“Ultimately, colleges have inherited the spiritual mission of churches. As religious beliefs have declined with the rise of science, especially among educated people, people started to turn elsewhere to ask the big questions: What does life mean? What is the world about? People turned to works of art, to literature, music, theater, philosophy, which were in turn brought into college curricula.”

How an elite education can lead to a cycle of grandiosity and depression

Source: William Deresiewicz on the Ivy League, Mental Illness, and the Meaning of Life – The Atlantic