By Doevy Estimphile
Bowdoin is a liberal arts college with an endowment of $1.74 billion. The college has the resources to create an environment that tries to present an equal opportunity to get a quality education. Despite these resources, there are ways that low-income students can feel marginalized at any institution. Therefore, stepping into a space that rich white folks dominate can feel quite intimidating. The campus as a whole is hyper-aware of all the signs of wealth that surround them on campus.
For our final project in Theo Greene’s Intro to Sociology class, we interviewed a few students to see what items are associated with material wealth, and we got some interesting results. The Canada goose jacket was constantly brought up as a very prevalent sign of wealth on Bowdoin’s campus. Some interviewees were not familiar with the concept of the Canada Goose jacket representing wealth; a student stated that “I had never heard about Canada Goose jackets being a sign of wealth until I got here.”
These students also indicated other signs of wealth include L.L.Bean boots, fancy clothes like Lululemon, and Apple’s AirPods; “If someone is walking around with AirPods…. they’re rich.” One interviewee told a story about another student who was ashamed of their AirPods, mainly because of what connotations the little white Bluetooth devices carry; his feelings may be linked to his friends’ jokes, claiming that he “can’t hear them.” “He would always only have them in the room, and going outside, he just used the normal ones with the cord.” This friend noted that “if you see people with AirPods that’s one of the first things people can notice about you and then that can be their first impression about you.” Clearly, a student’s reputation can be impacted by the presence or lack of material wealth, but it seems like the presence of material wealth is more acutely focused on and criticized. When students thought about connotations associated with wealth, those tended to be leaning towards the negative aspects, like arrogance or lack of empathy. Thus, one interviewee says that when “hear[s] people say things that are sort of more markers of wealth, I just usually will end up [thinking], have I ever said something like that?”; witnessing or hearing markers of wealth compels this person and many others to look inward, to see if they are unknowingly flaunting in the same way.
According to our interviewees, another sign of wealth is the ownership of a MacBook; although, the fact that THRIVE gives low-income students MacBook’s distances it from the notion of wealth. One student claimed that “If I would have gone to a school like a state school or something, macs are a huge [wealth symbol]….but because THRIVE gives MacBook’s…it isn’t really a symbol anymore at Bowdoin specifically.” Besides material signs of wealth, Bowdoin students can also detect the wealth of others through how they act. “One time I was having a conversation about someone else who had an experience where their roommate had asked them if they could pay them to do their laundry and stuff…. What a crazy concept…it’s interesting how they just see the world in a completely different way.” “One of our friends… she ordered several pairs of the same shoe with different colors.” I, myself, have exuded privilege when I acted surprised when someone said they never played a sport before; “Yo, you’ve never played a sport before?” Her response was “not everyone gets the opportunity to play sports, Doevy.” In general, the most obvious giveaway that someone is of a high social class lies within their rhetoric during discussions about wealth. The wealthier people do not have a solid grasp on the all the obstacles a poor person has to deal with; “they just have no concept of what that means, or, you know, any specifics about the struggles that they can face getting winter clothing or textbooks, or anything about culture, differences, that sort of thing.”
One’s opinion on Clayton Rose’s decision to make the second semester pass/fail is another indicator of class; “because if you’re from a higher class, I’m so privileged that both of my parents are still working, and I don’t have to worry about not being able to feed myself.” We interviewed a student who had a parent who taught physics, who believed that “if you do work hard, you should be rewarded” when it comes to schoolwork during quarantine. As a counterargument, this student pointed out that “we kind of weren’t addressing the fact that there are other kids who are also working hard, but they’re working hard in different areas of their lives and can’t work hard. They can’t dedicate as much time to school as other people can.” A common theme of those we interviewed is that they wanted wealth and academic success to not be directly correlated. Thus, the more readily recognizable one-liners from the 1 percent, like “Oh, my daddy bought me this” or “You don’t know who you’re talking to?” seem to be more common outside of Bowdoin, as in each student’s respective high school. The stigma of the MacBook as a giveaway sign of wealth was ever-present for this one student: “[It would hurt] if I was the only person who didn’t have a laptop and everybody said, ‘oh, why don’t you have a laptop?’ You know, I think it’s more of an issue of overlooking and lack of sensitivity.”
The consensus about the signs of wealth at Bowdoin is that it can be quite easy to spot, partly because everyone looks so intently to find any indication of wealth. Since a college is essentially a group of intellectually curious individuals from various backgrounds and cultures, it is understandable.