I agree, that is a major problem. It's basically institutional classism. You can't look for well-travelled students as an admission criteria and I disagree with the practice. But most of the stuff they seem to look for is free or cheap for the student to pursue so far as extracurriculars—there just has to be a backbreaking amount of them.

Students at Yale are really very bright, but they are all jockeying for status all the same. And they're all concerned with how their peers perceive them, and so they act accordingly e.g. pretending not to work but working all the time; pretending to party all the time, networking to be accrue status and be well-liked, etc. There are also very confident students that don't need that extra approval of their peers or the profs, and who do what they want because they want to. The really outspoken ones are rare, but I'd say lots (usually upper years) are much more self aware than the article puts across.

That the undergrads work constantly differentiates them from other college grad cohorts. For years they have unintentionally trained themselves for the break of dawn to midnight investment banker jobs. That's why JP Morgan et al come to campus to woo them and wow them with their stories of high stakes capitalism and adventure.

But like any other college cohort they all totally lack life experience. They'll grow out of it the way everyone else does, except for the ones who are too emotionally stunted to start with who are very rare (and I've taught the grown-up versions when I taught masters students at Yale). They're not so different in terms of all the things people go through growing up, but they do work much, much harder than most college students.

Elchiv is right, some of them definitely are incredibly miserable already and have the potential to become more miserable moving forward. But university classes can't fix perfectionism so it's wrong to blame universities for it.

So far as what the article says about Ivy's being research driven and so teaching falls slack... that's true and it's not. Generally, professors who don't care about teaching give so much responsibility to TFs that TFs do the teaching in discussion and lab groups while the profs just lecture once or twice a week. Structurally all the classes look like that, but you know when you're doing the lion's share of explaining things and fielding questions. TFs are a mixed bag, like profs, but seeing as we don't have tenure yet I think we're more incentivized to do a good job.

Personally, I try to create a relaxed environment for my students where they feel less pressure to give the perfect student performance. And I have actually asked one outside of class whether they were taking on too much work because they seemed to have a lot to do (read, always overprepared and a little tightly wound). The response was, "It's ok, it's my senior year and I just want to finish on a high note."

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