Assuming you have the choice, would you advise someone to go to a school where the rich and famous go, or to a school where the smart kids go?

In my youth I had an opportunity to attend a public school in England for a year. Americans know these schools as private schools. I.e., you have to pay for them. This school wasn’t an Eton or other famous English boarding school, but it is always telling me now, when it wants my money, that it produces the most A-levels of any school in England.

Now I don’t know if anyone pays attention to that kind of thing in England. So my question is whether people value a “name” more than the numbers, or whether the name always reflects the numbers.

In the US, I know a number of people who attended Harvard and really didn’t like it. They were middle class people and they found Harvard to be too socially isolating. Of course, they didn’t have to go to the brand name Ivy Leagues schools. There are other schools that turn out large numbers of PhDs or engineers or who-knows-what. For that matter, there are also party schools like the University of Miami.

If you go to a school with the rich and famous, you have a chance of making social connections with them, or of being snubbed by them. If you get into a school where you have to be smart, you will probably get a good education, regardless of social connections.

How would you evaluate the relative importance of social connections vs education in your country? What schools represent each in your mind?