August - My son experienced this as the only privately educated student on a course. He was ignored by his fellow students except when they were imitating his accent and sneering at him.
However maybe you think he deserved it for being posh an all.
Not at all, @dapplegrey. Everyone deserves courtesy and, while people have a right to choose their friends, it''s grossly unfair when one member of a subject group is socially excluded and thus put at a psychological disadvantage during group tutorials, which are gruelling enough to begin with.
I remember one fellow student - a nice girl, not a classicist - she was of Asian heritage and came from the north of England where she had attended a local independent day school. She told me that back home people thought she was "posh" (not in a good way) because she went to private school, but at Oxford she was "common" because she had an accent! Like me, she was totally ignored by the blue-bloods - her private school wasn't a famous one - and every time she left the first year halls the townie drunks on the bridge would shout out "Oi Pki, fck off home" or something along those lines. I hope she is very successful now because she certainly earned it! And no, I don't know why some people have to be so horrible to people who have never done them any harm, but I've never thought that this was purely an upper-class phenomenon. It's just that possessors of the old school tie have so much more scope to act out their sociopathic fantasies: I think my college has produced more Tory MPs than any other, for example.
Agustarella, I may have got some of it wrong, but from what I have heard, certainly the non ab initio classicists are very predominently public school and male, some with very little experience of sharing a class room with females. I understand that this can be quite isolating.
They generally come from single-sex schools but hang out in mixed-sex social groups. They might not have shared a classroom with girls, except maybe at summer school, but they are well socialized and (superficially at least) mature, sophisticated and cosmopolitan, to an extent that is odd and rather daunting to young people from an ordinary background. Their distinguishing feature, however, is their deeply-felt aversion to their social inferiors, to the extent that even making eye contact is uncomfortable to them. It is a kind of instinctive revulsion which a white supremacist must feel towards members of other races. I think George Orwell, writing from experience, once described this feeling well, but I'm too old and brain-addled to remember the quote or even which book it came from. The strange thing is that the average person in the street has no inkling of the contempt in which he is held by the Bullingdon set, and if he did he would be more likely to lob molotov cocktails through their windows than to elect them to parliament. Rather, you have to observe the patrician clique in its natural habitat to know what you're dealing with.
The very first ab initio group consisted of me, a thirtyish female Scottish academic and a 24 year old single mother whose daughter had just started school - a remarkably diverse group, and all three of us at different colleges. They were nice ladies and managed better than I did IIRC, though I got a middling 2:1 in the end. The next year's intake was bigger I think, so it must have been a qualified success. I'm not sure if state school pupils are better represented in college now than before (I would know if I bothered to read the marketing crap/begging letters the alumni office sends out) but I remember that the Laura Spence scandal broke when I was an undergrad, and I think that must have put the SCR on the back foot. I don't think the college was necessarily averse to letting us state school kids in, but they had not yet made the requisite display of inclusivity.