I went to one of these elite schools in the 80’s (in fact my college friend group had an extensive text exchange about this article), and yes, there were some trust fund babies that I knew, but for the most part my classmates came from middle class to upper middle class backgrounds. We studied Thoreau, Homer, Shakespeare, Kant and Camus and took classes on the history of architecture and music as well as China, Russia and Latin America because knowledge was something worth pursuing in of itself, and employers those days valued people who proved they knew how to think and not because they had a trained skill (other than engineers). So I don’t think it is the makeup of the schools that is driving this, but what a lot of companies now demand in their entry level hires.
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