Word: upper-class
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Next to good grades, the factories list "energy" and "personality" as the main criteria for judging prospects. Some "white-shoe outfits" (so called because white bucks were once standard footgear on Ivy League campuses) still cherish a preference for an upper-class family background. It also helps to be free of conspicuous eccentricities: a facial tic, a squeaky voice or a gaudy necktie can bar a bright applicant, and even too much library pallor may arouse suspicion. In response to a Harvard Law School questionnaire on what it was looking for in graduates, a New York firm curtly replied, "Byron...
...light district runs for block after block through the center of town, and heavily mascaraed male and female prostitutes try to entice passers by into their "cages"-narrow stalls with wooden barred doors and a single bed. The cage dwellers charge only 42? per customer, but there are also upper-class brothels where Anglo-Indian girls receive patrons in high-ceilinged boudoirs with brilliant red curtains. Many of Bombay's estimated 70,000 whores are Devadasis, who practice prostitution in the name of religion. The custom dates back to the 3rd century, and, in its present form, Devadasi parents...
...dispersion is higher standards at the Big Three schools and more scholarships for gifted poor boys. Bright scholars have driven out dull scions. As one result, says Hawes, the country is getting "a new set of socially desirable colleges that has some of the flavor of the old upper-class institutions, but less of their academic rigor." More important, the competition is upgrading society itself. Says Hawes: "It could not be said of any period up through the 1940s that most young members of the upper class had to pursue rigorous intellectual training before they could take responsible stations...
Paying the Bill. Latin Americas Catholic universities will probably never rival the national universities in size. Since the church schools seldom get support from the state, they must charge tuition that sometimes runs to ten times that of public universities. Their enrollment runs heavily to middle-and upper-class students...
...George is a shambling compendium of symbolic British upper-class weaknesses-most of them unwittingly acquired, along with his fringe status as a gentleman, to appease the memory of his socially insecure, non-U mother. He has never held a real job. He is sterile. For years he has been trading on a gentleman's voice and a gentleman's manners, and the kind of charm which, like the ?400 a year income he inherited during World War II, no longer goes as far as it once did. "At some point, now impossible to define," he reflects...