LOL about Foucault. My daughter grew up surrounded by bookshelves filled with Weber, Durkheim, and Marx and part of what interested her (she’s probably a scientist) about Chicago’s Core was that she’d read some of that stuff in college. Not intrigued enough to tackle it one her own, but firmly convinced that these are thinkers a well-educated person should have read. We’ll see if Suicide convinces her otherwise!
On the broader point, yeah, when I went to Harvard the people I hung out with talked nonstop about ideas and about things we were reading. But we were the nerdier kids – probably not the majority even then, but a critical mass and one supported/encouraged by faculty and grad students. Some of those faculty tell me things have changed and my daughter’s perception was kids like her/us weren’t the kids headed to Harvard these days. Her perception may be skewed by coming from a private school on the east coast (DH and I were public school kids from CA and NH). But long story short(er), she was looking for what we had and found it elsewhere.
FWIW, I think UChicago’s Metcalf program has really taken off in recent years and my kid seems to have even better access to internships than I did at Harvard way back when. Unpaid internships were a nonstarter for me, but Metcalf largely takes that issue off the table. And the search/application process seems very well-organized and accessible.