Hmmm. I don’t know if that’s going to make @marlowe1 happy or not.
Stanford: I think what rationalizes everything is that Stanford (like Harvard, and completely unlike Chicago) is not primarily about what goes on in the classroom for the majority of students. The feeling is that everyone is smart (that’s true), everyone is focused (or pretends to be), everyone takes him- or herself pretty seriously but without being pretentious about it, and everyone expects to have ultra-high achievement in something. That can be academics, and is for some students, but it can also be sports, or business, or politics, or art, or inventing things.
If you see a kid you know do the work necessary to be an Olympic swimmer or a professional football player, that inspires you to dedicate yourself with similar zeal and focus to whatever it is you think you are going to have equivalent success at. It’s not like those kids are dumb and coddled. They are as smart as you are, and you are as coddled as they are, and neither of you is necessarily getting most of your validation in the classroom. Some kids, of course, do get their validation in the classroom, probably a significant portion of the student body, but not enough to make that the norm. It’s just one of the options life offers. And lots of those kids have ulterior motives: law school, medical school, consulting jobs. Their classroom focus is a strategy, like the football player’s weight training, something you have to do well to make the first team, but not an end in itself.
All of which makes Stanford a lot like Harvard, but with less pretentiousness and less weight of history, more engineers and entrepreneurs (and more Olympic athletes) and fewer Intellectuals. So there’s somewhat less anxiety if you are not Olympic-quality whatever yet, and in any event the weather is great and almost everything is pretty new and it’s easy to kick back for a few hours when you want to do that. And it’s in the ethos of the place that everyone pretends to kick back a lot more than they do – the “duck syndrome” (relaxed and placid above the waterline, paddling furiously below).