Been there, done that, got the t-shirt!
Reflections on the wisdom of branding
by Joanna Diane Caytas
It’s all a walk in the park. At least when the sun is shining and you can be out and about, or when the climate is suited for hoodies. Ah, those hoodies! They make anyone look so Silicon Valley, so brogrammer-like, so collegiate in spirit. I treasure fresh air because I inhabit the ivory tower, or at least a dorm worm suite in those barely aired halls of academe, replete with stuffy knowledge suitable only for being graded on a curve. You know, with girls, curves are a wildly popular thing - with grades, they are not. They show imbalance and obesity, excessive bulges in the middle, of ultimately useless knowledge that is never quite handy when you would need it. Think of all the training for which your employer will have to pay to turn you from a proud law graduate into an even somewhat useful lawyer. These parts of the process of disseminating knowledge seem bizarrely inefficient and somewhat nonsensical, and so it really helps to elope into the park from time to time. Be with squirrels and turtles, shake a leg, stretch a ligament, watch the birds, see incautious fish getting caught and released. Reminds you of voters, doesn’t it? Yeah, that’s how election years go…
But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Rather, let’s look at the unbearable weirdness of branding. Imagine that the very same girl, 5’10”, 140 lbs, elicits starkly different reactions and looks from people depending on… what her t-shirt or hoodie says?! Is that even remotely fathomable for a healthy brain? Of course I am not talking about something even vaguely creative, say, a humorous or prurient or even arguably thoughtful imprint. No, all this is just about the most trivial yawn you can think of when your imagination has already signed off almost completely: a university logo. You don’t believe this makes a difference? Then take the test walk in the park in my shoes. Try 8 ½ for size, but bear in mind that this is also the name of a truly wonderful brasserie at the lower end of the park, a great place for civilized foraging. You may prefer to go there right away, rather than venture with me into the park, but then you’d miss a memorable, odd experience.
First, let’s eliminate the home team: after all, it is neither original nor worth a second look if someone shows up in the park wearing a Columbia shirt. A shirt spelling out Columbia Law School, as opposed to a cryptic “CLS,” gets slightly more attention, even probing looks, especially when worn by somebody who does not look like a lawyer – which would be virtually all 2Ls and 3Ls. But those never wear Columbia Law t-shirts anyway, unless they absolutely ran out of clean clothes. NYU logos seldom venture this far north – or vice versa. Why would they? These guys have much better restaurants and night spots around Washington Square, right at their fingertips. We, on the other hand, have a view. Neither of us has a life while in residence (nor during ‘vacations’). There could be remote geographic legitimacy to wearing a Fordham shirt – especially when the pope is in town or to support Jesuit scholarship.
Remember when suitcases of cosmopolitan travelers still got plastered with exotic stickers of airports and hotels? That was also the last time they built luggage so sturdy and durable that it not only crossed the equator but also the bridge into the 21st century. It could be that school paraphernalia evoke such wistful memories in alumni. But, by and large, they are just variations of the gift shop theme, leftovers from the days when Co-op stores were not yet run by Barnes & Noble – a last refuge from Amazon. The branded stuff they sell is a fool’s tax on collectors and on people who hide under fictitious identities, just like they do on the internet. Sure, everyone has some shirts and hoodies from their own school but most wear them only pretty rarely outside the immediate vicinity of their campus. It’s just not cool, and sometimes it is considered almost gauche. Especially when you attend a school that is on other people’s letter to Santa. For that same reason, some will only say that they went to school by Menlo Park or in New Haven, as if it’s heartless, kinky or sadistic to spell out that cold, unattainable, cruel name. So, yeah, Light Blue at Morningside Heights it is. Of course nobody makes t-shirts with such a discreet logo – they need to go blatantly all the way, with lions, crowns and stuff. On one hand, it may facilitate actual bonding with colleagues because you can recognize them more easily – especially on rare days when your team actually wins, even if that never happens against an “athlete’s school.” Those, I understand, are schools run not so much by deans but by their coaches. On the other hand, you don’t want to incur the wrath of, um, jocks. So everyone who claims a sense of humor almost invariably turns into a collector of collectibles that come without a transcript: memorabilia from other schools. They are very handy because, once you got enough different ones, you can either trade up or down with credible deniability and nobody will be the wiser. “Nah, I did not actually go to Cambridge, that was a gift from an exchange student.” Or: “Sure, I started out at Red Rocks Community College and now I clawed my way into Cooley Law. Obvious, isn’t it?”
Well, few things in life are obvious, especially if you are observant. Because, once you go undercover, in a manner of speaking, you notice that you start getting very different looks and stares and sometimes comments, depending on the logo sported on your bosom. And these reactions are revealing of the starer’s state of mind.
