Every day, from the time we groggily hit the snooze buttons on our alarm clocks ’til we fall back into bed at night, the choices we make define us. It’s not just the big, life-altering decisions that have the power to change our lives forever; the small things, the little details, that make us who we are can contribute to how others perceive us and function as a sign of who we are, who we have been, and who we might grow to be. While it might seem cliché to say that first impressions are everything, appearances at first sight do play a large role in such self-determination. And it is clothes which contribute to the making of our appearances.

Attending Oxford, a university in an ancient city more than 3,500 miles away from the place I call home, has only given greater clarity to my understanding of this fact. Born in New York and raised in Connecticut, the values I was imbued with as a child and the culture I was immersed in for eighteen years made me the person I am today. They also marked me with attributes that set me apart when I was transplanted here, to a community less homogenous in addition to being foreign.

The very clothes I wear out of long-formed habit are some of the most visible markers, from head to toe. Starting with grosgrain-ribbon headbands, followed by polo shirts and oxfords covered by cable-knit sweaters and Shep shirts, which sit atop madras skirts or Nantucket reds or corduroy or khaki across which a pattern of tiny whales march, culminating in Sperry Top-Siders, scuffed and patched with duct tape, or L.L. Bean moccasins.

Even seasonal pieces serve as indicators, whether tartan wool pea coats in winter or brightly patterned Lilly Pulitzer shift dresses in summer. Classic clothes which last forever are an all-encompassing hallmark, with wardrobe choices bypassing the trendy, tacky, and synthetic in favour of the durable and timeless. Monogrammed totes, J. Press ties, colourful flip-flops, and strands of pearls all blend together in an amalgam of prepdom.

Other, less obvious signs, from where you went to school and college, to your city or town of origin, to the sports you play or the places you’ve travelled, right down to your family and friends, are even truer gauges. But the attire you are garbed in forms a first impression, and can in itself give away many of these details, if the observer has something to connect them to. At home in New England or New York, up and down the eastern seaboard, this kind of appearance is a dead giveaway of such things.

But here in Oxford, there’s a little more of a mystery surrounding it, at both ends. Fellow Connecticut native Heather Mayer, a student at St. Hilda’s, says “it was strange at first to realize last Trinity term that the people around me weren’t also wearing madras skirts or Rainbow flip-flops.” Even though the knowledge that most of the world doesn’t dress like this and doesn’t care about people who do is always present, the actualization of this thought is somewhat more hard-hitting. According to Mayer, it can also be somewhat “refreshing”; when she looks at photographs from her time at Groton, a boarding school in New England, seeing all of the “skinny girls in Lilly Pulitzer and Jack Rogers with straight hair” can seem suffocating, after being in a more diverse environment.

For those who subscribe to the lifestyle which was memorialized in the 1980 tongue-in-cheek classic, The Official Preppy Handbook, and brought into the millennial era in this year’s True Prep: It’s A Whole New Old World, published by Lisa Birnbach, one of the original book’s authors, studying and living in Oxford can feel as if this new old world is still swirling around and settling into the new millennium. The best advice that can be given is to keep one’s attitude firmly tongue-in-cheek, just as the authors did; after all, preppies commandeered the Tea Party slogan for a farcical YouTube video well before anyone else in America did the same for political purposes!

In fact, the best course of action for preppies in Oxford attempting to explain their choice of wardrobe might be to direct friends to that video, which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYKNJehC5Sk&feature=related. While they might do well to forewarn them of the exaggerated and highly ironic nature of many of the activities and much of the behaviour, the illustrative garments would be illuminating.

Is there anything nice to say about the Browne Review? It has some pretty graphs, and the font is quite nice. Everything else is a digrace. It places unfair expectations on those from richer backgrounds, proposes a system which will damage access for those from poorer backgrounds, and recommends a system which could easily put people off middle-income jobs for life.

First, those from well-off families will suffer. Under Lord Browne’s proposals, students will receive a non-means-tested maintenance loan of £3,750 per year, and there will be up to £3,250 available in additional support for those from households with a total income of less than £60,000. The grants are a good thing, but the £60,000 threshold signals the clear assumption that those whose parents earn more than that will receive money from them for their living costs – why else would a student’s loan be affected by their parents’ income? £3,750 is barely enough to cover a year’s rent at Oxford, let alone food. Is Browne saying that those with well-off parents should have to get holiday jobs, while those with poorer parents don’t need to? Of course not – instead he is relying on the assumption that anyone with wealthy parents will be able to rely on the Bank of Mum and Dad.

For a start, this isn’t true. There are plenty of students who don’t receive any money from their parents, whether their parents could afford to give it or not. Secondly, and more importantly, the assumption that well-off students will not need a grant makes a mockery of Browne’s own claim, early in the report, that “students will not have to rely on banks or families to meet the costs of living and learning”. His later statement that parents will have to make an “affordable contribution to the cost of living” proves the earlier to have been entirely deceptive and untrue.

So he lied at the start. What else? Well, he suggests (in a rather scary communist-style turn of phrase) that there should be a minimum entry standard “based on aptitude” to qualify for any loans, to make sure that only those “who are qualified to benefit from higher eduction” will receive it. “Qualified to benefit”? Even if you accept the idea that only clever people should get to go to university, Browne’s proposal for how to measure who is “qualified” is ludicrous.

He explains that an aptitude test would be difficult to implement, and instead advises that to “qualify to benefit from higher education” applicants will have to have a certain number of UCAS points. Remember those? They are what you get for GCSEs and A levels. And also music exams, drama courses, the Duke of Edinburgh Award, extra language and IT qualifications and so on – in short, all the kinds of things which you have to pay to do, and which you are far, far more likely to do if you go to a private school or have wealthy parents. Browne claims that his system will leave “no barriers to access”, but when even getting a loan relies on a system of points which can be bought, this is clearly another fallacy.

So the poor and the rich have been disadvantaged, but there is bad news for the middle too. If you go on to earn less than £21,000 a year, you won’t have to pay back anything at all. If you become an investment banker or a lawyer, your debts will be paid off before too long. But if you earn something in the region of, say, £35,000, you will be handing over almost 10 percent of your income for what could amount to decades, as the interest stacks up. Browne has recommended that debts be written off after 30 years – so if you choose to be a teacher instead of a hedge-fund manager, you could hit 50 before you’re debt-free. Browne has been reported as saying “there is a lot of evidence that students don’t just look at debt”, but with debts like these, it will be very hard not to look.

My final big problem is with the statement “investment will be targeted on the teaching of priority subjects” – those like medicine and engineering, where graduates are clearly helpful to the government. The ‘priority subjects’ will probably now cost more. For subjects like mine (Classics), which struggles to recruit applicants from poorer backgrounds and where the number of qualified teachers is decreasing by several dozen a year, losing funding because it’s not high enough ‘priority’ will be disastrous. There is no subject taught at Oxford which does not deserve to be a priority, and if some of them suffer more than others through lack of funding, that will be a very great loss indeed.