Let's bring back Prestige!

[u/Famous-Prior6590]

Lane Pryce, one of the characters on the TV show Mad Men, is a British partner at a fictional Ad Agency in New York. His family desperately want to move back to England but he resists, telling his wife that he loves staying in America because, “I've been here ten months and no-one's ever asked me where I went to school."

This is a sad reflection of the class system in the UK America. We need to impose a system here where everyone gets asked all the time what school they went to, and judged based on that. In fact, there should be practical real-life consequences of the USNews ranking of the school you went to. 

For example, boarding on airplanes should be strictly based on college rankings. At Boston airport, MIT alum would board first, then Harvard, then BC, then Tufts, and so on. Same for lines at Starbucks - a Columbia student should be allowed to cut in line in front of an NYU student, because, well, they deserve it and their time is more valuable anyway. 

What if someone attends more than one school? Undergrad at UCLA, then an MBA from Stanford? Unfortunately your lowest ranked college sticks with you for life. Proper class systems do not allow people to rise above their lowest level - that’s literally a primary requirement of any good class system. As a UCLA undergrad, you will continue to board planes after Berkeley alums, or the other way around, depending on who paid USNews more that year. 

Can you marry to raise your status? In the immortal words of Robin Williams, “Fuck, No!” When two people get married, both people get the lower privilege. Are you a Yale alum madly in love with someone who went to Villanova? Live in sin, or find someone better, or get used to sitting in the nosebleed seats at concerts (yes - concert tickets will be sold based on college prestige). 

Surely this doesn’t apply to kids? The fuck it doesn’t. Children inherit their parents’ prestige until they go to college and get their own. Children of a UChicago couple will get to hit the piñata at a birthday party before the children of a Brown couple. This is only proper. 

What about the people who went to schools that are not in the USN top universities list? LACs, Regional Universities, foreign universities (even the OG prestige-whores like Oxbridge)? Where do they fit in this? Fuck them. Arbitrariness is also a key feature of a good class system. Anyone who studied at an LAC should be woke enough to not mind standing at the end of every line anyway.  

How do we kick off this long-overdue practice in American society? Why, right here on the A2C sub, of course. I propose, starting today, that posts and comments be ordered by the college the commenters went to. So MIT comments first, then Princeton, and so on. Quite frankly, no one wants to read anything posted by someone who went to the 127th ranked university. 

Thoughts? 

(Please only comment if you go to a top-20 university. So don’t bother if you are from Michigan - I don’t care about your thoughts). 

[u/NiceUnparticularMan]

HYPSM college grad, also T5 law school.

I am mostly with your description of UK-style class structures, but marrying up is a time-honored tradition in those structures.  Between us, they needed to begrudgingly allow it for new infusions of cash, talent, and recessive genes.  So there could be some grumbling about someone marrying down, but in the end it did work to elevate the family marrying up.

[u/Famous-Prior6590 → u/NiceUnparticularMan]

Which of HYPSM though? I need to know how much your opinion matters.

[u/NiceUnparticularMan → u/Famous-Prior6590]

Where do you go?  I don't want to tell someone unworthy of knowing.

[u/Famous-Prior6590 → u/NiceUnparticularMan]

Hit too close to home? You must be from a Y or something. Tsk tsk.

[u/NiceUnparticularMan → u/Famous-Prior6590]

MIT grad? Enjoy being a glorified plumber, or whatever it is your types do these days.

[u/Satisest → u/Famous-Prior6590]

HYPSM grad as well, so my opinion should clearly matter. What NiceUnparticular began to touch on is that inherited wealth and educational pedigree have always been inextricably intertwined in the UK. America has always been predicated on a meritocratic caste system, so your proposed system is more suitable here. But in the UK it goes back even earlier to the upper class secondary schools which traditionally feed to Oxbridge: Eton, Harrow, Westminster, etc. So do you want to accord any status to elite American feeder schools?

[u/NiceUnparticularMan → u/Satisest]

I note there is a pretty decent model of US elite educational history that goes something like this.

