He is hungry to be with people truly interested in learning as opposed to good workers and grade grubbers. There just are not many such people.
Your last sentence says it all.
When choosing a college (and we're finding this to be true right now, as a matter of fact), it may be BETTER to be in a less selective environment.
Why?
Well, because as your DS so astutely noted, his
real peers are not the students around him, but the faculty. That is likely to be the case of about 90% of the students even at the most prestigious institutions on earth.
The only difference is that as you go up in prestige, the students themselves have been groomed/conditioned to "pass" as HG/HG+.
They still aren't-- at least most of them aren't, I mean. But statistically, what can one realistically expect here anyway??
The "hard working" students are now able to achieve at the same stratospheric levels as truly EG/PG students now... because the entire k-12 system now conditions kids for volume, not authentic rigor, and makes an A accessible to ALL, provided that they just "do enough" or "work hard."
So this is how you get to a point where a school produces 40 valedictorians. ONE of those kids is actually EG or PG, most likely. About half might be HG. The rest are likely MG or borderline MG, and TigerParented.
Why do I mention this? Because all of those valedictorians are now your son's classmates in college.
Faculty look out at a sea of cookie-cutter "perfect" students... and how should they tell them apart? How can they know which three of them in a class of 100 are
really worth the extra time? How can a STUDENT figure out which two classmates are genuine peers? They can't.
In a less elite setting, however, one of those PG kids IS that different from the rest. They will get noticed and nurtured because they are rare and special. Now, no-- they aren't going to have any more peers than in the elite setting.
But you said it yourself; when you're a statistical rarity, you may very seldom meet others like yourself. While BigName University may be
enriched in those outliers... fundamentally, the environment also makes them harder to identify from the background noise.
^ JMO.
Grad school is different. Truly. There, the less-able vanish after the first year. Those who remain are generally at least HG, and many of them are EG. (Depends on the field, of course-- in STEM, this is certainly true, though.) As you go up in educational setting, the enrichment becomes more noticeable.
This is why your son's
professors have more in common with him than his average classmates. They are more like his LOG.
DD already discovered this during a high school internship at a uni research lab. Pleasantly, she also discovered that faculty are downright rapacious about mentoring the real thing, and it's not at all hard to identify them in a non-selective setting.
