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Notes -
I’ve been thinking about a related question.
Germany certainly has universities of varying prestige, but they don’t vary nearly as much as the gap between the average mediocre college and Stanford, and the best at undergraduate level are also often very large. In several European countries (Italy is another example) course entry thresholds are pretty modest, but the first year gauntlet is extremely hard.
But in all of them - even where there are large gaps in prestige, like in the UK - the boarding school feel of most elite American colleges just isn’t a thing. Even at Oxford, as I understand it. The whole nature of the private liberal arts school is designed to increase the value of elite colleges. You could go to Cambridge or Heidelberg and never encounter the ruling class of that country except maybe very vaguely in passing. Classes are often very large, social circles small, and the few hours you spend a week in education are dwarfed by the rest of life in which all the usual divisions exist. There may be tutorials but hours per week are still much lower than in American colleges. The few elite US colleges that are actual ‘city universities’ (Columbia is probably the best example) are also somewhat like this.
If you go to Harvard or Stanford at undergrad you’re going to meet the kids of the American ruling class. Yeah you’re not going to be best buddies and people still stick to their own kind but it’s an order of magnitude more than in Europe.
Can confirm. I met a shit ton of people far smarter than I could ever be, but the vast vast majority of them were less "elite" than me, in fact, because of my schooling background and family station back home, I was the "child of elites" person in most of my groups (fat load of good it did me though).
I met plenty of people who had studied at Eton and Harrow and Westminster etc. but even they by and large behaved little different from ordinary people (and most of them were sons and daughters of parents who had saved up to give their child a good education rather than anything more); sure the conservative association held their yearly dinner in a grand room at the houses of parliment (with price tag to boot) but the afterparty was a trip to the nightclub where everyone would slum it out with the common populace of London.
To be honest with you I was negatively surprised by how vulgar (used in the original sense of the word) all of it seemed to be, when I matriculated I expected things to be a lot more rarified than they actually were once you stripped away the institutional traditions.
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