We know there are American equivalents, but I only intuit a fraction of them. When my mother remarried, we moved into a borderland of upper middle class who had some generational connection to the Saltwater Life but were not quite there. My mother and stepfather naturally took to rising and by the time the Official Preppy Handbook came out in 1980 they looked much like the illustrations for their generation. They got invited by friends in Ogunquit and Bar Harbor and Bald Peak and generally moved into some nearer borderland. They pursued no further, because they actually liked the friends they liked and the activities they found fun. Yes, the Wayland-Weston Curling Club was prestigious and they went to bahnspiels in Canada and Scotland, but they also actually enjoyed the sport and felt no need to join the slightly higher-placed clubs. Natural rather than driven elites, but still way out of my range. My disdain always showed, even when it was mixed with envy, and eventually, I could no longer have ever found my way in.
If you don't know, you don't know. And usually, I don't.
When colleges get rid of standardised tests, they increase the power of the unwritten rules. People throw this at them, as if this is news to their admissions offices and must be curtailed. Those offices have long known this, and have long since switched to Plan B. You just don't know it yet, because there are still enough exceptions that it's not easily discovered.
4 comments:
"What if it was the exposure to rich posh people that was a large part of the value of an Oxbridge education, and essential to social mobility?"
I've often thought that the real value of a Harvard education, especially Harvard Law for lawyers, lies in the exposure to those who were always going to ride family connections to wealth and power. After college, you're somebody they knew from college. You skip the filtering processes: if they later want to hire you, instead of sending in a resume and cover letter you are introduced to the hiring manager as an old friend.
The Short List by C. Northcote Parkinson
That's always been a background thing...
I got my first job at UW because my advisor was riding in an elevator with a UW prof he knew who asked if my advisor knew somebody with a specific skillset.
Some years ago, an acquaintance was telling me about how he got his current job (a remarkable and career-defining opportunity) because one of his classmates from Harvard Business School had told him to talk to the owner of the company.
Then, as an aside, he commented that THAT was the value of a Harvard education - in terms of getting an MBA, the subject matter and instruction were good, though not necessarily better than you could get at any number of schools; but the people you went to school with had connections everywhere and, for the rest of your life, you would benefit from access to opportunities that people who went to other schools would never even hear about.
James's story illustrates that this sort of thing doesn't only happen at Harvard. But moving in elite circles matters, and your choice of school is one of the biggest opportunities to affect the "eliteness" of the circles you have access to.
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