And yet, as the bribery cases have made clear, the campus remains a place of pervasive wealth, where celebrity, money and status are still a part of daily life. This is the campus of choice for Dr. Dre, who boasted last month about his daughter being admitted on her own merit, without mentioning that he had donated millions for a school building named in his honor. Wealth is so closely associated with U.S.C. that when a recent “Saturday Night Live” skit spoofed the admissions scandal, it opened with a shot of U.S.C.’s central library.

On the sun-streaked campus, students said conversations focused on a mix of envy and judgment for those with more. Students of all backgrounds said they often silently worried that they were being judged by their peers — either for having too much or not enough.

Mr. Bentley was raised by a single mother in Menifee, a small working-class city about 80 miles east of Los Angeles. When he arrived on campus, he expected to feel comfortable quickly, but instead said he was “completely alienated” because he did not have enough money. Most of his friends now, he said, come from similar backgrounds, “lower middle class or just poor.”

Undoubtedly, there are benefits to attending a private university with a $5.5 billion endowment: gleaming new buildings, access to premier technology, smaller classes. And wealthy students are a fixture at elite colleges across the country — the challenges at U.S.C. are similar to issues faced by students at many top private universities.

“We know when low-income students get to these elite schools, they have a large problem with fit,” said Jessica Thompson, the director of policy and planning at the Institute for College Access & Success. “These schools have built reputations in the world that they are operating to erase class lines, but they are actually sort of hardening the types of inequity they claim to eliminate.”

But whether because of the students it attracts or because of its place in glittering Los Angeles, the campus exudes a kind of singular flashiness. There are also signs that the university understands the buying power of students. In the campus bookstore, one wall is filled with pricey Kiehl’s bath products and an Abercrombie & Fitch welcomes students in U.S.C. Village, a $700 million residential and retail development opened by the university in 2017.