(FORTUNE Magazine) – THE DECADE that just wound down has tweaked awake an old ganglion most Americans prefer to leave at rest: class consciousness. Unprecedented numbers of people got rich, and many are eager to convert their dollars into status. Some go for glitter -- yachts, art-stuffed condos, watches with more digits on the pricetag than on the dial. Others try to spritz themselves with the subtler colognes that evoke old money. The number of registered polo players has doubled since 1980. Fox hunting is drawing a big new following, and waiting lists at country clubs have been growing for a decade. The status seeking raises a few questions. For the newly rich: Where is the boundary that separates the upper class from the merely rich? Can I cross it -- or do I want to? For everyone else: Are we becoming a class-polarized society? Appearances to the contrary, the answer to the broad question is no. America has never been as stratified as most other countries, and important social and business changes that began with World War II are making it increasingly meritocratic. More Americans than ever got college degrees, and with them, career and social mobility. Increasingly, professionally managed corporations have supplanted dynastic, family-run companies. The civil rights movement and antiestablishment sentiment of three decades ago sharpened disdain of inherited privilege, even among many of the wellborn. Yet it is also true that many of the Eighties arrivistes are eager to consolidate their social positions. That's an irony, considering that these baby-boomers prospered precisely because of the shift away from aristocracy and toward meritocracy. Says E. Digby Baltzell, a Philadelphia sociologist and analyst of the upper class: ''This is a generation desperately yearning for class.'' Can they attain it? Not easily. Upper class in America is a vague status derived mostly from the accomplishments and money of ancestors, not of the living individual. This means megabucks alone won't get people in. Says Cleveland Amory, who writes about the upper class: ''Many people can make a fortune. Only a very few can found a family. '' Nelson Aldrich, related to the Winthrops who founded Massachusetts and to the Rockefellers, says the age of the money wins you more points than its size: ''Time or wealth. Which is more important in people's perception of class? There has to have been wealth, but it's time mostly.'' ) Personality and demeanor figure too. The products of old money are understood to have had the time and resources to appreciate the arts and to learn manners. (Aspirants seeking to short-cut the process can hire consultants; see box.) Unlike the patriarch who ruthlessly clawed for his fortune, the scion is relieved of the need to scramble. He or she is therefore presumed, however wrongly, to be relaxed, ethical, and nonchalant. The most prominent arbiter of class, the Social Register, is not a chronicle of achievement but a directory of who begat or married whom. The Register's staff declines to explain the rules by which people win admission (current membership: some 30,000 families). Colleges, clubs, and yacht size all seem to matter -- they are duly noted -- but the guide pays so much attention to bloodlines it is nicknamed the Stud Book. Plebeians can get in, however, if they can persuade five Register-ed people to nominate them -- and if the anonymous admissions committee approves. Brides or grooms of members also need five recommendations, but usually get in. Oh, and Presidents of the United States are always listed. What won't win the admiration of the upper class is the opulent living so often embraced by the newly wealthy. It may just provoke their irritation. Many old-line polo players avoid the Florida clubs crowded with big-spending newcomers, preferring quieter clubs in Colorado and Wyoming, says Norman Brinker, CEO of Chili's, a Dallas-based restaurant chain. Besides, lavish spending has always been declasse and may even suggest that the spender doesn't have real wealth at all. ''The typical millionaire is not into status,'' says Thomas Stanley, chairman of the Affluent Market Institute in Atlanta, which studies lifestyles of the 1.5 million families with net worths of $1 million or more. Sniffs a Mayflower type whose grandfather was called the richest man in New England: ''I don't know anybody who drives a Mercedes.'' The gaudy spenders are usually those in jobs with high prestige and fairly high incomes, of whom society expects a certain display. Old-shoe shabbiness in a doctor, for instance, may suggest incompetence and scare off patients. ''Physicians tend to live up to social expectations,'' Stanley says. ''Same with vice presidents making $150,000 a year. They feel they have to maximize consumption.'' Ethnicity and religion still play roles, though WASPiness is no longer mandatory. Suspicion of Catholics faded after John F. Kennedy was elected President. Being Jewish may be more of an impediment than it was in the 1870s. Jews helped found the exclusive California Club in Los Angeles and were members of the Union League of Philadelphia after the Civil War. But when large numbers of Jews began emigrating from Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism flourished. ''There are still places where being Jewish is a handicap,'' says Robert Christopher, author of Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America's Power Elite. Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians remain mostly outside the circle. ANY PRETENDER to the upper class is aware of the importance of attending the right schools -- a score of prep schools and a handful of Ivy League and other old private colleges. When immigrant rabble began flooding Eastern cities 150 years ago, frightened upper-class parents established prep schools in safe, pastoral settings. For later generations, admissions criteria came to reflect the presence of alumni in the family as well as the ability to pay steep tuition -- brains were not always obligatory. So prep school attendance hinted strongly of old and considerable wealth. Since Ivy League colleges also valued an applicant's money and parentage, preppies were particularly welcome. As recently as the 1940s, half the graduates of the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey went on to Princeton. Nearly half the students at Williams College in the late 1960s were prep school grads. Much of that has changed. By the 1970s, Ivy League colleges were looking for aptitude and achievement, and offering financial aid to get the best students. Since prep schools are often measured by their ability to feed students to the Ivy League, they had to do the same. Now almost a third of the 980 students at Phillips Exeter Academy get financial aid, says Kendra Stearns O'Donnell, principal of the 