<p>How do roomates handle a huge disparity in family incomes? My S has a large scholarship to attend an Ivy, one of his suitemates comes from a VERY wealthy family (Rich & Famous profile type). How do they handle joint purchases for the room? Going out?</p>
<p>You are assuming that the two of them will become really good friends and go out together. If they do, they will figure it out. If they don’t, then there will be no problem, as they will be doing their own thing. Based on what you wrote, there are more suitemates. This will have to be a group decision and they should respect the fact that your son cannot pay, as long as your S has the ability to say “Sorry, I can’t afford that.” Don’t look at this as a problem, but a life learning experience. Both boys will meet others with more or less money during their lives, so this is a good way for both to find out what the others are about.</p>
<p>This situation has some negative potential, but most of the time things work out fine. My friends in college included a group of 4 that essentially stayed together the whole four years. It included two kids who were pretty wealthy, one middle-class type, and one foreign student who didn’t have a penny. (They weren’t even best friends or anything – two of them were preppy partiers, the other two nose-to-the-grindstone engineers, one Jewish and one evangelical Christian. They just figured out how to get along with each other and never wanted to mess with it.) Everyone just understood that the one kid was not going to contribute much money to anything, and they were fine with that.</p>
<p>Which Ivy?</p>
<p>I ask because I think that income disparity is likely to be more of an issue in big cities, where there are recreational activities in the city that some people can afford and others can’t.</p>
<p>I went (long ago) to Cornell, an Ivy that’s not in a city, and income disparity wasn’t a huge issue. People just have to be sensitive to the differences, and I think most of them were. A lot of the things we did for fun, such as going to movies screened on campus, were cheap anyway, and practically everyone could afford them. </p>
<p>It helps if people are open about their financial limitations. For example, when sorority rush time arrived, there were several people who said straight out, “I’m not going to rush because I’m looking for the cheapest living arrangement I can find for next year, and sororities aren’t it.” Other kids will understand this sort of situation, but they have to be told about it.</p>
<p>Usually guys don’t decorate their rooms together, or decorate at all. The guy with funds will bring everything he wants. The reality is that he probably went to a prep school and will have a dozen friends from there along with family friends, kids of friends his dad went to school with if he’s a legacy, etc. If he and your son have a lot in common they’ll become friends. Otherwise just because they are roomates is not likely to make them hang out together in the way kids do when they don’t already have a strong circle at the school.</p>