And yes, Kipling saw much, and, if I think about it, he could easily have written “White Man’s Burden” to Wendy Kopp – I think I blogged that a month ago.

Flavia, love the idea of the 1-bathroom society. Totally agree that the lower-class students at elite schools are busily trying to blend, (I grew up with two bathrooms but also sometimes gov’t cheese and food stamps, more detail on that here.)

Ira, if we are arguing in favor of a transformative education and human interaction, then the statistics don’t matter. The stories are what count, and every person that exits with a story like Flavia’s is a victory.

Colleges have been doing a lot to help minority/international students adjust for a long time. Expanding those things on a socio-economic basis would be a first easy step, and flow naturally from the changes in affirmative action policies.

Anyway, yes, colonialism – be it GWB’s type or Hillary Clinton’s type – is my complaint. Deresiewicz didn’t tackle that at all. I’m not sure many Ivy grads are capable of seeing that.

As for the stories of poor roommates. Yes, they exist. Just as rich kids show up at “State U.” But the stats say they are rare. And even rarer are those “working class” kids. (It is more likely that you will get into Harvard if your family is below the poverty line than if your family earns between the poverty line and $40,000 a year).

But Flavia’s points are really worth looking at – what are the costs and benefits of the homogeneous campus culture? – is there a way to help those “non-typical” students adjust without becoming even more colonially abusive?

But these are not thing you’d have known to look at them, and Deresiewicz also has a point when he talks about the pressure for normalcy — everyone tries to conform, more or less, to the aesthetic of their campus (which may be more preppy or more artsy or whatever, depending on where they are), and everyone inculcates the same values about work, play, study abroad, etc.

Potentially, that’s one of the great things about these kinds of schools, the access that students (ALL students) get to experiences unlike their own. As someone more or less in the middle, socioeconically speaking (adequate but not great public high school out west; on financial aid and work-study), it was really eye-opening having one roommate who worked two campus jobs and one who ordered any old thing she wanted from the J. Crew catalogue (and having all three of us become really close friends).

BUT. I’m not so sure that most schools do a good enough job helping students from less-affluent backgrounds adjust, in the early stages — that’s the problem with the pressure for normalcy. Students from such backgrounds — and heck, even from mine; I felt culturally and intellectually out of step for a while — can feel like they’re the weirdos, and it’s their job to fit in and catch up; at least at my institution I didn’t see a lot of resources geared toward easing that adjustment period.

(Well, okay: another friend did start, freelance, what he referred to as “the 1 bathroom society,” open to kids who had grown up in households with only one bathroom. That was his dividing line between lower-income and middle-class.)

My far-too-implicit point, though, was that counting notable graduates is a stupid way to argue these issues.

I’m sure that class segregation is very extreme in elite colleges and becoming more so. But that is a systemic issue, entrenched across the US, and elite colleges are consciously working against it. They may be failing, but at least they are enforcing an apparent egalitarianism on campus, while less elite institutions offer cheaper classes if you take them during off peak hours, and let you buy your way into the single-room dorm while poor kids are living in triples in the unrenovated houses. Those schools may have more poor kids statistically, but do you think there is much cross-class intermingling there?

My elite SLAC took kids from affluent feeder schools in the rich suburbs of New Jersey, and assigned them to work-study jobs in the dining hall, serving pasta under the supervision of uneducated cafeteria workers.

But – I do not think you will meet many of the children of America’s working class at elite colleges of any kind. The “working class” – that second quartile of the American economic structure (20,000-35,000 annual family income) rarely attend four year colleges, and when they do, almost invariably go to “second tier” state universities. Most attend school systems where no Guidance Counselor has ever seen an elite college application. Even in my son’s “college prep” charter high school, the only institutions applied to east of the Appalachians in the four years he was there were Ithaca (where my son applied, was accepted, and refused to go after visiting because he said, “everyone looks and sounds exactly the same”) and one young woman who attended the Naval Academy.

And most evidence I’ve read suggests that elite schools have gotten far more elite economically over the last 20 years, not less.

And – Wendy Kopp? I would view her as the definition of what Deresiewicz is discussing. Elite colonialism which could have come right out of a 19th Century English boarding school is hardly empathy. Wendy Kopp pads the resumes of rich kids while offering poor kids a revolving door of untrained and inexperienced teachers. And she, and her Ivy friends, view this as a positive. Just as I was saying, an inability to observe.