Story by Rachel Abbey | Photos by Samantha Rainwater

Amanda Chaffin is looking for a roommate for next year. Applications for rooms in residence halls have already begun, so Chaffin thought she’d sign up now and find someone to live with later.

But most of her friends already made plans to live in off-campus apartments or houses, and Chaffin can’t find someone to share the dorm with her.
A friend suggests Chaffin pay for a single room, rather than live with a stranger.

“I can’t afford that,” Chaffin replies.

Her friend shrugs it off. “Just ask your mom to pay,” he says.

“I can’t,” she continues, to his confusion.

“Why not?”

“I live in a trailer, and my mom’s on welfare,” Chaffin explains.

Her friend grew quiet, looking shocked, says Chaffin, a sophomore music education major at Miami University in Oxford.

Most students at Miami — a college that made The Princeton Review’s top 20 list of schools lacking interaction between races and classes — don’t realize her background is so different from theirs.

Chaffin walks into the tiled cafeteria and examines the choices listed on signs hanging from wrought iron, reminiscent of an old-fashioned deli. The light streaming from the skylights and warm hanging lamps is soft and flattering to the numerous dining areas filled with plush booths, diner stools and wooden tables. “Just walking in here, you can tell how much money everyone has,” Chaffin says. Most students are used to borrowing Dad’s credit card or Mom’s car, but Chaffin grew up on welfare, moving from place to place since the age of 8.

Chaffin is not the only student who has gone to college and been exposed to an unfamiliar social class. The college years are often the only time in a person’s life when he or she experiences extreme differences in culture and class, whether it’s going to a rich private school or attending a working-class university.

These kinds of situations actually can be beneficial to students, says Sara S. Lee, an assistant sociology professor at Kent State. “People who belong to different classes can live their entire lives without coming in contact with a different social background.” Elementary education is divided primarily by neighborhoods, she explains, which tend to be made of people from the same class, race or ethnicity. But college usually offers a more diverse spread of people than the real world. It’s a prime time for students to examine different perspectives and share their own.

“The classroom, I think, is really an opportunity for those kinds of cross-class interactions to take place,” Lee says. She encourages the students in her Inequality in Society and Race and Ethnic Studies classes to take advantage of the college experience. Nowhere else are people so diverse in their backgrounds, Lee says.