Originally Posted by aquinas
Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
Yes, but only if you happen to be named Tiger von Preeiminence. grin

That's His Excellency Tiger Lord von Preeminence IV to us plebs. wink

Pardon my French, but this whole academic prestige-hounding is about as tasteful as a nouveau-riche talking loudly at a party of old money about his finances. If you have to flaunt it, it means too much to you and is too novel to be "really" you. Groucho Marx and all that.
As a practical matter, an advantage of attending a prestigious school is that you don't need to flaunt your intelligence (or whatever it is that prestigious schools are supposed to signify). Every college graduate puts the school he attended on his resume. So you get to "flaunt" without boasting. If it were commonplace for employers to explicitly ask about SAT/ACT and other test scores, and for people to put those numbers on their resumes, the importance of attending a "name" school (which may be exaggerated in any case) would fall. Listing SAT scores on resumes and employers requesting them does happen, but it's not the norm. The College Board sends score reports only to colleges, not to employers. If it were more widely understood that the SAT is largely an IQ test and that IQ predicts job performance better than most other variables, the perceived need to attend an elite school (or to attend college at all, for that matter) would dwindle.

Schools maintain records of who attended and graduated from them. I think they should maintain records of who they admitted, regardless of whether they attended. People could use "got into X" as a credential. I doubt my suggestion will be taken up.