Class Warfare: E Pluribus Impera: Getting Your Ticket Punched

This Thanksgiving friends from New Mexico arrived and in their story the Phantom thinks there is a lesson, somewhere.

Every Sunday, for as long as the Phantom can remember, his parents read aloud from the Sunday New York Times wedding announcements.  One after another, the resumes of the newlyweds were spread out in the living room air, like banners of victorious legions, with the lineage dating back to the Mayflower, then the names of the schools, Harvard, Yale, Princeton during the 50's,  with Dartmouth, Stanford, Smith, Holyoke, Bryn Mahr, Wellesley, Swarthmore filtering in over the next decades.  And as the Phantom picked up the tradition in the 80's and 90's, as the Society pages changed, and the photos were no longer just the bride, and the brides no longer just white Anglo Saxon women, but Asian, and more recently Black, the announcements of arrival at the top echelon  of society changed, and now the pictures were of both bride and groom and even more recently of bride and bride and groom and groom.  

For my parents, who were born in America, where their parents were not, these pages from the newspapers helped them understand how this country worked. You are Christian, white, and preferably English, Irish or Scot or French or Scandinavian. That was enough in the 1930's and 1940's--America was less a meritocracy; people were born into privilege. But then meritocracy arrived as a tidal force, and you had to be not just white and WASPy but you had to work hard and get good grades and then you had to score high on the SATs.  And then you got into Yale, and your ticket was punched. You got that Harvard sheepskin and they gave you a job with a salary that put you into the top 10% of all earners. Your ticket was punched, and life was on Easy Street, with little effort required after that. 

At least that was the myth parents believed in.

Now, you see in the resumes the girl who from age 5 started on a road to concert violin, who became first  violin in the Shaker Heights youth orchestra, who was captain of her high school soccer team, who traveled to Kenya on her Spring vacation to work in a village teaching water purification, who relentlessly built her resume, got into Princeton, then on to Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons,  and even that wasn't enough, she got a Masters of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, then spent a year at Oxford getting a totally superfluous degree in narrative health care.  Finally, she did her orthopedics residency at The Hospital for Special Surgery, before taking a year off to found a non government organization for delivery of orthopedic services to underserved populations in Chevy Chase, Maryland and Gross Point, Michigan and Scarsdale, New York.  She is marrying a Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton/Harvard/Cambridge who works for Goldman Saks.  They will live happily ever after, raising blond, high scoring violinist varsity soccer players, and they will have homes on the Upper West Side and East Hampton. 

These are admirable people, with all the right stuff. At least, that's what the Phantom grew up believing.

Until his own children lived parts of those lives and the Phantom became acquainted with the real people behind those resumes. 

But now he spends time with his friends from New Mexico. The pater familias dropped out of college. He worked in a plant which built airplane engines and he did work which required astonishing skill and knowledge. If he did not do his job right, three hundred people fell out of the sky to earth in a calamity which would make Daedalus and Icarus look like a warm up act.

His son is an engineer. Applying from New Mexico, he was admitted to Princeton and MIT, but Drexel gave him a full ride for a combined program which graduated him with a BS and Masters and a guaranteed full time job with a large power company.  Those names "Princeton" and "MIT" would have got him into the pages of the New York Times, some day, but he did not need the Times.  He is an engineer and he will never have trouble getting a job or sustaining a career. As was true for his father, he will not have to worry about being unemployed. He will only have to think about which problems interest him most and which jobs excite him most. 

While the Phantom's parents, who were word people, verbal people, lived with the searing memory of the Depression, and the fear of being out of work, these numbers people, these technicians and engineers do not worry about unemployment, or the names of schools which certify them as geniuses. They do not worry at all. They simply think about the next job.

And the father changes his own brake pads, and drives a Jaguar, which he purchased new after retiring at age 54, after 32 years at the same company, with a good pension. He and his wife travel three months a year and they visit their sons, who have every prospect of lifelong employment in professions which continue to amuse them. The father, without ever having graduated from Harvard, retired 10 years earlier than his siblings, all of whom graduated from schools with cachet--Mount Holyoke, Berkeley. His siblings had their tickets punched, but talk to them about their careers in law, obstetrics and trade association work, careers filled with frustration and stress,albeit some satisfaction and financial reward.

The fact is,  prediction of future success is a dicey proposition. 

And when it comes to careers in technical areas, in science, medicine, engineering, the banners you see waved from the Society pages mean little.  Academic pedigrees ain't what they used to be, if they ever were.