Elite American students don't want to design, engineer and make stuff. They want to communicate? For their 15 minutes of ego fame? Where is the connection to real world? The material world that for much of the world's population is not very pleasant.
I think you have to remember the "herd" in which this thoroughbred runs. Peggy's friends' kids are likely to have journalists/tv producers/news professionals as parents. Therefore, the kids she's in contact with are more oriented towards the arts than the sciences. While that's a bit of a generalization, I think there's some truth to it.
The Ivy League schools have excellent and very full and successful programs in the sciences. There are lots of Ivy League kids who want to engineer, build things and solve biotechnological problems.
Of course, the key is that all of them are leaving their Ivy League schools with a leftist perspective - imagine that in the realm of bio-ethics, nuclear/weapons defense system planning, etc.