“Nearly everybody I know has a pretty prestigious education: Harvard, Pepperdine, the Sorbonne in France, Oberlin, Amherst, Georgetown, Duke, Tel Aviv University, and King’s College in London - to name a few. I rarely ran into anybody educated when I lived the small town I was born in!”
I think you mean”——the small town in which I was born”
Your new friends would be shocked at the grammar——just shocked.
Ouch.
I figured somebody would try a gotcha. (The ones with good grammar are from state schools.) That is true! My Amherst friend has terrible language skills. My other friends are all from Russia! They screw my grammar up! And truly, you do not say “in which I was...” Nobody speaks like that. The rules will change. Anyway, my grammar mistake comes from changing my thoughts. I should have simply deleted the last sequence of words “I was born in.” That sequence belonged to a different thought. A more modern approach to grammar would encourage concise and short sentences. “In which I was born” is awkward, and the best sentence would have read “I rarely ran into anybody educated when I lived in a small town.” If I wanted to focus on my place of birth, I would have said “I was born in a small town, yadda yadda.” It would have been the lead in. Thus, I still maintain that “in which I was born” is poor style. “in which” is (basically) archaic, stuffy, used to connect after thoughts. You should drop after thoughts, or make them leads.