I originally had a somewhat ranty but not-terribly-pointed essay on how the Mormons have taken over Utah, and what a bunch of bollocks it is. I have to admit that while they have wrestled control of Utah, they've really only wrestled it from a bunch of small shrubs and oddly-colored rocks. Besides the (ahem) natives, there really wasn't much in Utah before the Mormons arrived, and pretty much everything that's there is something that they've built. The state is salty and unpleasant and I reserve absolutely no blame whatsoever for the countless multitudes who skipped Utah entirely and went straight to California.
The thing is, however, that Utah is currently 60% Mormon and is the fastest growing state in the union. With teenage and low-income pregnancy what it is, I was fully expecting a state like Mississippi or New Mexico to hold the title for fastest population growth, but I also guess that all of those bottom-tier states suffer from ridiculously high attrition rates, too.
So there's Utah, which doesn't seem to have the big brain-drain hit that the lower trim-level states have, but which also has the religiously mandated procreation drive to power themselves to the front of the population-wise pecking order. I don't mean to suggest that the population of Utah is going to be overtaking that of California or Texas anytime soon, but I do mean to suggest something a bit more interesting: Utah is going to become a place where people really do "come from."
Prestige is a funny thing in that it's completely useless right up until you've got heaping loads of it. The prestige currency, you see, is the sort of thing that's tiny and uninteresting as it grows and really only starts to show itself when it's the biggest cat in town. Just ask Brown, for instance, how far its cachet goes when trying to convince people that they really should attend the most fashionable ivy league school instead of, say, Harvard.
And that's the thing with Utah—it's the sort of place that's been growing quietly for so long that it hasn't really shown up on anyone's radar. In a somewhat similar vein, I recall the growth of conservative movements in the 1980s—nobody really paid much attention because they were a bunch of backwards bible-thumping rednecks. This is unfortunately a problem, because now they weild immense political power and a still backwards bible-thumping rednecks.
So that's what I have to say about Utah. It's really bothersome that places like that crank out far more kids than the more enlightened ends of the universe.
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