It’s also possible for students to not be obsessed with how much money the parents of other students make, or even aware. Instead it was my experience, that parents’ SES/occupation/income played a far lesser role in college relationships than high school due to a combination of the greater separation from parents, increased maturity, and being in a later stage in life.
For the most part, I didn’t know the SES status of the parents of kids I attended college with. The kids I spent time with didn’t talk about how wealthy their parents were, going on a ski trip to Switzerland, and so on. I also wasn’t in to fashion and had no idea which kids were wearing designer clothing and which kids were not, nor did I care. I rarely went off campus and had pay to play type situations that excluded students who could afford an expensive activity. Instead the things that we did talk about generally had little relation to parents’ income/SES, such as talking about how things were going with classes, who was dating/wanting to date who, a kid in the dorm who partied too hard and was in no condition to take his midterm, an activity on campus, etc.
After graduating, I learned that one of the kids in my dorm’s father was a near-CEO of a fortune 500 type company. While in college, he tended to hang out with other persons in the dorm that were in to partying like he was, rather than those whose parents were a particular SES. There was a similar pattern with cliques – kids who were in to partying often hung out with others who felt the same. Kids who were more focused on pre-med often hung out with others who felt the same. The cliques often centered on common interests, goals, activities, gender, or ethnicities.; not SES. On my team (crew), it was common for team members to hang out, but the only time SES was brought up was indirectly in relation to something unusual. For example, one kid on the team shared a standard sized room with a huge number of roommates (maybe 6… don’t recall exact number), which was in violation of the campus rules. This generated a good amount of discussion, but it focused on the huge number of roommates, rather than SES or assumptions about his parents being poor and having to same money on housing. I am not aware of him being segregated or excluded from any off team activities. Instead he was more popular than most on the team, probably due to his bright and outgoing personality.