By Marcus Ribeiro
One’s relations with their friends have a large bearing on our perception of wealth. Since no one has the same experience with wealth, sharing experiences with peers can help create a better understanding of the wealth stigma and the implications of one’s privilege. After interviewing Bowdoin students, many thought that it was in these unforced peer conversations that they learned the most about wealth at Bowdoin.
To understand why these wealth conversations tend to be more impactful at Bowdoin than other times in students’ lives, let us put the socioeconomic variance at Bowdoin into perspective. According to Bowdoin, for the 2019-20 academic year, 48.6% of students were on financial aid, a similar breakdown to whether Bowdoin students’ high school was public or private. Moreover, on average, $51,107, or 69% of Bowdoin’s cost of attendance, was covered for students on financial aid. With one half of campus paying 3/10 as much as the other half, on average, the gap in socioeconomic status and experience is wide, withholding discussion about outliers on each end. Furthermore, in the fall of 2019, Bowdoin reported that 6.6% of students residing on campus were international students. International students come from economies that run in stark contrast to the U.S., and implications of being at different socioeconomic levels there can be very different than in the U.S. This will be a learning experience for these students, but also American students, as they can reflect on their hometowns’ societal differences, such as their varying wealth symbols or related cultural customs.
Is our campus diverse and how does this socioeconomic breakdown compare to students’ high school experience? As one upper-middle-class student put it, “I think [Bowdoin does] try to do a good job of recruiting people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. But, it’s not a complete range. You have a clump here and a clump there.” Similarly, another more affluent student mentioned that “based off of the people I’ve met this year, I think that campus is socioeconomically diverse.” However, when asking students who were not part of the upper-middle-class, answers differed. In particular, one student had difficulty answering this question: “Yeah, for sure. Well, yeah, I don’t know. It is, it is. I don’t, I just don’t know really, I guess you have to define diverse.” Her initial instinct was affirmative, but she quickly doubted herself. She was not sure if she could comment on the whole of campus as her friend group may be less representative, going on to state that “I think that the people that I’ve surrounded myself with happened to not be for the most part people whose families make more money and so, I thought that there are more [people of my socioeconomic class] than there actually are.” This leads us to a larger problem in general that it is hard for one student to examine the socioeconomic diversity on campus as students tend to subconsciously clump together based on class: “I think people sort of self-segregate pretty easily on campus. I definitely think that coming from a certain economic background might influence the people that you relate to and make it harder to talk to people of different backgrounds.” This phenomenon of students’ self-segregating was commonly referenced in students’ answers, but that does not make up all friend groups on campus.
Conversations between those of varying levels of wealth are at times frustrating and harder to fashion. One student mentioned “I can talk to my friends, from pretty much the same economic background as me, about stuff like this from home. But, it’s hard sometimes for me to feel comfortable talking about it with people from the same background because I don’t want to be speaking for other people.” People fear potentially offending others due to ignorance, which in turn limits the number of interactions these people have, and their mutual understandings of each other. Also, since students vary in resources, certain students’ privilege casts very different realities off-campus for them: “During spring break, for some of my friends it would be really easy to just hop on a plane and go to the Bahamas but for other people in our friend group, it is not really possible.” Having conversations like these would be uncomfortable and are easily avoided in diverse groups.
Bowdoin’s campus perhaps might not provide as much opportunity for students of various socioeconomic classes to gather. One example of a safe space on campus that arguably functions as a cosmopolitan canopy is first-year dorms. As one affluent student on campus put it, “My group I feel is pretty diverse, socially and economically. And I feel like we all kind of know where we sit, but we haven’t expressed ‘this is what my parents make’ but we all have an idea just because we’ve spent so much time together now.” In safe spaces like these, the conversation about wealth can flow more naturally: “people were afraid to bring it up and say ‘hey, we should talk about the fact that this is happening.’ My [less affluent] floormate and some other people were very willing to call people out and be like, ‘yo, do you understand that?’” Despite the diverse combination of students allowed for in first-year dorms, Bowdoin’s campus lacks many other spaces that intentionally congregate students of different socioeconomic classes that halt self-segregation.
Contrastingly, conversations about wealth between those of the same socioeconomic class seem to be less worrisome, but these conversations feel less necessary to discuss between more affluent members of campus. An upper-middle-class student remarked that “I’ve never been in a situation at Bowdoin with a group of people from the same socioeconomic class, but I would say that it makes it easier [to talk about wealth]. This is something my cousins and I often talk about. We’re so lucky.” With her cousins, she can talk about this issue as she relates more with them as they come from a unique perspective of being wealthy first-generation students, but many other wealthy members on campus may have vastly different experiences with wealth. It seems as if on campus, this conversation only comes up when it poses a problem for people, affecting those that are less affluent. A student alluded to this in their interview, explaining that “I didn’t hear [conversations about wealth] back at home, but I hear it from a lot of different students at Bowdoin.” Going from an environment with people of similar economic privilege to Bowdoin, her friend group also has similar economic privilege but talks much more about wealth as they have less relative to other parts of campus.
Although campus could increase understanding of wealth differences, hubs like first-year dorms and interactions fostered between people of different classes look to further spread this conversation. As one upper-middle-class student stated, “I think generally people were really open to talk about [wealth]. My floor got along great and I love them.” Once the initial topic is breached, many students are willing to discuss this issue and gain understanding. This makes me hopeful for a future of increased understanding and a greater meshing of people from all walks of life on our campus.