There is a lot of talk as the presidential campaign of 2020 heats up about college for all and other assorted schemes for leveling the playing field of life. The New Yorker's Louis Menand who holds an endowed chair as an English Professor at Harvard University (MA) and graduated from Pomona College (selective private college) in California and Columbia University (NYC) an IvyPlus institution. Menand offers a perceptive and rational discussion of college admissions and financial assistance/inducements that are yoked in our time. If this is (fair & balanced) socio-political analysis, so be it.
[x The New Yorker]
Merit Badges
By Louis Menand
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In recent years, we have been focussed on two problems, social mobility and income inequality, and the place these issues appear to meet is higher education. That’s because education in the United States is supposed to be meritocratic. If the educational system is reproducing existing class and status hierarchies—if most of the benefits are going to students who are privileged already—then either meritocracy isn’t working properly or it wasn’t the right approach in the first place. Paul Tough, in The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us (2019), thinks that the problem is a broken system. Daniel Markovits, in The Meritocracy Trap (2019), thinks that the whole idea was a terrible mistake.
The term “meritocracy” was invented in the nineteen-fifties with a satirical intent that has now mostly been lost. “Merit” was originally defined as “IQ plus effort,” but it has evolved to stand for a somewhat ineffable combination of cognitive abilities, extracurricular talents, and socially valuable personal qualities, like leadership and civic-mindedness. Attributes extraneous to merit, such as gender, skin color, physical ableness, and family income, are not supposed to constrain the choice of educational pathways.
Educational sorting often begins very early in the United States, as when schoolchildren are selected for “gifted and talented” programs, and it continues in high school, where some students are pushed onto vocational tracks. But every American has the right to an elementary- and high-school education. You just need to show up. Until you are sixteen, you are required by law to show up.
College is different. College is a bottleneck. You usually have to apply, and you almost always have to pay, and college admissions is a straight-up sorting mechanism. You are either selected or rejected. And it matters where. Research shows that the more selective a college’s admissions process the greater the economic value of the degree. The narrower the entryway, the broader the range of opportunities on the other side. College, in turn, sorts by qualifying some students for graduate and professional education (law, dentistry, architecture). And graduate and professional education then sorts for the labor market. It’s little gold stars all the way up.
College is also a kind of dating service. You and your classmates have chosen and been chosen by the same school, which means that your classmates are typically people whose abilities and interests are comparable to your own. And, for many people, friendships with other students constitute the most valuable return on their investment in college education. One of the things they are buying is entrance into a network of classmates whose careers may intersect profitably with theirs, and alumni who can become references and open doors.
We find it unseemly when someone is hired because his or her mom or dad made a phone call. We think that’s unmeritocratic. But we are not, usually, taken aback when we learn that someone got a job interview through a college roommate or an alumni connection, even though that is also unmeritocratic. We accept that those connections, along with connections that students make with their professors, are among the things you “earn” by getting into a college. It’s one of the rewards for merit.
Education therefore plays an outsized role in people’s lives. It can vastly outweigh the effects of family and local community on people’s beliefs, values, tastes, and life paths. For the individual student, the investment in time and money, not to mention the stress, can be enormous. But, according to Steven Brint’s Two Cheers for Higher Education (2019), even though tuition and fees increased by more than four times the rate of inflation between 1980 and 2012, college and graduate-school enrollments grew every year. (There has been a dip in recent years.)
Almost every study concludes that getting a college degree is worth it. What is known as the college wage premium—the difference in lifetime earnings between someone with only a high-school diploma and someone with a college degree—is now, by one calculation, a hundred and sixty-eight per cent. For people with an advanced degree, the wage premium is two hundred and thirteen per cent. (Of course, the more people who get a college degree—about a third of the population now has a bachelor’s degree—the greater the penalty for not having one. The decrease in earnings for non-degree holders raises the premium.)
The investment is also substantial for society as a whole. Taxpayers spend a hundred and forty-eight billion dollars a year to support higher education through subsidies and grants. Total annual revenue at all colleges and universities—including public, private, and for-profit schools, from all sources, including tuition, grants, gifts, and endowment income—is more than six hundred and forty-nine billion dollars. The question of whether the system is working for everyone is therefore never an inappropriate one to ask.
