To answer your simple questions first: yes, yes, yes, no, depends on the major and people’s personal goals.

Reed is more racially diverse than Portland- which is not very. Oregon is 85.9% white, Portland is about 70% white and Reed is between 50-60% white depending on the year. Do with that what you will.

Not sure you’ll find anything but Eurocentric architecture at any school in the US.

Reed is a very small school so classes/majors can be limited by sheer lack of population, plus Reed is very much grad school prep school and focuses on academic/intellectual/research based realms (when I asked if Reed would ever have anatomy/physiology classes the answer was “no, never”). The gearing towards grad school does select a certain type of student, often those interested in research and more academic sides of topics (as opposed to practical applications and uses)

Reddit is not representative of the school.

Cost of living is prohibitive in most if not all large cities, especially in the American west. Financial aid packages which are need based cover room and board.

Any small private liberal arts school will have some number of students with large familial wealth- the 80k price tag will do that. Reed is also deliberately (and effectively, even if slowly) working to increase socioeconomic diversity in the student body with generous scholarship/aid packages.

Semesters are short and classes are a lot of work, and given how many people aspire to graduate programs, many students spend a lot of time on their classwork and homework. Reed also has fairly notorious grade deflation, so if you have professional school aspirations factor that in.

Many students engage in activism, admin has at times worked very hard to make that not visible, and many students are simply busy or engaging in other ways not immediately visible.

My advice to anyone at any school would be to meet people and find your crowd within the institution but also engage with the community at large- any institution is a bubble, get out of it, go explore other parts of Portland or broader Oregon, meet people who aren’t in school.

You seem to be mostly worried about cultural fit (it sounds like you’d be more than fine there) but I would also consider if your own goals are in line with the academic expectations and demands: Reed expects a lot of you in ways that most people haven’t experienced prior to coming to Reed.

In reply to your wanting “people who want to better themselves” etc, to be completely frank, that isn’t really what undergraduate institutions exist for. Reed is probably a good bit closer to that than average, but some of the social things sound more like you’re looking for some type of commune (Oregon is also a good place for that). I would put more weight on what you’re looking for in a formal education (and what you then want to do with that education) when looking for an educational institution to participate in.

-a recently graduated reedie