Extracurricular class

A Yale student glimpses behind the ivy-covered myth that all students are equal.

By Simon Rodberg

Aug 20, 1999 | The Yale Club of New York, which literally overshadows Grand Central Station with 18 floors of hotel rooms, restaurants and a spa, hosts a happy hour every Thursday night of summer for current students and recent alumni. Half the women wear black for work and the other half for going out after happy hour ends. They greet dimly remembered graduates and former roommates, circle the room three times and never quite sit down. They flush with exultation at the sense that the ruling class exists and they are it.

In three weeks, when my senior year at Yale begins, I will sit across from some of these women in the dining hall as we push fried scrod around our plates and wipe our fingers on our jeans, and nothing will ever be the same.

The Yale Club uses these nights as a come-on for prospective members, a meet-and-greet teach-in on looking comfortable in a suit and tie. The happy hours are a good place to see a lot of people and a bad place to have a conversation with one. They frighten me: I see intimations everywhere of the divides that college so successfully hides and the real world so inexorably instills.

You can tell summer salaries by the relative levels of bravado in the clot by the entrance. The track star working in information technology for J.P. Morgan pulls rank over the intern at Bloomberg News, while the silent girl from my environmental studies section now pronounces the name of her law firm with emphasis. You can watch who drinks water and fills up on the free chicken wings and who buys a round, who makes arrangements to meet for lunch in midtown and who sits in the corner with her friend from high school and leaves two hours before last call. You can watch money, power and prestige begin to work their magic.

You can't see any of this at school, where distinguishing the executives' sons and university brats from the legal secretary's daughter is just as difficult as predicting which of the English majors will go on to a Ph.D. and which will end up with an M.B.A. With few exceptions, we wear the same clothes, go to the same parties, eat the same dining-hall food and live down the hall in the same dorms. Those who have money don't have a lot of opportunity to spend it, and those who don't can hide their want. The members of Student Coalition for Diversity are just as likely to be poor, middle-income or rich as those enrolled in the upper-level economics seminar.

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