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[quote=Anonymous]Yes, there are lots of piggish dot com bros at Stanford and the Yale has a disproportionate share of anxious young men confused about their sexual orientation and Princeton is full of Southern trust fund preppies and they all have way too many students who think wealth is the only measure of life.

But these schools are also full of really interesting young people who do all the reading and have fascinating discussions in their seminar classes, like the author who has three degrees from Columbia and spent nearly all of his professional life at Yale. A large proportion of the grads from elite schools end up as academics and think-tank types because they want to build a life around their intellectual curiosity.

For really smart, curious students, the elite schools offer a large set of peers who share their smarts and curiosity. Those kinds of students exist at all the big public schools and the SLACs but not at the same critical mass as at the top tier schools. It's one thing for a Yale professor to whine about the shallowness of his students, it is another when a professor at a public university talks about the barely literate essays submitted by her students or a SLAC professor describes how none of his students read the news.

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