The one thing that shocked me about Harvard
Something that surprised me about Harvard was how wealthy everyone was. Most of the time, low-income students simply don’t have the resources to get into a school like Harvard. Harvard and other top universities are overwhelmingly filled with students from wealthy backgrounds. This is due to the fact that grades and test scores correlate with wealth, and also due to the fact that these schools employ legacy policies that favor the children of alumni.
I was prepared to meet a lot of rich people at Harvard, but what really surprised me was how everyone was rich. When winter arrived, I noticed a lot of people wore Canada Goose jackets. It seemed like every single person at the school owned one of those parkas. And they did look really nice and warm. I wanted to fit in, so I went online and tried to buy one. That’s when I realized that they cost $800-$1,000. I was shocked. I could not imagine having that much money to spend on a jacket. That was the price of a MacBook, for crying out loud! Or an international vacation. I could think a million things that I could spend that money on.
And yet, every single person at my school was able to spend that considerable sum of money on a plain black parka. Yes, they’re warm, but they’re not that warm. It’s Boston, not the Arctic Circle. I have a $30 parka from Primark that gets the job done. I heard so many stories from people about how they lost their Canada Goose jacket at a frat party. This would happen basically every weekend. But they didn’t even really seem to care. They cared more about the fact that their university ID was in the pocket, and they were annoyed about having to go get a new ID card printed. They didn’t even seem to care that they lost an $800 jacket. That really shocked me.
And people are really not aware of how wealthy they are. I’d meet students who lived off-campus in beautiful and expensive apartments in Boston, and they’d assure me that they weren’t rich. I’d meet people who would talk about being “broke” or coming from a “middle-class family” or they’d talk disparagingly about “all the rich kids” at Harvard, but then later I’d find out that their father is the CEO of a major company, or they own a yacht, or they have a vacation home in France. I’d meet people who would say utterly absurd and out-of-touch things like, “I never realized that families ‘summer’ in the same place every year. My family goes to Europe and explores new countries in the summer. Isn’t that more normal?” I was so shocked. My family never “summered” anywhere. Our summers were spent at home, and I usually went to summer school or worked.
The reality is that a lot of people at prestigious schools like Harvard are extremely out-of-touch with the economic reality of the world, and they think that having a yearly income of $100,000 makes them “middle-class.” It took a lot of getting used to. Truth be told, I never really got used to it. People don’t go out of their way to make you feel bad for being low-income, but you just find yourself excluded from a lot of activities. For example, this spring break a bunch of my friends were going to Cancun. They told me that they spent $1,000 on the trip. I simply wouldn’t be able to afford to go on a trip like that. And it’s also little things, like the ubiquity of Canada Goose jackets and Vineyard Vines and J. Crew and Lilly Pulitzer and Cartier bracelets and all of these extremely expensive clothes and jewelry that people wear with such casual indifference that you can’t help but feel a little uncomfortable and a little excluded.
Nian is a content creator @Mascot. She recently graduated from Harvard College.
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