I imagine you grew up either in an at least upper-middle-class family, or in an area with unusually driven and competitive teenagers compared to the national av

I imagine you grew up either in an at least upper-middle-class family, or in an area with unusually driven and competitive teenagers compared to the national average. There was absolutely no pressure, in my experience from a random boring part of white suburbia, for anyone to do anything but go to one of the states’s relatively cheap public universities. People who went to places like MIT, Harvard, or expensive liberal arts colleges were a rare exception by far.