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"\"Economic culture shock.\" That's how KellyNoel Waldorf describes arriving at Duke freshman year. She couldn't believe that her classmates complained about the (perfectly fine, in her opinion) dining hall, instead opting to eat off-campus\u2014and off the expensive mandatory meal plan.\n\nBut it wasn't until this past fall that KellyNoel, now 21 and a senior, came clean about her low-income background and the effect it's had on her college experience. In an op-ed for her school newspaper, she wrote about being poor at a place where no one wants to talk about money, even though money is everywhere.\n\nThanks to KellyNoel's viral column and nationwide initiatives to get more low-income students into college (even the White House is on board), class has become a hot topic on campuses across the country. And at top schools where wealthy students are overrepresented, extreme privilege can start to feel like the norm.\n\nIt's not that elite colleges haven't been outspoken about their desire to enroll more students from poor families. But getting them to apply isn't so simple, says Ana Rowena McCullough, the co-founder and chair of Questbridge, a program that connects high-achieving low-income students with top schools: \"If you do some basic research and look at the sticker price of a highly-selective private college, the amount is oftentimes well beyond the annual income of students' families.\" These schools' high endowments give them the means to provide generous financial aid packages, but students sometimes need to be convinced. \"For a lot of them, it's the first time someone has said, 'You're smart enough to get into one of these top schools, and you have a chance,'\" says Grace Sun, Questbridge's manager of communications and external relations.\n\nMany low-income students are the first in their family to attend college, and they're also more likely to be racial and ethnic minorities and come from single-parent households or foster homes, says Chelsea Jones, a student support associate at I'm First, an online community for first-generation college students. Once they get in, these students have lower success rates for completing their degrees, prompting many schools to set up programs to help them get to graduation.\n\nI'm First has a profile page for each of its 175 partner colleges, listing specific resources at each school. Harvard, for example, has a student events fund that low-income students can use for tickets to campus events and performances that they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. The key though? Students have to be proactive enough to ask. \"It's not that low-income students always need more help than anyone else, it's just that they haven't been in this kind of environment before,\" says McCullough. \"Their more affluent peers just know that that's what you do: If you're stuck, you ask for help.\"\n\nDespite all the attention colleges pay to courting economic diversity, many students agree that discussing class is still taboo. \"What's funny about socioeconomic status is that you know your situation, but you don't necessarily know everybody else's,\" says Ilenna Jones, a 20-year-old junior at Dartmouth.\n\n\"Saying the words 'I can't afford it' is socially terrifying at a place like this,\" Scripps College senior Shane Zackery says of all the expenses\u2014like books and meals out\u2014that aren't included in financial aid packages. \"You either get this sympathy that isn't really genuine or you get complete apathy, where people don't understand why you can't just call your parents and tell them to put more money in your bank account.\"\n\nThen there are the status symbols. From expensive laptops to fancy jewelry, wealth is rarely discussed, but is always on display. When 20-year-old sophomore Lea Trusty started at Princeton, she couldn't believe how much her friends went shopping. While she couldn't drop cash at off-campus boutiques, she made it a priority to find a way to pay her eating club's $800 dues. Sydney Farmer, a freshman at NYU, raised her eyebrows when a classmate got sick with alcohol poisoning: \"An ambulance to take him to the hospital cost thousands of dollars, and he treated it like it would be no problem for his parents to cover that.\"\n\nStanford sophomore Tracy Yang worried that her peers would be bitter about her status. \"I knew people would be like, 'You got into college just because you're low-income. You get more help than I do,'\" she says, noting that her defensive attitude made it hard for her to relate to her classmates. \"I was so angry all the time because no one understood where I was coming from. I didn't get why my roommates didn't clean up after themselves or why they thought the world revolved around them.\" In time, she came to realize the underlying issue: \"I was really angry because I was internalizing my problems and wasn't allowing myself to express who I am.\"\n\nUltimately, some students are able to transform their class consciousness into positive actions. Many Questbridge scholarship winners take on leadership roles in the Quest Scholars Network and other socially-minded campus groups.\n\nTwo years ago, Erin Turner, now a 21-year-old senior at Northwestern, spoke out about her background in a video for a campus Tumblr. \"That was the first time I very publicly said that I was a low-income student,\" she says. \"That was probably one of the scariest moments of my life.\" This year, she started a Tumblr of her own to host similar class-related confessions from anonymous Northwestern students.\n\nAs Shane explains, being a low-income student at an elite school could have gone one of two ways: \"It could have made me feel like I didn't belong and that there wasn't a space for me, or I could have decided that it was up to me to create a space for myself. I didn't hide my differences. In fact, I embraced them.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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