Just wanted to thank everyone who replied to this thread that I created a few weeks ago, right before I disappeared back into my real life. My CC participation is lumpy at times, but I really appreciate the responses.
It looks like it turned into two threads 
I want to respond to some of the specific posts, but for now, I just wanted to post some general responses.
First of all, I wanted to make clear that I wasn’t serious at all about adding the “accepted to schools” to the resume.
I was just trying to make a point. The Admitted Certificates at Harvard is funny, though.
I find name dropping obnoxious, but I do want my daughter’s prospective employers to know how hard she worked in high school. Going to a college that required that kind of hard work to get in, is a way to convey that information WITHOUT name dropping. I guess that’s the whole thing I’m struggling with.
When I got back on today, I read through the first half of the closed thread “Upper Middle Class Frustration”.
Reading some of the posts on there cleared something up in my mind about what prestige means to me. So I thought I’d post that here. I realized that the only reason prestige matters to me is that it signals high achievement in high school.
People on the other thread mentioned the fanciness of the elite schools, and I think someone compared it to valuing designer bags or designer clothing. Those aspects of the elite schools don’t matter to me at all. In fact, they’re a turn off. I just visited a college with my daughter and she really liked the look of the kids. It’s not that I disliked the way they looked, but I smelled money and privilege, and it turned me off. I worry that she wouldn’t be happy if she were surrounded by a bunch of super wealthy kids, but who knows.
Anyway, I might be wrong about this, but I think that some of the negative reactions some people on here have to other people valuing prestigious schools might be similar to my reaction to the kids that I saw as wealthy and shallow. But there’s a big difference between valuing a prestigious(I’ll call it high stats) school for what it says about the circles you travel in, and valuing it for what it says about your academic achievements and the academic achievements of the kids you competed with, while getting whatever GPA is on your resume.
The stats of the kids at Villanova are a good bit higher than the stats of the kids at Fairfield. It’s A/A- kids versus B+ kids. That’s why the difference matters to me. I think they both have their share of wealthy kids. A better comparison might be Trinity College in Connecticut and Binghamton. The stats of the kids at Binghamton are higher than those of the kids at Trinity(59 Points higher on both SAT sections combined), but Trinity has a lower acceptance rate(33% versus 42%) and Trinity is probably considered more prestigious and more fancy by many people.
I think the Trinity kind of prestige is the kind that many people outside of the Northeast get turned off by. They see Northeasterners as a bunch of status-obsessed, image-conscious phonies. But I think most people here are probably more like me. I think they value a lot of the private schools here because they have higher average stats than the public schools. There’s nothing elitist or snobby about that.