ouldn’t it be so nice if my kid was double-legacy?”

I’ve heard this joke thrown around campus many times. I’m sure most Harvard students have, too. The joke rests on the familiar possibility that students might meet their future partners at college.

Amit Mehra, the founder and CEO of the matrimonial app Ivy Shaadi, saw this likelihood as a business opportunity. He built a matchmaking service around one shared credential: an Ivy League education.

“Getting into the Ivy League is such a demanding process where you have already gone through a lot of pre-vetting,” he tells me. According to him, that pre-vetting means that two such people will be closer to seeing the world in compatible ways.

Services such as Ivy Shaadi are a contemporary version of India’s long-standing arranged-marriage tradition. In a 2018 survey of more than 160,000 Indian households, 93 percent of married respondents said their marriages had been arranged by their families.

But what does a matrimonial website look like in an Ivy League setting where arranged marriage may not be the norm?

Ivy Shaadi’s matchmaking process has some similarities to dating apps. Mehra says that users can create a profile and then, much like a dating algorithm, can see eligible suitors and reach out when interest is reciprocated. Other times, Mehra says that the service will handpick profiles for you after learning about your preferences, and then send them over for you to review.

Curious about what this process looked like, I pulled up Google and typed the words “Indian,” “matrimonial,” and “Ivy League” in the search bar. A flurry of results popped up, including VIP Elite Matrimony India, Corporate Marriage Bureau, and Ultra Rich Match (each name clearly more creative than the last). I opened VIP Elite Matrimony to see what appears to be an AI-generated banner of a generic-looking man standing in front of a Harvardian hodgepodge: Lowell’s bell-tower imprinted on Dunster. Beside him is another deeply generic-looking woman staring dreamily into the distance from a building that looks vaguely Yale-like.

VIP Elite Matrimony draws its clientele from Ivy League graduates, graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management, MBAs, and doctors. Another website, Ultra Rich Match, caters primarily to those from households with net worths upwards of $2 million — but will make an exception for new Ivy League graduates who have starting salaries upward of $200,000, according to its managing director Saurabh Goswami. To verify the qualification of its users, Goswami says that the company asks users for graduation certificates, identification, and bank statements, and (if they own a company) their company’s registration details. The service also charges a fee for successful matches: for each successful partnership on the ‘Standard Package’, Ultra Rich Match charges around $3,200.

IITIIMShaadi’s site, which its founder and CEO Taksh Gupta says has 70,000 users at any given time, displays a bright-yellow header depicting my new favourite slogan: Alma Mater Matters!

But why does alma mater matter?

To find out, I booked an initial consult call with Ivy Shaadi. Mehra said he was surprised to hear from me directly. “I was surprised how you were reaching out, not somebody from family,” he tells me. For him, the name on a prospective match’s diploma matters because it is an unchangeable part of their identity.

A large part of the reason is that the Ivy League acts as a status symbol, especially for parents looking to find a good match for their children. “A degree from an Ivy League college, it gives you good networks, good circles, good everything,” Goswami says.

On these services, Ivy League status becomes a basic screening criteria for everyone involved. “They know that a person can’t fall too low in terms of if a person has secured a good education,” Goswami adds.

That logic is difficult to separate from class. Ivy League admission is not simply a measure of academic ability. It is also shaped by access to resources, extracurricular activities, college consulting and other markers of privilege.

Mehra and other founders offer another explanation for why the Ivy League credential matters.

“What education is serving here is basically as a proxy for mental compatibility,” Gupta says. According to him, your alma mater shapes your worldview and your experiences.

Mehra, himself a Duke MBA graduate, agrees: “My MBA was a big anchor, a transformational force in my life,” he tells me. “The chances of you finding someone when your wavelength matches increases if you meet someone who has done the same.”

Graduating from Ivy League institutions does not mean that two people have the same experience there. At Harvard, students can come from radically different countries, socioeconomic backgrounds, academic disciplines and political perspectives.

Yet, clearly, when a family knows little about a prospective spouse, an alma mater is an easily recognizable piece of information. According to Mehra, it can act as a shorthand for a set of characteristics that are otherwise difficult to observe from just a matrimonial profile.

For women, Mehra says, these signals are particularly important.

According to Mehra, Ivy League backgrounds can signal the likelihood of open-mindedness in your spouse and their family. “A lot of folks at that level are open-minded,” Mehra says.

Gupta points out, for instance, that families in search of potential daughters-in-law create accounts on IITIIMShaadi knowing that they are more likely to come across women who are ambitious. “25 percent of women say that they don’t want children,” Gupta says. Given the traditional expectations from marriage in India, that seems to me like quite a high number.

For these matrimonial websites, the Ivy League’s name acts as a form of social currency. It can act as a shorthand for a person’s ambition, worldview, social circle and the kind of future they are likely to build — and therefore something worth seeking in a spouse. And because that credential is permanent, the status attached to it, according to Mehra, is permanent too.

“Your job can change, a lot of things in your background can change, but your education stays constant,” Mehra says.

—Magazine writer Hitishaa Goyal can be reached at [email protected]