Boulder loves to pretend they are liberal and progressive… but a quick check of the housing prices reminds us that to live there, one must be rich, and (it sounds like from your story) of the white persuasion.
Can we coin a term for this? 'Boulder liberal'? Liberal about everything BUT people who are not white or don't make a six-figure salary and who are apparently on the exclusionary side when it comes to access to higher education? It's still better than 'conservative'.
It reminds me of that one movement of gay Nazis I read about on the internet (I can't remember who they are) who was basically white supremacist and misogynist but for LGBT rights. Not only are they as fucking stupid as their straight counterparts, but they're basically the gay equivalent of black KKK members. EDIT: An SPLC article about them
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Corrupted_neoliberalism
Not all members of a society may have equal access to the law or to information, even when everyone is theoretically equal under the law, as in a liberal democracy. This is because access to the law and information is not free as liberals (such as Hayek) assume, but have associated costs. Therefore, in this context, it is sound to say that the wealthy have greater rights than the poor. In some cases, the poor may have practically no rights at all if their income falls below the levels necessary to access the law and unbiased sources of information, while the very wealthy may have the ability to choose which rights and responsibilities they bear if they can move themselves and their property internationally, resulting in social stratification, also known as class. This alleged tendency to create and strengthen class has resulted in some (most famously David Harvey[70]) claiming that neoliberalism is a class project, designed to impose class on society through liberalism.