The United Kingdom has had 15 prime ministers since the end of World War II. Three (Winston Churchill, James Callaghan, and John Major) did not go to college. One (Gordon Brown) studied history at Edinburgh University. The other 11 all went to Oxford.

This extraordinary monopoly sets Britain apart from the rest of the Anglosphere and, indeed, from most of the developed world. You meet a lot of Americans in senior positions who have been educated at places you have never heard of. A dozen U.S. schools can legitimately claim to be at the top of the tree. But in Britain, two universities have a cachet that the others lack — one of those two (Cambridge) doesn’t do politics, at least not in the way that its rival does.