“To be honest, some very wealthy schools are awful, like Wash U, Notre Dame and NYU…”
And those schools aren’t located in Maine. Bowdoin is a tough sell to poor kids who aren’t from upper New England. Relative to St. Louis or Poughkeepsie, it’s more expensive and inconvenient to get back and forth. It’s possible that Bowdoin could be doing a lot more to attract Pell kids, but it’s not a fair comparison to a school that’s a 90-minute train ride to NYC, and food has nothing to do with it.