Good question! I have tried to answer this before, and always fallen flat -- I think that the reason is that if it could be transmitted by writing, I would have picked it up without the need to have spent all that money and time. But that sounds like such a cop-out! So I'll try:
At the Ivy League school I went to (and I did not study a technical subject here -- it was an architecture school), I was surrounded by people who had an agenda for their lives -- in fact, they often already had their career plotted out, and many were already working on the side. School was for them a set of tools (people, information, opportunities) to be hacked resourcefully to get what they wanted. At Big State U, the kids seemed to think of themselves more as subject to the whims of an institution, and to think of the institution as something they needed to please to get "a degree." The degree was hardly worth mentioning at Ivy League School; the professors were seen as either equals or, in a sense, servants/tools. The Ivy League kids also seemed far more ready to create their own programs and experiences; they would see a niche, form a group, and suddenly the school was filled with minority kids learning architecture on the weekends; or suddenly a local youth group had a student-made meeting place.
Of course this kind of volunteerism and spirit of service happened at Big State U as well! What I thought was really different at I.L.S. was the self-assurance and lack of self-consciousness involved; these kids saw ownership and power in the world as their natural right -- they seemed to act and take command as naturally as another young person might turn on the television.
I hope this doesn't sound arrogant or somehow fanboyish; I am trying to explain how being thrown together with these people for years changed me deeply -- made me both able to see beyond where I came from and to be more proud of it, and of myself. It was really almost more a matter of physical knowledge -- of mimicry and group identification, perhaps -- than of something you could pick up in a book.