My social circle (I don’t mean neighborhoods I walk through, I mean people I am friends with and get together with intentionally) is extremely varied in terms of SES. I’ve lived all over the world and have BEEN at several different levels of wealth and class myself as well.
There’s a set of friends I have in my small town who I know through my kids…more than half of them middle to upper middle class and mainly somewhere around my age though there are several exceptions I can think of. Mostly white, but not all. I have a close friend on Medicaid and a close friend in a McMansion with a beautiful boat. No one I know cares (if they did they wouldn’t be the kind of people I’d hang out with anyway).
There’s a large set of friends I camp with a few times a year, with a band. That one is all over the place in terms of SES, from literally homeless to upper class as in private jet. Friends from my childhood that I still spend time with when I am in NY…again, all over the map from quite poor to quite wealthy, because I grew up in a poor mostly black area but attended a private school on scholarship (also did the visit friends’ summer houses thing as cobrat did), and in between commuted to a school in a more diverse area. I have a set of friends in an island country that I visit 1-2x a year over the past 30 years…also everything from dirt poor to very wealthy, and from many different countries as well.
I suppose it’s possible I could have led the kind of sheltered life that exposed me only to people of my class. My kids might have been like that growing up here (some of their friends are that sheltered), had we not taken them everywhere we possibly could and spent significant time in the city their dad and I are from.
As it stands, I am very comfortable with people from all classes and races, and i have no trouble making connections with people that I like, and getting to the point that we contact each other and get together intentionally, and more, sometimes.
I think my kids have been and will be just fine in a college with a diverse set of students to hang with.