Hiding in plain view works very well: it seems innocuous to wear Dominus illuminatio mea because there are so many bloody Oxford knock-offs that they don’t even command a premium buck at Stanley Market or on Canal Street anymore. There is safety in numbers. And God bless Harvard shirts: faithfully, every year, statistics trumpet how much closer their admission rate has inched to zero. The velocity of the decline allows you to calculate a date when Harvard will have reached negative admission rates. So it becomes pretty safe to hide behind their crest – nobody will believe that you wrapped yourself in anything but a souvenir. Generally speaking, it does not even have to be Harvard. Anything with Veritas in the logo qualifies for the same stealthy purpose – since most will suspect that the wearer could not be farther from the truth. And while you are already at it, dear God, kindly bless other knock-offs, too: they made Vuitton, Cartier, Burberry and Hermes socially ready to wear, without causing a groundhog day for the green-eyed monster. “That’s a fake, right?!” “Gee, of course it is – what do you think, I won the lottery?” Don’t touch my fakes or what you think are fakes – the former serve as life insurance for the latter.
On most occasions, my trusty OSU shirts are nothing less than wonderful. A guarantee for making your personality fade gently into the background, they are a magic tool for turning the topic of conversation from trickier subjects to sports. It takes so very little to relate to real people’s true concerns about higher education. If this is what you aim to achieve, it isn’t rocket science - just mention the Buckeyes.
If you are into rocket science, though, go all the way for an MIT shirt. It is almost guaranteed to inspire awe in the starers and increase your putative IQ by some 50 points in their minds. But beware of the icy looks of real rocket scientists who did not get that coveted admission ticket – you could find yourself unexpectedly in the center of cold fusion.
If you like foreign stuff, do have some sense and stick with the obscure! It suggests you actually left the country (remember, only a record one-third of Americans presently own something called a passport – and that’s already up from 3% not very long ago). Despite such statistics, spelling out University of Tromsø on your pectorals somehow does not really scream privilege. Go figure why, if you consider the cost of living in Norway. Still, for some unfathomable reason, the country is known as home to cute, fuzzy polar bears, reindeer and intoxicated Norsemen. Nobody thinks of it as just another oil sheikdom with fjords populated by salmon, which it actually is. You should still watch out for subtle nuances in your travels - the same logic does not work for the University of Semipalatinsk. Except in Borat movies.
Other places are just too obscure and therefore prone to serious confusion: the University of Vienna (est’d 1365, home to nine Nobel laureates), feels compelled to teach people remedial classes in geography on some of its more informational souvenirs: “No kangaroos in Austria.” I was dumbfounded - who would have guessed? The real crux of American secondary education shows all too often when trying to analyze such labyrinthine details.
This entire logo craze leaves much room for multicultural improvement if we are to become one world at long last: Think college sari, college abaya, or college hula skirt. Dropping out gracefully of those might pose a whole new set of esthetic challenges. At least for girls. Don’t laugh, it is an unresolved and serious concern: far from a minority, we after all account for the majority of zealous customers paying for higher education. Another wonderful proof that doing well in school is no predictor of overall success, at least not by the criteria that made most females take on heavy debt to go to law school in the first place.
Chances are you did it all for nothing because a “university-blind” approach to selection may be coming:
Deloitte, PwC, and in part Ernst & Young in the United Kingdom are ringing in the death of university branding. Having realized that potential and skill matters more than pedigree and is a forward-looking rather than backward-looking yardstick, their recruiters see only resumés with college and graduate schools blacked out. The name of this new game is “contextual information.” Algorithms are to filter out whether a candidate earned unusual accomplishments during his or her time in academia, whether he or she came from a disadvantaged background and nonetheless had achieved success. Which may be reflected in a lot more factors than in graded excellence. Taking into account relative, not merely absolute achievements may have merit, especially in providing a key element of any credible meritocracy: social mobility. A person who performed well coming from an underperforming or educationally deprived area may hold greater growth potential than one who performed very well under conditions that cannot be characterized other than as extremely favorable. Unless a firm hires people who think and innovate differently, come from a plethora of backgrounds and present a significantly varied array of perspectives, it fishes with unconscious bias in an ever-incestuous talent pool. This also requires a departure from cut-off thresholds based on grades or specific red flags.
Of course, another reason for this change of mind among consultancies may be that consulting has consistently dropped in popularity as a career choice of business students in recent years. Deloitte’s study “Talent in Banking” shows management and strategy consulting ahead only of retail or public sector and government agencies – and even that just barely. The unwillingness of the “best and brightest” (by traditional criteria) to seek a career in consulting – a trend also experienced in legal education in recent years – may well have forced consultants to “think different.” In any event, changing and broadening one’s perspective and a departure from same-old, same-old branding routines can only bode well for competition, but also for true innovation in either sector.
