I went to college at UF after having a public school education in Massachusetts. I was honestly shocked at the general ignorance of the top students, ones who had done well academically and were in challenging majors, and how they had just so little interest or curiosity in the outside world, which is what I had come to expect from those with high academic achievement.

I can remember being at a party that was mostly med students and I made a reference to Tiananmen Square for some reason. Not a single person at the party had heard of it. I don't mean they couldn't remember exactly what it was about, they had zero familiarity with the term. I asked them if they were familiar with Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Nope, no one had heard of these things. And this sort of thing happened constantly down there, subjects that I could easily discuss in Massachusetts with blue collar workers with no college education were completely foreign when I tried to discuss them with a HS valedictorian from Florida with a 4.0 GPA in college.