<p>Bahaha, as someone not on scholarship or any financial aid, I assure you I am most certainly not “checkbook envy” at all. And I’m highly offended because that assertion is completely irrelevant in my opinion. I’m merely speaking from experience, as I’ve lived in a very affluent place my entire life and my peers - these “children of privilege” - most certainly took advantage of that fact and were in a word, “shallow”. Sure, there are kids who come from wealthy families who are humble and low key about it, but fact is, the bratty, selfish, materialistic rich kid stereotype does come from something real. It’s a little too idealistic to think that kids from wealthy families inherit the drive to accomplish something great. But I guess I’m just a pessimist and encountered too many spoiled kids in my life already. </p>
<p>I equated the cost of a school to being shallow because as much as we like to boast that USC has the biggest financial aid budget in the entire country and lots of awesome merit based scholarships, reality is, there are kids (i.e. parents) paying for the ENTIRE cost of USC. And let’s get real here, USC isn’t exactly the cheapest school around. There is a LOT of wealth here, I’m not going to drop names, but there is old money, new money, celebrities, sons/daughters of celebrities… And I’m not saying that these people are automatically shallow, my point is that kids who come from high income families have the tendency to be more shallow than kids of low income families, and you’re going to find these wealthy kids at an expensive private school, like USC. A public community college is bound to have a smaller percentage of shallow people, on the other hand. That was my point.</p>