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Comment by withad | Hacker News Reader

There's a certain prestige attached to some very famous, expensive private schools (called public schools in England alone, never quite worked out why). The number of Eton graduates running the country comes up a lot, for example.

But other than that, no one really.

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They're called public schools in England because free and tax-funded education is a relatively new phenomenon. At a time when people could choose between private tuition at home and religious tuition in classrooms, public schools offered a classroom education to any fee-paying member of the public, regardless of creed.

>There's a certain prestige attached to some very famous, expensive private schools (called public schools in England alone, never quite worked out why). The number of Eton graduates running the country comes up a lot, for example.

That exists here in America too. Harvard and Yale account for quite a lot of our top executive and judicial branch posts. Most famously, every one of the 9 members of the Supreme Court is either from Harvard Law School or Yale Law School. In their own way, Harvard and Yale are America's Eton - where future leaders go to hobnob with other future leaders.

Yes, but Harvard and Yale are higher education institutions whereas Eton is a secondary education institution. That was hugh3's point: "the British elite will judge you not only by your university but by your high school."

I want to say the English equivalent of America's Ivy League universities like Harvard and Yale are its older private universities like Oxford and Cambridge, but the truth is the reverse (Oxford, for example, dates back to about the 9th century!)

Our Eton would be Andover.

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