How Do You Know You’re Elite?

At Colby, our athletics program shapes a lot of our broader experience and our ideas of what it means to belong to the school community. Even though the NESCAC is just a sports conference, it determines who we consider our competition in admissions, facilities, academic rigor etc. The concluding line of the speech at my freshman convocation was “Beat Bowdoin.” And while we compete with these schools, their successes do help us be confident in our own eliteness: If Bowdoin is an elite school, and Colby is considered a direct competitor of Bowdoin’s, then Colby must be elite too.

Croft School also uses partnerships and organizations to make itself elite by association. During some research, I learned that Croft has an established connection with an elite New England boarding school where international royalty and members of prominent American families attended high school. Each year, Croft School participates in an exchange program with the American school where a select group of students visit over their summer vacation (February/March) and participate in the full extent of student life at the host institution: they take a full schedule of classes, play on athletics teams, and stay with the families of day students.

Croft School also plays host to students from the American school when students in the Northern Hemisphere are on summer vacation. The American school’s website advertises the program as an opportunity for all students, regardless of Spanish language ability, to develop into global citizens and participate in social and family life in a foreign country.

By living and learning with elites from another country, students expand their social networks with influential acquaintances. Not only are their host students likely to attend elite colleges and hold positions of power in the future, but their parents and neighbors are often in influential roles in the present. The students from Croft already possess elite social capital within Chile, but the exchange pushes them past national boundaries. They also learn about the cultural artifacts (art, media, etc.) that are popular among elites in other countries. This cultural awareness will facilitate their ability to maintain privilege and power in transnational/international contexts.

The students who participate in the exchange are not the only beneficiaries. The schools themselves use each other to confirm their elite status. By partnering with other institutions that have long histories of serving elite students and families (the American school and Croft have been around since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, respectively), a school shows that it measures up. Since the world of elites is, by nature, a selective and closed community, only those on the inside can determine that someone or something, like a school, belongs. These two schools perform this act of validation for each other: as long as elites see each other as such, they are safe on the inside.