I came across this essay by Michael Chabon. He's writing about MFA programs but it seems that there are larger applications, no?

We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that “our most precious resource is our children.” But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are, but who find value in this knowledge, and even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.