The era in which I went to Yale is now long in the past, and I can’t claim to know a whole lot about it now. My experience there, and my spouse’s, was about 180 degrees different from yours, but then I went into it with an attitude that was 180 degrees different from yours, too.
I didn’t go to Yale because it was prestigious and would help me get some great job. I went because I really wanted to study literature, and it had the best English and French literature departments in the world at the time. I wanted to meet those great faculty members, and to find out what they had to offer. For years, I had been the best student in almost every class I was in. (I didn’t care that much for math and science, so I was usually only one of the best 2-3 students in those classes, not as much of a standout.) I longed to be in a situation where I had some actual peers. Finally, I really liked the residential college structure and the ubiquitous arts participation, and my best friend was also going there.
I didn’t care much, if at all, about the teacher/scholar distinction, and I cared even less about it after I had a few college semesters under my belt. Yale had plenty of great scholars who were also great teachers, and it was pure joy to take their classes, regardless of subject matter. But even with the normal situation – great scholars who were at best middling teachers – I was more than satisfied. I didn’t need to be taught. I learned fine on my own. I needed to be inspired and to be guided. And for that, I needed to be in contact with people who actually had ideas and were doing original work. I got that 24-7 at Yale, from the faculty, from the graduate students (many of whom developed later into famous professors), and from the visiting scholars who came from all over the world for days or months.
It was an incredibly rich intellectual experience, and one that had absolutely no visible relationship to anything practical. In that respect, it was like being in heaven. I adored it. For its own sake, not for where it was going to take me.
I also adored my classmates. They were so intellectually alive, so curious, so hardworking, so ambitious to do good in the world. People would sit around and talk about their classes, what were hot issues that interested them. We would trade readings – one of my roommates gave me Richard Dawkins’ seminal articles on sociobiology; I gave him deconstructionist interpretive theory and African-American folklore.
At the same time, Yale taught me that, notwithstanding my head-in-the-clouds literary focus, I could have a place in the practical world, and even an impact on it. On a lark, my sophomore year roommates and I took the basic financial accounting course, and it was fabulous – both the easiest single course I took in college, and completely effective for teaching me what it was designed to teach. (40+ years on, one of my greatest professional strengths is solid understanding of the theory and principles of financial accounting, and it came from that gut of a class.) I participated in a program which let me spend a summer splitting courses between seminars with top-line literature professors and some basic semi-business-related stuff, then the university helped me get a super (paid) internship on Wall Street for the fall semester. I learned that my skills did have value in the real world, and that I could function there perfectly well. That was a revelation to me. “Business” had been this black, intimidating box from which I felt excluded, but I learned that I was not actually excluded at all.
That was one of the greatest gifts Yale gave me – the sense that intellectual depth and engagement with big, important economic and political issues in the real world were not at all incompatible. Apart from that financial accounting course (and a later one on corporate finance), I never used any of the material from my Yale coursework in my career, but I constantly used the experience of what it was like to do deep dives into a new subject matter, to identify what was important to learn and then to learn it. I have made very little use of my Yale social network professionally, but I still love the people in it.