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.
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.
It's more nuanced than what it seems.
I suspect going to Oxford and Bumping into students who are members of the bullingdon club is the same but far more so
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.
Its also based in Manchester and was where Baby was built you know one of the first computers :-)