It may be truly unheard-of to create a level playing field in recruitment for graduates of Oxbridge, HYSC, les grandes écoles, or a handful of Asian schools with those of more pedestrian institutions of higher learning. It’s blasphemy, yes. But it will either verify or falsify the methods of ranking and prioritizing used to date. Not least, it may result in the loudest wake-up call to actual relevance in higher and professional education. Too much make-work, too much stuff nobody ever uses, too many things that matter not at all outside of academia – much less in practice.
And wasn’t anonymized, randomized verification by testing the essence of the scientific method?
But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Rather, let’s look at the unbearable weirdness of branding. Imagine that the very same girl, 5’10”, 140 lbs, elicits starkly different reactions and looks from people depending on… what her t-shirt or hoodie says?! Is that even remotely fathomable for a healthy brain? Of course I am not talking about something even vaguely creative, say, a humorous or prurient or even arguably thoughtful imprint. No, all this is just about the most trivial yawn you can think of when your imagination has already signed off almost completely: a university logo. You don’t believe this makes a difference? Then take the test walk in the park in my shoes. Try 8 ½ for size, but bear in mind that this is also the name of a truly wonderful brasserie at the lower end of the park, a great place for civilized foraging. You may prefer to go there right away, rather than venture with me into the park, but then you’d miss a memorable, odd experience.
First, let’s eliminate the home team: after all, it is neither original nor worth a second look if someone shows up in the park wearing a Columbia shirt. A shirt spelling out Columbia Law School, as opposed to a cryptic “CLS,” gets slightly more attention, even probing looks, especially when worn by somebody who does not look like a lawyer – which would be virtually all 2Ls and 3Ls. But those never wear Columbia Law t-shirts anyway, unless they absolutely ran out of clean clothes. NYU logos seldom venture this far north – or vice versa. Why would they? These guys have much better restaurants and night spots around Washington Square, right at their fingertips. We, on the other hand, have a view. Neither of us has a life while in residence (nor during ‘vacations’). There could be remote geographic legitimacy to wearing a Fordham shirt – especially when the pope is in town or to support Jesuit scholarship.
Remember when suitcases of cosmopolitan travelers still got plastered with exotic stickers of airports and hotels? That was also the last time they built luggage so sturdy and durable that it not only crossed the equator but also the bridge into the 21st century. It could be that school paraphernalia evoke such wistful memories in alumni. But, by and large, they are just variations of the gift shop theme, leftovers from the days when Co-op stores were not yet run by Barnes & Noble – a last refuge from Amazon. The branded stuff they sell is a fool’s tax on collectors and on people who hide under fictitious identities, just like they do on the internet. Sure, everyone has some shirts and hoodies from their own school but most wear them only pretty rarely outside the immediate vicinity of their campus. It’s just not cool, and sometimes it is considered almost gauche. Especially when you attend a school that is on other people’s letter to Santa. For that same reason, some will only say that they went to school by Menlo Park or in New Haven, as if it’s heartless, kinky or sadistic to spell out that cold, unattainable, cruel name. So, yeah, Light Blue at Morningside Heights it is. Of course nobody makes t-shirts with such a discreet logo – they need to go blatantly all the way, with lions, crowns and stuff. On one hand, it may facilitate actual bonding with colleagues because you can recognize them more easily – especially on rare days when your team actually wins, even if that never happens against an “athlete’s school.” Those, I understand, are schools run not so much by deans but by their coaches. On the other hand, you don’t want to incur the wrath of, um, jocks. So everyone who claims a sense of humor almost invariably turns into a collector of collectibles that come without a transcript: memorabilia from other schools. They are very handy because, once you got enough different ones, you can either trade up or down with credible deniability and nobody will be the wiser. “Nah, I did not actually go to Cambridge, that was a gift from an exchange student.” Or: “Sure, I started out at Red Rocks Community College and now I clawed my way into Cooley Law. Obvious, isn’t it?”
Well, few things in life are obvious, especially if you are observant. Because, once you go undercover, in a manner of speaking, you notice that you start getting very different looks and stares and sometimes comments, depending on the logo sported on your bosom. And these reactions are revealing of the starer’s state of mind.
Hiding in plain view works very well: it seems innocuous to wear Dominus illuminatio mea because there are so many bloody Oxford knock-offs that they don’t even command a premium buck at Stanley Market or on Canal Street anymore. There is safety in numbers. And God bless Harvard shirts: faithfully, every year, statistics trumpet how much closer their admission rate has inched to zero. The velocity of the decline allows you to calculate a date when Harvard will have reached negative admission rates. So it becomes pretty safe to hide behind their crest – nobody will believe that you wrapped yourself in anything but a souvenir. Generally speaking, it does not even have to be Harvard. Anything with Veritas in the logo qualifies for the same stealthy purpose – since most will suspect that the wearer could not be farther from the truth. And while you are already at it, dear God, kindly bless other knock-offs, too: they made Vuitton, Cartier, Burberry and Hermes socially ready to wear, without causing a groundhog day for the green-eyed monster. “That’s a fake, right?!” “Gee, of course it is – what do you think, I won the lottery?” Don’t touch my fakes or what you think are fakes – the former serve as life insurance for the latter.
