It was, therefore, something of a relief to come to Princeton. This relief might seem misplaced; after all, most of us remember reading a characterization of the typical Princeton student: "rich white kid." Certainly there are rich students on campus, but the way Princeton students discuss income has consistently struck me as unusual. At Princeton, being less wealthy than the rest of your class almost seems to be something to boast about. For example, I own a pair of particularly pretty multi-colored shoes. In Bombay, I may have felt compelled to weave a wonderfully elaborate lie concerning the origin of said shoes: "I got these from an old family friend in the business before they were even out in the stores!" At Princeton, I breezily explain that I ordered them from Target. The number of used books you managed to secure is a matter of pride. The cheaper your jeans are, the better. As a result, the anticipated Princeton J. Crew preppy style rarely makes an appearance on campus. With the sole exception of Lawnparties, I have not been surrounded by the expected "I roll out of bed looking perfect" students. Instead, jeans and a T-shirt seem to be the generally preferred campus uniform. You add a sweatshirt on the colder days, or shorts if you want to make fun of the weaklings who need layers. But that's it, and perhaps that's a statement in itself: Few display their wealth. Rather, students make an attempt to look like average college students, even if they aren't. It seems that it's cooler to be average and even grungy than it is to be flashy and ostentatious. In a lot of ways, this attitude is refreshing. It creates an atmosphere where people are more comfortable about sharing where they're coming from. It grants us all a degree of acceptance that we may not have had the privilege of having before. It gives us the extra 15 minutes of sleep-in time that, in India, would be used picking the perfect outfit, accessorizing it suitably and spraying expensive perfume.
Maybe part of the reason that India and Princeton are so different in this respect is that poverty doesn't mean the same thing at Princeton as it does in India. To be "poor" in India is to have no home, no food and no water, trying to earn a living by driving one of who knows how many taxi cabs. Princeton's extreme is not India's extreme. There's less benefit and self-worth to be derived from emphasizing a relatively imperceptible difference than there is in parading an enormous one.
Yet even if wealth does not influence your social status or your reputation at Princeton, it can still influence how happy you are here. If we pretend that income disparities don't matter, we reduce our ability to tackle them as a real problem. The Committee on Background and Opportunity (COMBO) survey clearly indicates that there is still a correlation between our relative wealth and how happy we are on Princeton's campus, particularly with regard to the eating clubs. To say that correlation can be erased is unrealistic. But it could be minimized if we stopped pretending that we are all only slight variations of the quintessential college student.
If we all accept that differences do exist and do matter, perhaps the administration will feel compelled to intervene more on behalf of those who really need the intervention and tackle problems like those expressed in the COMBO survey. Thus, we need to decide how to balance the desire to regard all students equally and the need to differentiate between them a little. It's a difficult line to draw, and having been here for only two months, I haven't the slightest intention of drawing it. But for me, the novelty of this new perspective on income will take a long time to wear off: the novelty of being the subject of a conversation because of what I said in my sociology precept and not because of the origin of the tacky orange shoes I was wearing while I said it.
Camille Framroze is a freshman from Bombay, India. She can be reached at framroze@princeton.edu.
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