Jason Scott had just finished his first year at Stanford and had nowhere to live.

Financial aid didn't cover the dorms for the summer. He had $50 in his wallet, and so until paychecks arrived from his on-campus summer jobs, he needed to be resourceful.

For two weeks, he lived in his Jeep parked around Stanford's grassy Oval, with its grand view of the campus' sandstone arcades. He showered in the gym. He ate peanut butter sandwiches.

During the day, he worked in the registrar's office microfilming Stanford students' applications, the contents of which justified a nagging sense that most of his classmates came from a different world. Some referenced exotic travel, unusual sports such as water polo, and boarding schools with names like Phillips Exeter Academy and St. Paul's School.

"Who are these people?" he remembers asking himself.

Stanford says it admits the brightest students regardless of their ability to pay. Yet only 12 percent of Stanford's 6,759 undergraduates receive Pell Grants, a yardstick used to measure how many low-income students such as Scott are enrolled. The number hasn't budged despite Stanford's generous financial aid incentives in recent years. At UC Berkeley, meanwhile, 31 percent of undergraduates get the federal grants that are typically awarded to students from families earning less than $40,000 a year.

Scott, now a senior, and his college friends who also grew up poor entered a new universe at Stanford. For the first time, they clearly understood the advantages of money - knowledge that shaped their Stanford experience.

As much as money matters, Scott said, it matters most before students ever try to enroll. Kids who grow up with money attend good high schools. They understand the importance of mastering the violin or excelling at soccer. They have SAT preparation and sometimes professional college application consultants. Those advantages help smooth the way at the most prestigious of the West Coast's major private universities.

"We struggled to get there and once we got there, it was a culture shock," said one of Scott's friends, Tanya Koshy, a recent Stanford graduate. "Once you get over the initial shock and accept the fact that you're different and come from a different background, you can propel yourself forward and nothing can hold you back."

Frugal living

Almost everything in Scott's dorm room can fit into his one red suitcase. His single wall decoration is a birthday poster his dorm mates made that hangs above a desk with a wooden chair. All of this contrasts with his roommate's things: a black leather office chair, a poster depicting a mansion and luxury cars that reads "Justification for Higher Education," an enormous flat-screen TV.

Scott has always lived frugally. Born in Guyana, he moved to the United States with his older sister at age 11 to be with his remarried father, who is in the military. The family eventually settled in Junction City, Kan., where the median income is $30,084. Scott qualified for the gifted program at his high school and took the three Advanced Placement courses offered. He scored 1,320 out of 1,600 on the SAT. Once at Stanford, he realized he was behind in subjects like math despite his hard work in high school. His dream of someday becoming a Rhodes Scholar began to vanish.

He gravitated toward those with similar backgrounds, forming a tight-knit group of five close friends. They laughed together in disbelief at some of what they heard - talk of a weight-loss camp in Brazil where someone planned to tone her abs, discussion about buying Prada handbags.

The culture shock took other forms. Once, Scott tried to join a student-run program teaching children in Africa for a summer, but it cost $3,000. A classmate advised him to persuade his parents to pay for it. "I had to explain that I had to pay for stuff on my own and that I actually have to work," he recalled saying.

Bianca Argueza, who lives next door to Scott in the dorms, understands. Her father died when she was 9 and her mother struggled to support six children. She has at times felt isolated at Stanford.

"When I tell someone that I have trouble paying for a dorm trip that costs $5, they say, 'Well, it's only five dollars. It's not that much.' ... I don't think people really understand just how little a family who lives on $19,000 can afford."

Stanford and other elite universities in the last couple of years have launched highly publicized financial aid initiatives as their endowments have ballooned, with Stanford's now at $17.1 billion. Last month, Stanford drastically reduced its $47,200 annual price tag, which includes tuition plus room and board, for middle-class students whose families make $100,000 or less.

University officials have said they want more economic diversity. And yet one measure of that - Pell Grant numbers - has remained steady at Stanford.

Admissions officers say the problem is that low-income students don't understand how little the university charges them, so they don't apply. Scott, for instance, has had to pay roughly $2,500 a year, which he did by working and taking out a small loan. The university covered the remaining $44,700.

If Stanford wants more low-income kids, some education observers counter, it needs to change its admissions criteria and consider the grades, test scores and experiences of poor students differently, taking into account their lack of resources. Dean of Admissions Rick Shaw says the university considers each applicant in context and doesn't compare the accomplishments of a student at a poor school to one educated at prep school. Still, he said, "It's a very, very competitive process.

"Certainly there are going to be kids who have advantages on the basis of where they go to school or their family."

Dealing with the disconnect

Sociology drew Scott's interest, in part as a way of understanding the disconnect he felt as a low-income student at Stanford.

Despite his own admission to Stanford, he believes most students with his background don't have a chance of going to an elite university.

That's one reason he took a job last year at College Track in East Palo Alto, an after-school program aimed at getting low-income students into college. There's tutoring, a music studio, a computer room and intensive guidance on the college application process.

At the same time, he organized his own summer service-abroad program using the College Track model with a $7,000 grant from the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. He returned to his native Guyana and taught kids at a children's shelter to use computers, type and read.

He's grateful to the university - yet after four years, he still feels as if he's in a dream from which he might wake up.

Next fall, he plans to pursue sociology and will enter the Ph.D. program at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He chose that school in part because it has an airfield nearby. Becoming a pilot has been a long-held goal, one he mentioned on his Stanford application. He envisions teaching sociology and pilot training at a small college.

His friend Koshy, who doesn't quite get the pilot/sociologist thing, theorizes Scott is creating multiple safety nets because he knows what it's like to have so little.

Scott says he picked Notre Dame, with its Midwestern location, for another reason: He hopes he won't feel as out of place as he does at Stanford, that the socio-economic differences won't be as stark.