A reporter had tagged along with our valedictorian, Loren Easton, and found the freckled 17-year-old wrestling with disappointment, a sense that we hadn’t lived up to the school’s expectations. “All we cared about was getting into good colleges and we didn’t even do that well,” Easton told the reporter. The truth was that 44 percent of us had gotten into an Ivy League school. But for Easton, who spoke for at least some portion of our class — and who’d chosen the University of Pennsylvania after being rejected by his first choice, Dartmouth — it was less about the data and more about the feeling that we weren’t a particularly impressive bunch. “We’re not like last year’s senior class, which had so many geniuses, so many stars,” he lamented.
This obsession with achievement is familiar to anyone who has been in the orbit of an elite private school. Since time immemorial, or at least since the mid–20th century, affluent parents with soaring ambitions for their children have jockeyed for precious slots at schools prized for vaulting grads to the Ivy League and into illustrious careers. When the president of the class above mine got into Harvard, the only person visibly prouder than him was his mother, who immediately traipsed through the halls wearing a crimson sweatshirt emblazoned with the university’s crest.
My father, a corporate lawyer who often reminded his sons that “a man can never be too thin, too rich, or too well dressed,” worked his way up and out of the middle class without the benefit of brand-name schools. When he wrote the first of a handful of $15,000 tuition checks to Horace Mann (which now costs $68,700 annually, more than a Harvard undergraduate degree), I think my dad imagined I’d develop excellent posture while readying myself for a career as a Supreme Court justice, literary titan, or captain of industry.
Instead, after graduating from Pomona, a small liberal-arts school in California, I spent my early 20s playing in a series of ill-fated bands whose achievements — performing at Central Park’s SummerStage and various Verizon Wireless amphitheaters, signing a publishing deal — were thrilling but fleeting. I also spent a few years writing screenplays no one wanted. I did manage to wrangle $1,000 from William Shatner to rewrite a comedy he’d dreamed up, but he didn’t like my take and the movie never got made.