any time, but that is not the only valid archetype
If you are a minority or lower on the economic food chain, I think you tend to pay more attention. This is at least true in our circle. My kids are mixed racially and pretty average economically. My D had hesitations going to a wealthy, rather homogenous school but that is where the money was. There is nothing more frustrating than sitting in class listening to some girl in her Lily with hundred dollar flip flops, a huge allowance and not one paying job on her resume complain about the laziness of the poor. Thankfully, the school does have a good financial aid program and while there still isn’t the ethnic diversity D’s used to, there are at least kids on campus who get where she comes from on the economic front.
I want to add that wealth itself doesn’t create the attitude she’s beed dismayed with on campus. D has always had a large circle of wealthy friends but from families whose parents still expected their kids to work and to earn the things they wanted. There are kids like that on campus too thankfully. This has just been the first time she’d experienced such a high quantity of outright entitlement.
It seems to me that what matters is not so much SES diversity, but how much social stratification there is on campus. I think there are institutional differences that can emphasize or deemphasize stratification. For example, it might be emphasized if there are expensive and cheap dorms, a Greek system with strong social stratification, or a campus culture in which off-campus clubbing is a major social activity. It might be deemphasized if everybody lives in the same dorms, and most social activity takes place on campus (and is free). When we were looking at colleges for my daughter, she cared about this quite a lot, and there were some colleges that did indeed seem more stratified than others, even though the SES mix was probably about the same.
The argument of the very good and very damning book ‘Paying for the Party’ is that some state universities, in order to be attractive to wealthy OOS kids, offer, alongside their more serious paths, a ‘party pathway’, a substandard education with easy majors and few demands, which is fine for the kids who because of their family background are going to have a job after graduation no matter what. But lower-income instate kids who get caught up in that track end up not graduating or unable to get jobs if they do. “There’s a mismatch between what they need and what the university can offer them, and that’s where class stratification happens,” [the author said in an interview] “The university is set up to serve a group of very affluent students.”
http://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequality/dp/0674049578
^ that book was very interesting to me when I read it last year and I admit made me aware of some SES-related considerations at some schools D was considering.
Just an additional thought on the “Paying for the Party” book, which I have not read. The reviews give examples of students who breeze through school with mediocre grades and do well because of connections. There are also students who are very smart who are able to get good grades relatively easily. When colleges start trying to recruit a bunch of marginal students they create a divide, in that the marginal students can never compete or even associate very much with the smarter students, because if they do their g.p.a. will nosedive. Just something to think about.
Seems that a number of state flagships have a very wide range of students in terms of academic ability (e.g. AL, AZ, MS, etc.). Seems that the academically stronger and weaker students will have to at least encounter each other if they are in the same major, though some majors may be rigorous enough to “weed out” the weaker students. But it is not a given that a weaker student will find that associating with a stronger student is a bad thing; the stronger student may be willing to help the weaker student understand what s/he is studying some of the time.
I don’t ever remember picking my friends by first giving them an IQ test, or asking their gpa. I associated with people I liked, who may have had the same major as me so I met them in a class, or a friend introduced us. Even in grad school, my circle of friends grew more out of a shared geography than because the ‘smart’ kids hung together. My first friend spoke to me because I had a college sweatshirt on, he happened to be from that state, but we immediately discovered we’d gone to the same college some 2000 away from this sweatshirt state (it was my brother’s school and I had just taken the shirt), and now were another 1000 west. Small world, we’d lived on the same block in college. Connection. To this circle we added midwesterners who were friendly and I’d grown up in the midwest. Connection. More added because they wanted to have a beer after class.
@maya54 We have a totally different scenario, our privates can seem as competitive as colleges to get into and onlly want the cream of the crop - but they are college prep privates and we are in a highly educated demographic. Our publics are actually less diverse than our privates both racially and economically, the privates strive for diversity and offer millions in scholarships, not just get everyone in the neighborhood. At our publics, students are all trying to do the same thing and get the standard education, like hamsters on a wheel. At the privates, they are educating with a much broader world view and seek to explore more personal interests. On a side note, what I like is that privates fire a bad teacher on the spot, thus don’t have any, our publics get stuck with them for years. But I understand in some areas, privates are different.
I can’t comment on the particular schools you mentioned, but I don’t think this is necessarily true at the state flagships I’m familiar with, and not just because of “weed out” classes. For one thing, most large universities have honors programs that tend to put the stronger students in separate honors classes or honors sections, at least for intro-level classes; by the time they’re upperclassmen they’re taking advanced classes, even graduate-level classes in some cases, that the weaker students will never see. Second, there’s a lot of separation by major, or even by school or college within the university. At our flagship (Minnesota), for example, admissions standards are higher for engineering than for the College of Liberal Arts; pretty much everyone in the engineering school is going to be a capable student, while CLA has a wider range of abilities. But CLA students tend to self-segregate. A lot of the more capable students are pre-meds, for example; they usually end up taking a sequence of challenging science classes that most weaker students won’t even attempt, while the weaker students tend to gravitate toward what they perceive to be “easy” classes, “easy” majors, and “easy” professors Third, even within most majors, not everyone takes the same classes. The more capable students may “test out” of some otherwise required intro classes, or “place out” with HS AP credits, or take more advanced and challenging versions of the intro-level class (sometimes labeled “honors,” sometimes not) and accelerate to more challenging upper-level classes more quickly, while the weaker students will often try to take as few “hard” classes or “hard” professors as they can get away with while still meeting the bare requirements for the major and their degree.