The parent comment fails to rings true to me in the case of the three European countries I have experience with, the UK, France, and Portugal. All three are in many ways even more obsessed with class-based academic hierarchies. For instance, students of Portugal&#x27;s oldest university (Universidade de Lisboa) regularly wear 18th century style robes and were almost universally considered to be snobby rich kids by the Portuguese people I talked to about it. Oxbridge and the ancient English public schools that feed into it (Eton, Harrow, etc) are even more pedigree-obsessed than their US equivalents. And by all first-hand accounts I&#x27;ve heard, the French Écoles des Hautes Études tend to be filled with urban elites bound for government posts.<p>Maybe Germany or Scandinavian countries are different but I think that being obsessed with academic prestige is pretty universal in the developed world, it&#x27;s just that US universities like Harvard or Stanford have emerged as focal points for this global obsession.