Graduation season is upon us, and with it a ritual that did not exist a generation ago. In recent years, thousands of high schools have built out something called “Decision Day”: an event where seniors arrive in college sweatshirts, assemblies are staged, matriculation lists are published, and social media accounts celebrate elite acceptances with logos and school colors. Parents film it. Administrators promote it. Local news covers it.The ritual is presented as a celebration. It functions as something else: a public ranking of adolescents by institutional prestige, staged and amplified by the very schools that claim to be forming them.Walk through any competitive high school this month, and the scene is familiar. Seniors line the hallways in college sweatshirts, posing for photos in front of pennants and step-and-repeat backdrops the school has set up for the occasion. A senior in crimson draws a small crowd. A senior in the navy with an interlocking logo draws another. A senior in a sweatshirt from a state university an hour down the highway poses too, and the photo is taken, and everyone moves on a little faster. The students register the difference. They have been registering it for years.