Nope, not a joke. Too bad the article doesn't give the kids' last names. If it did, you could Google their names 10 years from now and see what they turned into.
I went to a snooty prep school and a highly ranked college, and I'm 45, so there's been time to see how my various classmates turned out. The really smart ones (some with excellent grades, some with crappy grades like mine) have nearly all done very well, and we're all paying way more than our proportionate share of the nation's income tax bills. I haven't seen any sign of a correlation between wild social activities during high school and college, and later success as an adult. One of the wilder young ladies I recall from college (also an NYC public magnet school grad) dropped out after her sophomore year because she was so smart she was bored out of her mind. Never went back to school, ended up in a cushy position at Microsoft making oodles of money, and happily married with two children. About 6-7 years ago, when she had more money than she knew what to do with, she quit her position at Microsoft, in favor of doing a little part time consulting for them and staying home with her kids. The activities of the kids in this article (at least to the extent they are revealed) are tame compared to what this friend of mine was up to in college.
Serious drug and alcohol use at that age seems like it has a bit more correlation, but not a lot, since the smarter kids are usually able to realize earlier when those things are starting to having a serious negative effect on their lives, and are better able to plot and execute a strategy to change course. But of course a few are simply lost to life-long battles with their addictions. Even within schools where everyone is in the way smarter than average in terms of IQ, SAT scores, etc., my observation was that heavy drug and alcohol use was mostly among the less smart subset of the student population.
And I could have sworn you were joking.....
susie