Ivy League Students Driven By Material Success Standards

[from article]
William Deresiewicz, who taught at Yale for 10 years until 2008, thinks these students are, in a moral and spiritual sense, lost. They’re accomplished networkers who have no friends. They’re super-intelligent but have no clue. In online postings and in conversations with the author, they say that they’re forlorn, depressed, anxious, so busy studying that they never get a chance to think.
[. . .]
In 1971, Deresiewicz notes, 73 percent of incoming college freshmen said it was important to develop a meaningful philosophy and only 37 percent deemed it important to be “very well-off.”
By 2011, those figures were reversed: 47 percent for the former and 80 percent for the latter.
So it isn’t college that is causing the craving for wealth. As a society, we tend to mistake money and status for happiness, to overestimate the correlation between income and satisfaction. If our ablest young people go for the gold, it isn’t an educational problem.
It’s a cultural one.

http://nypost.com/2014/08/31/do-top-tier-educations-lead-mainly-to-wealthy-depressives/

Do Ivy educations lead to wealthy depressives?
By Kyle Smith
August 31, 2014 | 12:44am
New York Post