Nathan Kulp, 8, W. David Kulp III, Heather Kimmel and Rachel Kulp, 11, are seen at their home in Great Falls, Va. Kimmel, a neuropharmacologist, has a doctorate from Emory University and grew up on the Eastern Shore. Her husband, W. David Kulp III, is a nuclear physicist who works at the Pentagon. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

“I do get a little concerned they don’t realize the spectrum of intellectual diversity,” said Heather Kimmel, a neuropharmacologist at the Environmental Protection Agency who lives just off Overbrook Street. “We talk to them a lot about it, that not everyone has a college degree and a big house.”

Kimmel, who has a doctorate from Emory University, grew up on the Eastern Shore. Her father, who met her mother in college, taught at a university. But most of their neighbors were blue-collar workers, including their mailman and a paralegal whose husband worked for the local power company.

Her husband, W. David Kulp III, is a noted nuclear physicist who works at the Pentagon. But he grew up in Allentown, Pa., watching the implosion of blue-collar manufacturing.

The couple do not live lavishly. Kimmel, for example, drives a 15-year-old Volkswagen. The divide they feel is intellectual, they said. When Kulp travels outside the region, he says he realizes that people he meets don’t talk much about things such as foreign policy and countering nuclear terrorism, as he does at home with other people with advanced degrees. Instead, he said, “people elsewhere talk more about what they see every day.”

“They mention ‘those people in Washington,’ ” he said, echoing a common feeling that the words are perjoratively pinned on everyone who lives in the region, not just its politicians and bureaucrats.

Anna Mangum lives with her two children behind Kimmel and Kulp, in a three-story house surrounded by a white picket fence.

An executive at a health-care association, she earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia, two master’s degrees from Berkeley, and went to Scandinavia as a Fulbright scholar.

Many of Mangum’s neighbors are also products of the best schools in the nation and the world, and now work at the kind of jobs that abound in Washington — associates at large legal firms, consultants, think tank scientists and nonprofit executives. Graduates of Harvard, MIT, Duke and the London School of Economics live a few doors away.

While she was growing up in nearby Falls Church during the 1970s and ’80s, Mangum said, the area did not seem as overtly affluent as it is today. Many of the neighboring houses like hers have been transformed, with spacious additions, or replaced by much larger houses.

But the biggest change she notices is how many women have well-paying jobs, sometimes earning more than their husbands do.

“Yes, nationally more women work outside the home than in the ’60s,” she said. “But locally, the additional change is that so many now work in these higher-level jobs.”

Mangum is glad the schools have a community service requirement, exposing children to people who have less. Her son works in a thrift shop and at the Humane Society.

Life in the bubble, she said, carries its own burdens, particularly for children growing up knowing that a four-year college degree is the minimum expected of them, and most will need go on to graduate school.

“It’s a paradox,” she said. “People have lush lives, with all the things they have. But the pressure is intense.”