Race and Class U.

I KIND OF feel like I’ve been dropped on Mars,” muses a lower-income student from rural South Dakota as she recounts her trek to the exclusive world of Amherst in Elizabeth Aries’s timely new book. I know the feeling. I felt it in 1998, when I arrived at the gates of Merton College, Oxford, where I’d come as a Rhodes Scholar after graduating from Oklahoma State University. Compared to the fourteen other students in my graduating high school class in rural Oklahoma, I wasn’t exactly poor, but my selection for the scholarship was unlikely enough that the Chronicle of Higher Education put my picture and the vaguely insulting headline “Look Who’s Winning the Rhodes” on its cover. As one of my best friends from those days, an Alabaman, recently remarked, “I think we were the only two Rhodes/Marshalls who moved to Oxford from a trailer.” The distance between such worlds, as Aries writes, goes “well beyond the miles.”