Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation.
Why are we doing this to ourselves?
— Peter Thiel, Zero to One, chapter 4, pg 36
I talk about the way in which college can turn self-proclaimed individualists (think of college applications that work so hard to help the student stand out from the pack) into conformists hell-bent on climbing a ladder here.