There are definitely some very interesting people at the Ivies

But I agree on the whole tbh. I think it's what other people have said: it's so incredibly competitive now that the only people who get in aside from dull legacies are people who've been single-mindedly striving since middle school. I was in a lot of AP/IB classes in high school and was involved with some nerdy extracurriculars, so I've known a lot of these people

They're extremely smart and nice people, but they never give themselves the time to mess around and figure out what they really want to do. There's no time to take a gap year. They can't take a few courses unrelated to their major because they have to graduate in exactly four years -- anything else would be a waste of time and money to them. They choose their career path based on what their parents want, what makes the most money, or what they themselves picked out in the fourth grade (again, gotta get those extracurriculars and internships started early)

Certain politicians' Wikipedia pages epitomize this. Pete Buttigieg is a good example -- guy was the valedictorian of his high school, won a contest for writing an essay on "the integrity and political courage of then U.S. representative Bernie Sanders," was a student delegate, graduated Harvard magna cum laude, wrote a politically relevant undergraduate thesis, won a Rhodes Scholarship, worked on counterterrorism in Afghanistan, on and on and on. He's obviously a smart and ridiculously determined person, but it feels like he decided to be president when he turned 9. It makes him come off as disingenuous/not actually a real person and people pick up on that