She graduated from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland in 1994, the school profiled in The Overachievers; and summa cum laude from Yale University in 1998. She was editor-in-chief of her high school newspaper, the Black & White.

She has also written for a variety of publications, including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, USA Today, Cosmopolitan, and Salon.com. Robbins has appeared in the media, such as The Smart Woman Survival Guide, The O'Reilly Factor, 60 Minutes, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, Paula Zahn Now, The View, The Colbert Report, CBS Early Show, and Anderson Cooper 360°, and networks including CNN, NPR, the BBC, MSNBC, CNBC, C-SPAN, and the History Channel.

Bush educational record

Along with author Jane Mayer, she broke the story about President Bush's unimpressive college grades and SATs in The New Yorker. The article got such media attention that reporters called to interview her and asked what her SAT scores were. She has not made her scores known publicly.[1]Robbins was a member of Scroll and Key Skull & Bones: The Secret Society That Unites John Kerry and President Bush, one of Yale's more esteemed secret societies, and has written a revealing book, "Secrets of the Tomb", a social history of societies at Yale, featuring Skull and Bones. The book's 2002 release was timely given the membership of George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush in Bones, and then more so when John Kerry, another member, was the Democratic Party's 2004 presidential nominee.

Robbins was a guest on the satirical program The Colbert Report on August 9, during which Colbert challenged claims Robbins makes in The Overachievers, citing some observations of Robbins' own experience, while she countered with observations about systemic problems resulting from a highly competitive system, the cheating that is endemic to competition and problems with standardized testing, arguing that the aforementioned conditions teach misplaced values. A video of this interview is available from Comedy Central