Comment by gtani

One thing about some of those elite institutions, Columbia, Penn, Chicago, Yale, teh area south of UC-Berkeley, are that they find themselves in the middle of not well doing urban centers. You could call them ghettos. You have a lot of privileged kids who have their first contact with unprivileged or people who have fallen out of the middle class. Most of them choose to ignore it, but a few take notable action to improve the situation.