I'd recommend the high road to anybody. You wonder about it and you don't really appreciate it until you do it and you find that it worked for everyone. But I recommend it.
These ivy league students are in the upper echelon of the college boards and had great opportunity in front of them regardless of where they go to college. Its in their very nature and it is something they expect.
I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.