Insularity Is the Problem

This is dead on. 

My father grew up in Irish-immigrant NYC and was the first in his family to go to college - let alone law school.  He wasn't reviled, but he was de facto abandoned.  It was assumed he considered becoming a cop or a fireman as beneath him.  It wasn't, but that's what everyone did, he just asked "Wait, why do I have to join the NYPD or FDNY..."

I won't get into the sociology of this but the role of women in the family fed this...my dad would always and everywhere want to see his brothers, but somehow the social calendar, ruled over by the wives, never worked.  I suspect that a FDNY wife wasn't keen to hang out with a lawyer's wife and vice versa.