In 1957 Kingman Brewster stopped off at my prep school, Milton Academy, to speak to those of us who were interested in applying to Yale for admission in Fall, 1958. Mr. Brewster was not yet President of Yale. He was (or was about to be) Provost.

The meeting was held in the Senior Study in Wolcott House whose only decoration I can recall was an autographed photo of T.S. Eliot who had gone to or not gone to Milton. None of us cared all that much who had once gone to Milton. Bobby Kennedy had gone to Milton. I wrote an article for The Orange and Blue that Bobby had gone and not caused much of a stir. (I had caused more of a stir at Milton than Bobby, but not of the good kind.) {In fact I had been apprehended doing something that so shocked Milton’s Board of Trustees they chickened out from expelling me for fear the publicity would be horrendous.}

We were interested in going to THE COLLEGE OF OUR CHOICE. Out of our class of 48 men, about half would get into Harvard and a handful would get into Yale. That was statutory. After all, most of us knew our ways around Cambridge, had friends at Harvard (who had graduated from Milton earlier), and could find our ways to the store off Harvard Square where you could buy Playboy without a hassle.

Just to show you how different things used to be, I was a B to B+ student (on a good day) and these were my only college choices: Harvard, Yale and Columbia. Yes, Columbia was my “insurance” college. Could I get into any of those today with my record?

No. (But back then I was accepted by all three.) I chose Yale, partly because Kingman Brewster was such a refreshingly honest emissary of one of the Big Three. And partly because I suspected that if I wound up in Cambridge, I’d drink myself out of Harvard by New Year’s. I knew too many people there who would help me go to my dark side.

But my inability to compete with today’s High School Seniors is not the point of my meandering. It is, rather, something that Kingman Brewster said to us that night that I have never forgotten. I have no idea why I remember this so well, but chalk it up to a rare moment of wisdom for my 17 year old’s self.

BREWSTER (1957): “No college is as good as it is hard to get into.”

I will grant you that that is a pretty twisted bit of syntax, but it is brilliant because you cannot forget it. That, and the fact that it is really really really really true.

Those of you with college age kids and those of you who actually ARE college age kids need to know this and etch it on your brows. Some of you will write poetic essays about why you are right for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Brown, Stamford, Oxford, Cal State Davis. You will run for President of everything from Debate Club to Chess Club and Junior Year Abroad. Some of you will spend every Spring Vacation hammering nails in poor people’s front porches because you care and it also looks wonderful on your admissions record. You will lose sleep. You will judge yourselves by your success or failure to get into THE COLLEGE OF YOUR CHOICE.
The educations you receive will be fine, but, as Mr. Brewster told us, that education will never be as good as what it took for you to get there.

So chill. (Yeah, right. Easy for you to say, born in 1940 and admitted to Yale under the entitled white guy’s Bernoulli principle. The uplift vacuum glided you right into a berth in New Haven.)

True. But I have worked for brilliant powerful people who went to colleges I would have been embarrassed to have to go to back in the day. They were smarter than I was, more driven and didn’t seem at all embarrassed by not being able to join The Yale Club.

In retrospect, I laud Kingman Brewster and I have concluded on your behalf that if you are supposed to be somebody (however you define that concept), you will be no matter whether you go to Harvard, Yale, or The New York School of Announcing and Speech (where I went after Yale).

Our society is so wrong. It was when I was 18 and it hasn’t gotten any better. Just don’t quit.