I grew up in freshwater country. I know what the Midwest is like. For the most part, it’s not like the University of Chicago.
It’s true, though, that one important quality about traditional Chicago is its insularity. That was one difference that really stood out when my wife and I compared our experience at Yale to our children’s experience at Chicago. At Yale, we felt like we were in an Ivory Tower of sorts, but the Real World was just on the other side of the door. There was the same kind of opportunities for service in the immediately surrounding community that people at Chicago have, but there was also easy access to city politics and national politics. When I wanted to see what a career outside academia might look like, the university got me a paid internship at the gold-standard bank on Wall Street. One of my roommates, an art history major, got a similar position with a big commercial real estate developer, and found his life’s work. My wife worked for the NYC City Planning Commission. I really valued that – not when I started college; I barely thought about it then, but later – precisely because I felt like I was from nowhere, and it was a crazy gift get access to the inner sanctum like that more or less just for asking. My kids never felt anything equivalent at Chicago. They both had interesting jobs they loved, but with one exception all the jobs they had were inside the University bubble. They were more or less mystified by life beyond the University, other than enjoying culture in Chicago. (The one exception – my daughter talked/wrote her way into an internship with a music magazine in Chicago whose the editor claimed to have never previously met a University of Chicago student or alumnus.)
I don’t think that made the University of Chicago experience richer or better.