As of 2017, Colorado College holds the second largest portion of students from the top 1% of the income scale in the country. 24% of the student body came from families within the top 1%, while only 10% came from families in the bottom 60% of Americans. I come from that bottom 60% margin, and I have always found these ratios fascinating. In terms of income representation, our school is almost inverted. One would assume more class tension and conflict, yet there is very little actively expressed on campus.
Despite coming from the statistically most disadvantaged portion of the school’s population, I have, through unique circumstances, extracurriculars and side quests, accumulated a very diverse cast of characters whom I call my friends. Through a culmination of their experiences in varying income classes and social groups on campus, as well as mine in Greek life and affinity spaces, I have compiled a list of phenomena that arise when so many young adults of affluence are so heavily concentrated in one space.
The title of this article may feel ironic or even paradoxical. That’s how I felt when writing and thinking about this with my friends on campus of varying backgrounds. Concerning wealth, there are so many contradictions, pluralities and complexities to one college experience. I’ve done my best to break it down into five succinct points, illustrating the main areas where the abundance of wealth at our school creates contradictory social dynamics.
- There will always be more powerful people than you here.
This is the first and foremost point that makes way for a level of social equity within the school. Anyone who feels superior, in material wealth, power or prestige, will be quickly humbled in an environment such as this. There will always be bigger fish in this small pond, no matter what.
- The abundance of wealth, in combination with counterculture, makes wealth inherently meaningless.
Liberal arts schools have always had a spirit of counterculture, dating back earlier than the hippies of the original countercultural movement. If everyone at a liberal arts school is wealthy, wealth signifiers become the status quo and the “class struggle” becomes countercultural.
This is why we see an increase in working-class fashion among students at our school, such as hunting gear, camouflage and cowboy boots. In men, there seems to be a fascination with hardware, handiwork and tools, in contrast to the darker alternative fashion styles typically associated with leftist subcultures. In women, this expresses itself in a “reclamation” of homemaker aesthetics and activities. Sourdough bread making, sewing, mending, pilates-mom culture (through CorePower workouts) and “traditionalism” are upheld in rebellion to girl-boss corporate culture. All of these things directly replicate the functional traditions of the working class, but are used as wealth signifiers because they are performed as leisure.
- Public attitudes about elite classes as well as nepotism in the 2020s make this an unsafe sociopolitical moment for the wealthy.
The heavy fire from the media, political extremism and growing economic instability of the modern day are gradually creating a more dangerous environment for the wealthy, even more so for the extremely wealthy. For example, Brian Thompson, the former CEO of United Healthcare; Jeffrey Epstein; Donald Trump; the Clintons; Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift.
There is an underlying awareness of this by those who hold this mass wealth and their families. This triggers a protectiveness that is correlated with parenting styles within these income levels, but not always. This leads to the wealthiest students at our school often hiding their wealth from their peers.
- Social media and LinkedIn makes exclusive experiences less exclusive, special moments less special.
Increased competition, Dopamine addictions, extreme success and luxury.
Let’s say you went to Utah for a block break. Well, someone else went to Patagonia.
You went to Thailand? Cool, someone else went to Japan and met the imperial family.
You got a job at Vanguard? Someone else got a job at BlackRock.
It is impossible to feel special when everyone has access to similar grandiose experiences and opportunities. This makes social media at schools like this, especially for students within the 1%, an emotional pressure cooker.
- FAFSA as an economic equalizer.
CC is not need blind, requiring a certain percentage of the school to pay full tuition in order to maintain its functions. Not everyone within the bottom 60% who applies and has the credentials to be accepted will ultimately get into the school.
Financial aid has a bit more nuance, but for the most part, it sorts students into those who can pay the nearly six figure tuition and those who cannot. The haves and the have-nots. The issues with sorting students into two distinct income brackets in this way are two-fold.
In one, differences between those in the ingroup are flattened. For instance, I am within what would be considered an upper-middle-class tax bracket within my suburban city of Kansas. Yet within the context of Colorado College, living in a small, three bedroom house in the midwest definitively makes me one of the poorest students.
In contrast to friends who pay for their own flights or drive home and do not receive allowances but often send money home to their parents, I feel very privileged. No matter how different our circumstances are from the “haves” of the school, we are perceived as one and the same.
On the other side of the coin, I have friends who can afford full tuition. Some whose parents make 300k or 400k a year, others whose family income is upwards of 50 million annually. From my perspective as a Bridge mentee, the difference in class between these two brackets was indistinguishable. Within the ingroup, differences are flattened.
Between the haves and have-nots, differences are exacerbated. Everyone’s perception is altered, and everyone else becomes either extremely wealthy or devastatingly poor. Often at this school, we may find more lifestyle similarities between the haves and have-nots, especially when factoring in scholar programs such as the Bridge Program that do not factor in economic disparities at all.
This exacerbation makes the middle class, or at least students’ perception of it, ambiguous. If no one is middle class, everyone feels as though they are.
This article is not meant to discredit or minimize the issues the bottom 60% face at a school tailored for the 1%, or even to claim economic disparities don’t have negative outcomes. Block breaks and hobbies at Colorado College have massive barriers to entry, and the cultures that surround these activities are often exclusive. The Block Plan is unsuitable for a student with a working schedule, even though half of the departments running the school depend on student labor to operate. There’s a certain number of students the school needs to be employed for the college to function, similarly to the number they need to pay full tuition. While some are exploited for their familial wealth and prestige, others are directly exploited by the college for their labor —the only thing we have to offer.
I write this article to say that the structure of wealth in our country and the social dynamics it produces are as unhealthy for the powerful as they are for the disadvantaged. Just as racism ultimately has negative effects on white Americans and the patriarchy negatively impacts men, the wealth-hoarding culture of the United States will ultimately negatively impact the elite. These are just the effects I have seen with my own eyes, as a 21-year-old undergraduate student. I can’t imagine the negative impacts when you get to the actual top.
I do see how these phenomena negatively impact my friends of this economic class, but due to the consciousness I have about the needs of my own, I can only view these negative social outcomes for the powerful as measures of equality in general.
If you are a part of the 60% like me, I do not want you to worry about how you are perceived here. As I have written above, everyone has their own issues to worry about, and all forms of oppression come with a return-to-sender policy.