Urban Cowboys

I recently had one of my favorite kind of dinner parties...the kind that included a round table of intelligent, witty journalist & writer friends with some of the nation's top publications, from the NY Times to The Atlantic. As you can imagine, opinions were flying all over the place, as were a lot of laughs. But the topic of City Slickers came up, and all the bankers, etc. we know that regularly flee to work on ranches, to attempt some sort of city/country balance. Hence, the topic of Deep Spring College. If you have not heard of this institution, I highly recommend it. How have I not heard of this before? The idea of a cowboy + an Ivy leaguer is almost too great to pass up.

Description from The New Yorker: There are two basic rules: observe isolation, and abstain from alcohol and drugs while school is in session. The school is year-round and free, and it requires students to do several hours of manual labor a day. Mentions the cattle operation. As a two-year institution, Deep Springs is technically a junior college, but its success in placing students at prestigious universities puts it in a category of its own. In recent years, about a fourth of each graduating class has transferred into Harvard, a fourth into the University of Chicago, and a few students have gone on to Oxford, Yale, and Brown.