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Yeah, as a child of upper middle class parents, it was a bit of a system shock years ago when I truly grokked that people had radically different backgrounds.
My college girlfriend broke down crying when she first saw my childhood home, because I "lived in a mansion" (I didn't) while her parents had been forced to sell her childhood home because they couldn't afford it, and one of the members of my Esperanto club was the first disabled man I ever interacted with at length and it was kind of heartbreaking seeing the squalor a person my age could live in even with supportive friends and family and disability payments.
I think those kind of scenarios are actually rarer than people think. It almost codes to me that your college GF was not the same race/ethnicity as you because of that kind of gap. People rarely end up in college without having traversed some part of the middle class, and if you did, you are exposed to all or almost all the tiers of the middle class. My parents, when I was born, were lower, by the time my youngest sibling graduated HS, upper. Even while we were still lower, I had seen UMC houses and they were clearly not mansions. I had seen mansions, that is what Michael Jordan owned.
What is actually a common jarring experience for lots of people is when there is a talented family of people who live in a bad or even mediocre place. Like say you are a law student at a T14 school and you meet a guy at that school and he tells you his sister is currently on full ride scholarship to Michigan and his brother is going to Wharton. Most people assume this guy came from UMC at a minimum. But sometimes they come from some random rank 100 school in West Virginia and their dad is like a railroad switchman or some general store owner/operator. Such cases now are becoming incredibly rare because of things like Affirmative Action in college admissions and other "standardization" (which of course actually excludes actual standards like SATs and LSATs) procedures, but they still happen from time to time. Bell Labs at its peak was populated by many such people, and I had opposing counsel in a case recently who I basically described, with minor anonymization added.
She was white-passing Hispanic. She had a scholarship, and was living for free in the house of a Christian couple that let underprivileged youth sleep in their spare rooms while she went to school. Her parents were working, but were too far away from the school and not in a financial position to really help her pay for things.
To be fair to her, I don't think she literally thought my childhood house was a mansion. I just think that she went from a precarious lower middle class in a cramped one-story house, to basically homeless, and something about the "unfairness" of that hit her when she saw the way I grew up.
I'm sure you're right that it is relatively rare, but my stint working as a home caregiver for the eldery also showed me a lot of sad tales. Old people with mobility issues or parkinson's who don't really have a lot going for them: They can't do their hobbies because of their broken bodies and deteriorating minds, their kids or grandkids have often cut them off and live far away, and they just get ferried from doctor's appointments to physical therapy until they die a slow, sad lingering death. It is hard when you're someone's only lifeline, and you're only there because you're being paid far too little for the amount of shit you're putting up with.
This is why "noticing" and hunches are informative. What we actually have is a Hispanic girl at a school that probably is a reach school for an equally talented white kid, and certainly not one where they get a scholarship. She's a fish out of water by design of the admissions office who wanted to fill out some numbers that make them feel good.
I am sadly well aware of this line of work because of the large number of criminals and scammers who go into the work. For the hard workers it is indeed a tough row to hoe. But its also full of abuse by just people exploiting the government.
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