Alec Klein went to a high school better than yours. Every year, 28,000 kids apply to Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, and only 850 are accepted. Among those that do make it, there is a 25% acceptance rate to Ivy League schools. The alumni include Nobel laureates, Academy Award winners, and business luminaries. Stuyvesant kids are far smarter, wittier, more successful and maybe even prettier than those that went to your high school.

But Alec Klein wants to know the reasons why? He graduated in the class of 1985, and now he has gone back to try and figure out what makes his school so special. His book, A Class Apart, follows several students — the ten-year-old prodigy, the captain of the football team, the jaded poet — and several faculty members through a year at “Sty High”, and finds in equal parts the fulfillment of the American dream and vicious educational elitism.

Klein was featured on the Diane Rehm show on Tuesday. Check out the interview.