We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they’ve got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

Leary contrasts unprecedented levels of formal schooling with a perceived lack of meaningful outlets—social, political, spiritual, or vocational—for young people’s intelligence and idealism. The image of a “brain dressed up” suggests education as a kind of credentialed costume: polished and presentable, yet not necessarily empowered to act. In Leary’s broader critique of mid‑century American conformity, the line implies that institutions can produce capable minds while simultaneously narrowing acceptable life paths, leaving graduates restless, alienated, or easily co-opted. The remark also functions as a defense of youth counterculture: if society offers “nowhere to go,” experimentation and rebellion become, in his view, predictable responses.