209-year-old school, and nearly 250 are ''people of color.'' NONETHELESS, schooling has become an important talisman to latter-day seekers after class. Observes child psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles: ''What you're getting is a self-conscious meritocratic snobbery tied up with fancy schools.'' Adds Fred A. Hargadon, dean of admissions at Princeton, not approvingly: ''A degree from a prestigious school is as clear a status symbol for class as we have.'' Those who do not have the degree try hard to get it for the kids. Up until now, such schooling does seem to have enhanced prospects for success. More than 10% of the present and former FORTUNE 500 CEOs surveyed in a recent poll graduated from Ivy League schools. Surely, not all those are from the aristocracy, and it is not clear that the education they got was that superior. Indeed, a recent survey by Standard & Poor's showed that the City University of New York has edged out Yale as the leading supplier of high corporate executives. But the credentials still count disproportionately -- a residue, perhaps, of the days when being born into the upper class led more or less painlessly through the hallowed institutions and into an office among the business aristocracies of yore. An exemplar of that era is James F. Bodine, the son of an old and wealthy Philadelphia family who graduated from Harvard business school in 1948. Bodine sought employment advice from banker friends of his father in Philadelphia, and one of his first visits was to William Fulton Kurtz, chief executive of First Pennsylvania Bank, the best man at his father's wedding. ''We were talking, and suddenly Kurtz stood up and started dusting off the seat he'd been sitting in. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me, 'I'm getting it ready for you. You'll be sitting here some day.' '' Kurtz was right. Bodine became president of First Pennsylvania in 1972. Says he: ''My experience wasn't that unusual at that time.'' Not unusual at all. By 1980 at the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, a big and venerable savings bank, four of the previous five CEOs had gone to Princeton -- and all had been members of Ivy, the most exclusive of the university's fraternity-like eating clubs. Old-line investment banks were class-conscious too, deliberately seeking polished Ivy Leaguers with degrees from top business schools. Says management consultant Donald J. Petrie, once head of personnel at Brown Brothers Harriman and later executive vice president at U.S. Trust: ''Sometimes if a job candidate's grades weren't so good but he had the right education and background, we'd bend a little to get him in.'' Today's job seekers can't count on such grease. Michael Useem of the University of Pennsylvania and Jerome Karabel of Berkeley studied 2,700 managers at 208 major corporations. The results, reported in 1986: For a high- ranking executive bucking for CEO, graduation from an elite prep school or a listing in the Social Register won't provide any advantage over his corporate peers -- if all have degrees from top colleges. Among the CEOs of the top 50 FORTUNE 500 companies last year, only James W. Kinnear at Texaco ( was in the Social Register. Just one head of the top 25 banks was in the Register -- Lewis T. Preston at J.P. Morgan & Co. -- and he stepped down in January. In other ways, class still has its uses. Useem and Karabel report that such executives with high social standing are 58% more likely to win multiple directorships on outside boards than other well-educated competitors, and 76% more likely to become a leader of a powerful business association. A high-status board of directors -- with members of patrician background, great wealth, or seats on numerous charitable and corporate boards -- can also delay or thwart bankruptcies and hostile takeovers. Richard D'Aveni, a professor at Dartmouth's Amos Tuck business school, studied 57 big bankruptcies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He found that by the time creditors shut down companies with elite boards, the companies had deteriorated more than those with ordinary boards. ''If you're trying to predict bankruptcy, about two-thirds of the behavior of bankers can be explained by the financial data,'' he says. ''But a third comes from information about the status of the company's board.'' Corporate raiders also tend to avoid companies with high-status boards, apparently figuring they have the connections that help mobilize money and lawyers better. Even the nouveaux who don't expect to wind up on corporate boards sense that they may gain a kind of tenure by breaking into the upper crust. Members of the newly swollen upper-middle class are deathly afraid their status and accomplishments cannot be preserved or passed on to the next generation. And with good reason. ''The professional and managerial group is still the middle class, and its only capital is knowledge and skill,'' says Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Fear of Falling, a recent book on anxiety and elitism in the professional middle class. ''Their capital is far more evanescent than wealth, and must be renewed in each individual through fresh effort.'' Never mind that social stature is less than ever a shield against competition, or that real class is a matter of conduct -- the kindness and sportsmanship that is equally scarce and valuable among bons vivants, executives, and ironworkers. Unless and until the urge to gain purchase in hierarchies vanishes from the catalogue of human conduct, people will struggle to outshine their peers. The options open to today's new American wealthy, however, may suggest the shape of social hierarchies to come. IN BETWEEN the newly successful and the old money is ''society,'' a neutral zone where the two groups rub elbows. In most cities, society consists of people raising funds for charities that benefit the arts or medicine -- events that have replaced the extravagant private dinner parties of earlier generations. Getting ahead requires not bloodlines but some combination of what Julia Hansen, president of the Drama League in New York, calls ''the three W's: work, wisdom, or wealth.'' Aspirants should at least be able to raise money, Hansen suggests. Every player eventually bumps into limits. Even those whose ancestors came on the Mayflower are looked down upon by offspring of the tonier crowd who arrived a few years later on the Arbella. But for those whose hearts are set on a perch in the aristocracy, a few words of advice. If you contribute enough money and aid to the institutions that affect the quality of life in a city, the Old Guard will notice. Peers may think you a social climber, and your children may be embarrassed. Keep at it. Assuming anybody still cares, the grandchildren might even call you an aristocrat.