@Cue7 , I have to give credit when it is due: In your posts 57 and 59 you have pretty well nailed the old place, descriptively and comparatively. Being a devoted reader of your entire oeuvre I know you’re not in love with those qualities. But am I completely off the mark in hearing a note of pride in your account?
Learning hard stuff is, well, hard, and entails a degree of suffering. To have faced up to that and seen it through Chicago-style is rightly a thing to be proud of. And insofar as this thread is about how Chicago grads do in the world, I would also relate your description of the culture to some very important qualities that make for success in life - intellectual curiosity, seriousness of purpose and fortitude in the face of adversity. These are the missing ingredients in many otherwise very talented and appealing young people. Perhaps they could have used a dose of the Chicago anti-fun elixir.
@marlowe1 - hah! And as I said earlier, I had a love/hate relationship with Chicago, and the “hate” has ebbed as time has progressed. It’s like doing anything else hard - in the moment, you might not enjoy it, but, in the long-term, you tend to appreciate it.
(This being said, as I’ve noted before, the vain part of me wishes Chicago had an ultra-primetime, big-lights brand, like Harvard or Stanford.)
@marlowe1 I think you have always slightly misread @Cue7 's attitude towards Chicago.
The vain part of you ought to be feeling pretty gratified these days. My kids feel like they get a lot of mileage out of their Chicago degrees. (Not so much the one who goes to work on campus every day, since everyone there has Chicago degrees. But definitely the one in New York, who straddles the worlds of mainstream institutional philanthropy and hedge funds.) Maybe not quite Harvard/Stanford mileage, but very much in the Yale-Columbia-Brown ballpark.
Coming from a south/west geography in a somewhat affluent private school area, I always thought that the general prestige of schools were
Super Elite Tier: Harvard/Stanford/Yale/Princeton/MIT/Wharton
Elite Tier: Columbia/UChicago/Penn non Wharton
Other: Duke/Brown/Dart/Cornell
But FWIW the average joe working in retail in my experience knows Harvard, maybe Yale, maybe Princeton, maybe MIT, then Duke + Stanford more for sports but not really as elite universities with super caliber students. Generally they dont know the rest.
