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Having been to grad school in Washington DC -- where the concentration of Trust Fund Babies (TFBs) is like New York and Boston/Cambridge kinda high (though DC TFBs are poorer than NYC of Boston. getting say an average wage from the fund), they do exist and are quite noticable.
Grad school students, in law school in this case are divided into three/four economic/social groups - the TFBs, the Straight Throughs (High School -> College -> Grad Program[s]) who are often also TFBs, the have-worked (those who held down a job for a while before grad school -- actually outside MBA and JD programs a limited group) -- and the evening program (working their way through (which includes some of the have worked). I managed to be in the have worked/working my way through group.
It is fair to say that there is a very big difference between the TFBs and the rest of the grad students. First, their psychology is very different -- they don't really need money, they go on semester abroad programs, they talk about public-interest work and criticize the working crowd for selling out to big law firms (since we need the money to say in school, that breeds a lot of resentment.) What really causes a lot of resentment is the tendency of TFBs, both conservative and liberal to score interesting and significant jobs, say on the Hill or in NGOs or in the Media which require someone to work as an intern for a year or two, then for very very low pay for another 3-5 years, before getting an OK paycheck. This filters out many of the non-TFB segment of the population. I would point out that this population of key policy roles, journalism, Hill Staff, political appointees, etc. with such a high proportion of TFBs or people from very comfortable middle class backgrounds, is, I think, a very BAD THING. It creates a group of opinion formers who have little idea of how the majority of the population live -- what it is like to worry, really worry about how to pay the bills, the mortgage, etc., to stay up at night wondering how to pay it, to have to calculate how to get from one month to the next on what is left in your bank account, to know that if you lose your job, there wont be a deposit in your checking account anyway. To be very comfortable is to think that spending a few months Inter-railing or Euro-railing from youth hostel to campsite in Europe is slumming it, or to be able to toss it in and go to China for months is normal -- and it is not.
Now that said, there are relatively few TFBs in grad programs outside the three cities I named (plus San Francisco) so the posters also illustrate another disconnect - the TFB resentment is very much a a feature of those four cities.
