ABSTRACT
Every university student is a presumptive member of an élite, in that the English system of education grades ability and distributes opportunity so as to restrict the most prestigeful careers more and more exclusively to successful graduates. A university degree, or its equivalent, would force them to reinterpret where they stood in terms of social stratification. They could hardly enjoy all the opportunities their education offered, without in part repudiating the society in which they grew up, and so disparaging their own roots. They were gradually forced to realize that the classlessness of student society was itself misleading, since the bonds which override conventional class barriers also forged an educational élite. Old friends no longer shared their interests or accepted them as equals, and in industry they discovered the segregated canteens and the sour antagonisms of the shop floor. This divorce of egalitarian idealism from the realities of a class-conscious nation showed, too, in their comments on accents.
