<p>"Some of us send our children to college in the hopes they will find a world of different people. People different from those they have known. Different backgrounds, different interests, from different places, headed in different directions, with different abilities and passions. College is seen as a broadening experience.</p>
<p>Some of us send our children to college in hopes they will find a tribe of like people. People with the same passions, the same brilliance, headed in the same directions. College is seen as a refuge, where one can focus like a tiny but brilliant beam of light and find other, sImilarly focused beams of light."</p>
<p>I think both of those things can be true at once. My ideal setting has a lot of people of different backgrounds, interests, places, etc. - but their “likeness” to me is that they take academics and learning seriously. </p>
<p>But yes, as your typical high school “brainiac” who got lumped in with the nerds, it was tremendously freeing and liberating to not be seen as “nerdy” for taking academics seriously. I cannot express how life-changing that was for me, to be in an environment in which it was cool to get pumped about what you were learning and where you weren’t made fun for taking studies seriously. </p>
<p>I’m sorry, but as someone who lived in a state with an unexceptional state flagship, I would have had a very hard time doing so when on the same floor with all the same people I’d gone to high school with, who were all in the same cliques and who didn’t really care about school. I might have even dropped out, it might have been so dispiriting. Maybe that’s a personality flaw in myself, but so be it. That doesn’t mean I believed the only places with a sufficient concentration of serious bright students was HYP - who would be so dumb as to think that? - but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s found everywhere. </p>