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

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'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've heard, the French Écoles des Hautes Études tend to be filled with urban elites bound for government posts. Maybe Germany or Scandinavian countries are different but I think that being obsessed with academic prestige is pretty universal in the developed world, it's just that US universities like Harvard or Stanford have emerged as focal points for this global obsession.