In my experience talking with Stanford alums and just walking around the Stanford campus most people there appear to be already rich. It is not Berkeley, where regular people go.
I was never much of a school rivalry kind of person until one Big Game where the Stanford crowd marched by, chanting "one day you will work for us." Go Bears.
My thoughts exactly. This has caused some amount of cognitive dissonance because I know a significant number of people who are Stanford students and coming from a modest socio-economic background.
That being said there is definitely a lot of money hanging out around there. It'd be a hasty generalization to say that everyone at Stanford is part of that Silicon Valley Elite though.
UMIST was subsumed by the University of Manchester in 2004 which together brought them to a distant 5th in the UK rankings by research income. (Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL are the only UK institutions that can really claim to be world class, though all those lists tend to be rather anglo-centric.)
Engineering tends to attract a slightly more economically diverse intake than the arts, but UMIST's was still very skewed towards the offspring of the professional middle classes. I'm not surprised to hear that someone who did not share that background might have felt a little socially alienated.
Top 3 or 4 for Computing back in the 70's when my cousin went well supposedly back then there where only 5 or so Computing Degrees that where considered any good.
Its also based in Manchester and was where Baby was built you know one of the first computers :-)