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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kids attend 2 different NESCAC schools. One kid is an (unrecruited) varsity athlete, the other does IM sports. Both have lots of other interests - for example, one is on the newspaper, the other works at the radio station. They both have athlete and non-athlete friends, but generally their closest friends are from their freshman dorm.

The biggest divide, as they see it, is caused by social-economic status. There are kids from very wealthy families who wear designer clothes, go out to eat all the time and go on fancy vacations, and then there are kids on 100% financial aid who can't even afford to go home for Thanksgiving. My kids are in-between and have friends in both groups, but the divide can make it hard to bring everyone together.[/quote]

This was similar to my experience at Williams. My team actually facilitated a lot of socioeconomic mixing but I ran xc/track and it’s not a class-exclusive sport like squash or tennis where there was hardly any socioeconomic diversity. I will say that I really did not see designer clothes often. I did have the experience of borrowing a friend’s dress for a dance and someone who I didn’t know said to me as I was leaving the bathroom “that’s from last season” which was obviously intended to be a dig. At the time the dress was so much nicer than anything I owned and the idea of only wearing a dress for one season was absurd (still is), so the comment just rolled off my back.

The socioeconomic stuff is a thing on every campus but there are not a lot of ways you can spend money in Williamstown so I never spent money on alcohol beyond team dues ($40 a season for drinkers and $30 for non drinkers) and I ate out like once or twice a semester - not often. I wanted to add about teams that it’s hard too if you walk away from your sport junior or senior year due to injury or to spend more time on schoolwork or pursue other things as social life can revolve around the sports team especially if it’s multiple seasons like crew or running. But that would probably be true at any college.

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