I'd think just being at college would have given these people a chance to interact with people who are not just like them in all ways.
Definitely not. This was driven home at Michigan in particular, and not just that law school was filled with mostly similar people but that their undergrad experience included basically only interacting with people just like them, the same way they were doing at law school.
Even if they were exposed to people somewhat different, they didn't seem to realize it, especially when it came to class differences. They just automatically assumed I had the same background they did and couldn't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that I was their classmate and yet my parents weren't rich, they hadn't gone to college (hell, Dad didn't graduate from high school, though he later got his GED), that I'd worked through high school and university and the four years I took off between undergrad and law school, etc. They only saw what they expected to see and what they expected to see was people just like them. (A lot of this is passing as white and white privilege, of course.)
Not all of them were like that, but a lot. I'd go so far as to say the majority.
I actually think higher education makes things worse, in some ways, because they attend schools where they can isolate themselves and never experience any life but the life they already know.
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Definitely not. This was driven home at Michigan in particular, and not just that law school was filled with mostly similar people but that their undergrad experience included basically only interacting with people just like them, the same way they were doing at law school.
Even if they were exposed to people somewhat different, they didn't seem to realize it, especially when it came to class differences. They just automatically assumed I had the same background they did and couldn't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that I was their classmate and yet my parents weren't rich, they hadn't gone to college (hell, Dad didn't graduate from high school, though he later got his GED), that I'd worked through high school and university and the four years I took off between undergrad and law school, etc. They only saw what they expected to see and what they expected to see was people just like them. (A lot of this is passing as white and white privilege, of course.)
Not all of them were like that, but a lot. I'd go so far as to say the majority.
I actually think higher education makes things worse, in some ways, because they attend schools where they can isolate themselves and never experience any life but the life they already know.