Was this what the social structure was like at your high school?

So after watching this movie, along with a few other Hughes' ones like Pretty in Pink or, to a lesser extent, The Breakfast Club, something has been bothering me. In all these pictures he portrays high school cliques as divided very rigidly upon financial class. The rich kids are cool and popular and flaunt their money, the blue collar kids are shunned, left on the outside looking in.

This has been bugging me because this was nothing like how the social status was built at my high school, and because of that it seems really inauthentic and cheesy to me. I still liked the movies; regardless of wealth the message of being an outsider and wanting to be understood still rings true, but it seems like this economic hierarchy is just added to give us one more reason we should sympathize with/root for the protagonists and view them as underdogs, and it just seems forced to me.

So my question is, are most high schools actually like that? Is popularity based stringently on how much money a kid's parents make? If so I guess I should start cutting these films some slack, but it just seems so foreign to me. My high school was similar to the one portrayed in Some Kind of Wonderful I'd say, relatively middle class with a spectrum of family incomes from working class to upper middle class. And there were certainly cliques, there were popular kids, jocks, goths, theater dorks, etc, but membership in these groups had almost nothing to do with money or material stuff, it was attitude and interests that determined your place. And yeah, I s'pose the in-crowd tended to wear "trendier" clothing, but no one bragged about their exotic vacations or their big houses, because half the time they were working-class anyway and the other half wouldn't want to offend their friends.

Maybe it was just an 80's thing, I dunno.

Any perspectives would be helpful, I'm quite curious.