I am studying the online culture of Harry Potter fanfiction because I want to find out what motivates young readers to produce such work about literature for fun.
[Abstract] Most colleges and universities emphasize identifying smartness much more than developing smartness. This value is made explicit in the many influential rankings of colleges and universities, in which elitist schools who recruit students with high SAT scores, grade point averages, and class rankings are declared "better" than other schools. The pursuit of high academic rankings (a) often is accompanied by a disdain for underprepared students who lower a school's ranking and (b) often contradicts the alleged desire to promote educational opportunities for groups of students who are placed at a strong disadvantage by factors such as SAT scores.
I would want to look more closely at Patton's statement "you [Princeton women] will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you". I would take a socio-economic path to try and analyze what men and women from Princeton, and more broadly from the Ivy League, do after their undergraduate study. What are their job trajectories? What are the discrepancies between men and women? What might lead to women not being surrounded by their male equals?