Go ahead an ask anyone accepted into Yale if they'd trade it off for the same major at po-dunk State U.
What do you think their response will be?
Don't be daft. This is trash.
It's quite possible to be mostly satisfied with something and still have good reasons to be dissatisfied, and it's perfectly reasonable to write about those reasons. I doubt Deresiewicz would say that "po-dunk State U" is better.
It made an impression on me. I checked out the 2nd tier of school and found a bunch of white bread people from Jersey looking forward to a career in ibanking or medicine.
I ended up in a good state school with real people and no debt. I lost the opportunity to work at McKinsey or whatever, but I consider that a plus.
Fundamentally, the best thing hat I learned about in college was myself. Surrounding myself with type-As on some track would have stifled that. Honestly, I'm really happy with how life has turned out this far!
Mind you, I think personal greatness is completely unrelated to social class. I'm not saying "elite education means you have issues", I don't think it's a zero-sum game at all. But having grown up in a town teeming with millionaires, I have to laugh at the idea that many rich aren't positively hunted by their own defects. Yes, they can buy an island, but they can't sit still on it, they cannot be with themselves, they cannot reflect on themselves. They are captured, driven, mad, and get hysterical when they are recognized and pitied. So they have to keep company that has the same fears, like an unspoken pact. It's like drug addicts hanging out with drug addicts instead of the people who would ask them wtf they are doing with their life.
They can't read many great minds and even get half of what they say; sure, neither do many poor people, but that's more because they don't have the time or the language is too bloated for them, not because there is some inherent vampire/garlic type incompatibility. If you discuss the exact same subjects with a "normal" person in normal words, they in my experience are less likely to throw up all sorts of deflections, while other people realize this stuff is fit to dissolve the lies their lives are and get scared.
Fear is not strength, and powerful people have many options, but when those options don't include letting go of power they are basically slaves as well. The highest echelons of power are impersonal and systematic, only entropy and madness gain from them, no human person; and it takes personal strength to sail in such an environment and not end up as a bundle of sticks held together by delusions. It takes fierce motherfuckers, which is the opposite of people who can't answer a straight question, as many people in the "upper echelons" demonstrate. Pester me not with their pocket calculator stuff :P
That's pretty much 90% of the difference I notice between Yalies and State school students.
This is not fair to say. Many, if not most ivy leagues go onto have relatively normal lives.
I have a friend in Vermont who went to Yale. She is a 'marketing manager'. I don't even think she could pay for her education unless her (doctor) father did.
I took a tour of Stanford, the girl went to Dartmouth. I don't think the people giving recruiting tours of Stanford earn all that much.
Surely, it opens a lot of doors, and there are probably industries in which it can give one a cosy path, but it's not the 'guarantee' of anything.