Imogen wrote:I ended up at Vassar (talk about upper-middle class/upper class white!) for college . . .
I can't imagine. I don't think I'd last there a week.
It wasn't so bad, but it was definitely a culture shock. My younger cousin is there now, and she's had it ROUGH (she grew up in Little Rock in a predominately black area).
I will say, I am super glad Vassar does need-based aid because it was the only reason I could go there. And considering my great-grandmother was an illiterate slave when Vassar first opened, it's pretty cool how far my family has come. But man...white central.
Vassar is very much the type of school my high school strongly pressured you to go to. BYU is neither small, nor liberal-arts, nor five figures a year in tuition! (Thank goodness for merit-based scholarships, on both levels. And I definitely never considered the white privilege I have; it was unremarkable to me that all my great-grandmothers graduated high school and were literate. They were born in the twentieth century, though. But still. That's quite a story, Imogen.)