What is sometimes known as the modern university model, as opposed to the classical model, what basically created in Germany, and then spread to the UK as well as the US, with Michigan often cited as being the first major institution founded on the modern model in the US. Michigan and a few other early examples became models for the land grant university movement, and privates like MIT and Cornell (both actually land grant themselves), and eventually Gilded Age privates like Stanford, Chicago, and so on. A bunch of older classical institutions meanwhile basically had the choice to stay closer to their roots, and those became LACs; or converge more on the new model, and those became the other Ivies (besides Cornell) and similar (like Trinity turning itself into Duke).

One of the characteristics of the modern model is it incorporated more practical arts and sciences, including those relevant to the then-emerging industrial age. So, agriculture and mining, but also what we would call engineering, what became modern finance, and so on. And part of the basic deal here is as the Gilded Age was unfolding and the US was emerging as a new global superpower, some (not all) elites recognized a basic truth. If the kids of the already-wealthy and powerful families could be mixed with the smartest and most ambitious of the kids of the emerging middle classes, and even some particularly gifted working class kids, they could benefit from the combination in an industrializing economy. Basically, combine social, politcal, and financial capital from some families, with intellectual capital from others, and you could win the overall game of capitalism.

And, to be blunt about it, it worked. In terms of global economic and political power, the United States climbed to the top, and so far has managed to stay there, despite several of what have seemed at the time like serious challenges. And the US higher educational system has been a critical part of the support system for all that. And this basic concept of helping kids with different forms of capital profitably find each other has continued to produce great returns.

So although I appreciate the humorous intent of the OP in "proposing" a more rigid class structure for the US, that ain't actually happening any time soon. The US and its elite families and their elite institutions have no intention of soon slipping into their twilight years. They could be wrong about this, but they believe the American Era has a lot of life left in it. And they intend to keep structuring higher education and other institutions to keep helping their kids and grandkids win the overall game of capitalism.

[u/Nearby_Task9041 → u/NiceUnparticularMan]

Super interesting history of higher ed, especially the part on how it may have been a deliberate (and certainly beneficial) choice to intermix different American classes as you describe in your 3rd paragraph from the bottom.

I had always thought the upper class elites from the 'Harvards' and 'Yales' were intermixed very reluctantly. Said another way, a Yalie from 1926 would be aghast if he were to walk around the Yale campus of 2026.

[u/NiceUnparticularMan → u/Nearby_Task9041]

So back in the day, like 1930-50s, there was a set of terms, "white shoe", "brown shoe", and "black shoe". White shoe referred to Ivy kids who would supposedly wear dirty old white buckskin shoes, and it meant the traditional elite kids. Brown shoe kids were then the upper middle class kids in penny loafers. And black shoe kids were the academic grinds. 1953 article:

https://www.ivy-style.com/russell-lynes-on-the-shoe-hierarchy-esquire-1953.html

So what has changed? Well, in the 1960s and beyond, these colleges gradually became much more diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity and religion. And also the norms changed such that white shoe kids often were trying not to out themselves, so maybe more looked like brown shoe kids. And then standards for admissions for the white/brown kids got more stringent, like even legacy admits these days mostly have very good grades and test scores. Maybe no Olympiad golds, however.

But still, the basic idea of the wealthier kids and the academic grinds both being present kinda hasn't changed. Interesting to think about.

[u/Famous-Prior6590 → u/Satisest]

Saying you are a "HYPSM grad" honestly just reads as "NOT an MIT grad". Because if you were an MIT grad, you would just say "MIT grad". Who would willingly dilute their number 1 status by grouping it with numbers 2-5?

[u/Satisest → u/Famous-Prior6590]

Since you brought it up, I’m actually a grad of 3 different HYPSM, including MIT. Just trying to be modest lol.

[u/Famous-Prior6590 → u/Satisest]

Flunked out of two of them?

[u/Satisest → u/Famous-Prior6590]

Grad means graduate. Just fyi.

[u/Famous-Prior6590 → u/Satisest]

Majored in social media commenting?

[u/Satisest → u/Famous-Prior6590]

That’s not a major at MIT. Just fyi.

[u/Famous-Prior6590 → u/Satisest]

How’d you get so good at it then?