On most occasions, my trusty OSU shirts are nothing less than wonderful. A guarantee for making your personality fade gently into the background, they are a magic tool for turning the topic of conversation from trickier subjects to sports. It takes so very little to relate to real people’s true concerns about higher education. If this is what you aim to achieve, it isn’t rocket science - just mention the Buckeyes.
If you are into rocket science, though, go all the way for an MIT shirt. It is almost guaranteed to inspire awe in the starers and increase your putative IQ by some 50 points in their minds. But beware of the icy looks of real rocket scientists who did not get that coveted admission ticket – you could find yourself unexpectedly in the center of cold fusion.
If you like foreign stuff, do have some sense and stick with the obscure! It suggests you actually left the country (remember, only a record one-third of Americans presently own something called a passport – and that’s already up from 3% not very long ago). Despite such statistics, spelling out University of Tromsø on your pectorals somehow does not really scream privilege. Go figure why, if you consider the cost of living in Norway. Still, for some unfathomable reason, the country is known as home to cute, fuzzy polar bears, reindeer and intoxicated Norsemen. Nobody thinks of it as just another oil sheikdom with fjords populated by salmon, which it actually is. You should still watch out for subtle nuances in your travels - the same logic does not work for the University of Semipalatinsk. Except in Borat movies.
Other places are just too obscure and therefore prone to serious confusion: the University of Vienna (est’d 1365, home to nine Nobel laureates), feels compelled to teach people remedial classes in geography on some of its more informational souvenirs: “No kangaroos in Austria.” I was dumbfounded - who would have guessed? The real crux of American secondary education shows all too often when trying to analyze such labyrinthine details.
This entire logo craze leaves much room for multicultural improvement if we are to become one world at long last: Think college sari, college abaya, or college hula skirt. Dropping out gracefully of those might pose a whole new set of esthetic challenges. At least for girls. Don’t laugh, it is an unresolved and serious concern: far from a minority, we after all account for the majority of zealous customers paying for higher education. Another wonderful proof that doing well in school is no predictor of overall success, at least not by the criteria that made most females take on heavy debt to go to law school in the first place.
Chances are you did it all for nothing because a “university-blind” approach to selection may be coming:
Deloitte, PwC, and in part Ernst & Young in the United Kingdom are ringing in the death of university branding. Having realized that potential and skill matters more than pedigree and is a forward-looking rather than backward-looking yardstick, their recruiters see only resumés with college and graduate schools blacked out. The name of this new game is “contextual information.” Algorithms are to filter out whether a candidate earned unusual accomplishments during his or her time in academia, whether he or she came from a disadvantaged background and nonetheless had achieved success. Which may be reflected in a lot more factors than in graded excellence. Taking into account relative, not merely absolute achievements may have merit, especially in providing a key element of any credible meritocracy: social mobility. A person who performed well coming from an underperforming or educationally deprived area may hold greater growth potential than one who performed very well under conditions that cannot be characterized other than as extremely favorable. Unless a firm hires people who think and innovate differently, come from a plethora of backgrounds and present a significantly varied array of perspectives, it fishes with unconscious bias in an ever-incestuous talent pool. This also requires a departure from cut-off thresholds based on grades or specific red flags.
Of course, another reason for this change of mind among consultancies may be that consulting has consistently dropped in popularity as a career choice of business students in recent years. Deloitte’s study “Talent in Banking” shows management and strategy consulting ahead only of retail or public sector and government agencies – and even that just barely. The unwillingness of the “best and brightest” (by traditional criteria) to seek a career in consulting – a trend also experienced in legal education in recent years – may well have forced consultants to “think different.” In any event, changing and broadening one’s perspective and a departure from same-old, same-old branding routines can only bode well for competition, but also for true innovation in either sector.
It may be truly unheard-of to create a level playing field in recruitment for graduates of Oxbridge, HYSC, les grandes écoles, or a handful of Asian schools with those of more pedestrian institutions of higher learning. It’s blasphemy, yes. But it will either verify or falsify the methods of ranking and prioritizing used to date. Not least, it may result in the loudest wake-up call to actual relevance in higher and professional education. Too much make-work, too much stuff nobody ever uses, too many things that matter not at all outside of academia – much less in practice.
And wasn’t anonymized, randomized verification by testing the essence of the scientific method?