Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but having gone to a similar university I suspect that the underwater basketweaving degree from Harvard will come with lucrative enough connections to make up for the lack of actual skills.

Remember, success is way more than half luck. Going to Harvard makes your luck much better.

That Harvard Rolodex will get you a job even if your degree barely certifies that you have a pulse.

But I don't think one enters Harvard committed to taking underwater basketweaving. At least as an undergrad, once you're there, I would assume that, like any college, you have a wide range of courses and majors to choose from, restricted only by needing to follow "X is a prerequisite for Y" structure and possibly being required to take some core classes. (The situation would be different for graduate degrees.) So if you're at Harvard and you decide to take underwater basketweaving, that's on you.

Hmm. I guess maybe there would be cases like "the school requires you to take at least N courses, and you don't want that much workload (or, more charitably, some of your courses are extremely demanding and you want to lighten the load on the rest), so you take some facile courses". Or cases like Feynman taking astronomy and philosophy to satisfy the humanities requirement. But I don't think there's any case where you'd need to major in underwater basketweaving... unless that is the easiest major and that's your criterion. I dunno, if they want an easy major, can it at least be something useful? Perhaps it's good in some sense if the genuinely useful majors are strictly separated from the easy ones? Hmm.

I think "Communications" seems to have that reputation, and a subject by that name does sound useful for being in a company (I have no idea what is actually taught in it). My brother-in-law said he majored in Communications because it had the lightest courseload, so he could work for Microsoft while attending school.

Sure, I agree with that. But the parent was talking about, well, the parents' motivation.

The parents probably recognize that, if their kid fails miserably at Harvard but manages to graduate with a questionably useful degree, they will still succeed because they'll still be able to flex their network to get a job of some kind with a salary.

Once you have a salaried position your life has a step jump in stability.

Exactly. People are not extremely attentive to social status & class-adjacent stuff out of foolishness. This stuff has always been extremely important to everything job/money related.

Human society, and the economy are not rational. Assuming that they are is foolish.

I would say that any parent who outright rejects this logic is a moron too, probably moreso.

The idea that "social desirability" does not reflect actually valuable stuff is foolish. Class exists in some form in every society. People are always hyper-aware of class issues, and it has always been a primary part of the college/career decision process.

In the US we pretend that class doesn’t exist here. We have risen above that, you see, anybody here can become anything they want. Much the same way we pretend that racism doesn’t exist.

Anyone can move up in class, if they want to. We don’t pretend to understand or support those who would take an upper middle class background and then go work in the trades.

In most republics we pretend that class doesn't exist, and it doesn't in the rigid ways that it did previously. It does however, always exist in some form.

In the UK, class is still discernible immediately by accent, schools are mostly segregated by class, etc. In Ireland, it's not like the UK... though some Dublin neighborhoods still have very distinct class accents. Even this is dying off. But.. class still exists in a more amorphous form broadly.

From the US outside looking in there is an ironic mirror of the usual commentary about US vacation time or lack of national healthcare. "Why do you accept this irrelevant bullshit?"

I have seen an apparent consensus that the upper class schools and such focus only on prestiege and signaling and then when they are placed in management by other from the background make a complete hash of it while thinking promoting someone who actually knows what they are doing would be an unthinkable faux pau because they might wear brown shoes in London or worse not coordinate their belt and shoes! It doesn't even seem to be a matter of capital given the fact there are apparently plenty of impoverished "patricians" and working class wealth to invest in and they were marrying into money from outside their silly class frameworks for generations.

It seems to be utterly useless on every level yet society still persists for some daft reason. Why not do away with it? Not in the "Get the gulitiones, senseless violence, and the full circle revolution started!" way but "A ignore the useless twits to stew in their own resulting irrelevance." way.

France is much better at pretending race doesn’t exist

==Much the same way we pretend that racism doesn’t exist.==

We even take the next step of referring those who point out racism as the actual racists.

I don’t disagree with you, but I think it’s an extremely common viewpoint among the Upper Middle Class and potential Ivy Leaguers.