Fifty years ago, the worry about meritocracy centered on race and gender. In 1965, the student population in American colleges and universities was ninety-four per cent white and sixty-one per cent male. By one measure, this problem appears to have been solved, despite tireless resistance to the methods that colleges have used to get there. Today, fifty-six per cent of students are classified as non-Hispanic whites and forty-two per cent of students are male.
A more fine-grained analysis suggests that this is not quite the victory for diversity that it seems. According to a report from the Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce, enrollment in the four hundred and sixty-eight best-funded and most selective four-year institutions is seventy-five per cent white, while enrollment in the thirty-two hundred and fifty lowest-funded community colleges and four-year universities is forty-three per cent black and Hispanic, a pattern of de facto segregation which mirrors that of the country’s public schools.
Nor does racial diversity necessarily correlate with economic diversity. That a student is nonwhite obviously does not mean he or she is from a disadvantaged background. Highly selective colleges tend to select from the best-off underrepresented minorities. And this feeds into our current focus on class and income.
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the college wage premium was small or nonexistent. Americans did not have to go to college to enjoy a middle-class standard of living. And the income of Americans who did get a degree, even the most well-remunerated ones, was not exorbitantly greater than the income of the average worker. By 1980, though, it was clear that the economy was changing. The middle class was getting hollowed out, its less advantaged members taking service jobs that reduced their income relative to the top earners’. “The help-wanted ads are full of listings for executives and for dishwashers—but not much in between,” Walter Mondale said at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. Since then, the situation has grown worse. In a survey conducted in 2014, fifty-five per cent of Americans identified as lower class or working class. And, of the many differences between Trump and Clinton voters in 2016, the education gap seems to have been a key one.
The Years That Matter Most is a journalist’s book. Paul Tough interviewed students, teachers, researchers, and administrators, trying to figure out why the higher-education system fails some Americans and what people are doing to fix it. He has fascinating stories about efforts to remediate class disparities in higher education, some of which have succeeded and some of which may have made matters worse.
What’s best about the book, a fruit of all the time Tough spent with his subjects, is that it humanizes the process of higher education. People have different situations and different aspirations. Not everyone wants to go to Harvard or Stanford. Not everyone wants a job on Wall Street. People should be able to lead flourishing lives without a prestigious college degree, or any college degree at all.
On the other hand, there are people who could go to Harvard or Stanford but don’t have the chance—because they are not given proper guidance in high school, because of family pressures and financial need, because their test scores do not accurately reflect their potential. Two standardized tests have been used nationally in college admissions since the fifties, the ACT and the SAT, and they are constantly duking it out for market share. Tough’s analysis focusses on the SAT, which is administered by the College Board.
The SAT was originally designed as an IQ test, based on the idea that people are born with a certain quantum of smarts (g, as psychologists used to call it). The purpose of the SAT was not to expand the college population. It was just to make sure that innately bright people got to go. A lot of the debate over the SAT, therefore, has had to do with whether there really is such a thing as g, whether it can be measured by a multiple-choice test, whether smarts in the brute IQ sense is what we mean by “merit,” and whether the tests contain cultural biases that cause some groups to underperform. But the real problem with the SAT is much simpler: SAT scores are not very good at predicting college grades. What is very good at predicting college grades? High-school grades, at least for American applicants. (For international students, whose secondary schools can have inconsistent or hard-to-parse grading systems, the SAT may be a useful way for admissions offices to pick out promising recruits.) Submitting high-school grades costs the applicant nothing.
Tough thinks that the College Board knows it has a problem and is trying to disguise it. In 2017, facing the fact that an increasing number of colleges were no longer requiring standardized-test scores, the company helped produce a report, “Grade Inflation and the Role of Standardized Testing,” which claimed that grade inflation favors well-off students. “Test-optional policies,” the report concluded, “may become unsustainable.”
The College Board promoted this finding by, among other things, running an online advertorial in The Atlantic called “When Grades Don’t Show the Whole Picture.” “Submitting SAT scores as part of a college application can open doors of opportunity not just for a privileged few, but for all students,” the article said. The SAT is the disadvantaged student’s friend. It takes a bite out of privilege.
The education press bought it. The trouble, Tough says, is that the report’s conclusion is contradicted by evidence contained in the report itself. Grade inflation has been consistent across racial and socioeconomic groups. What have not been consistent are SAT scores. Since 1998, the average score of students whose parents are well educated has increased by five points, while the average score of students whose parents have only an associate’s (two-year college) degree has dropped by twenty-seven points. It turns out that the SAT is, in fact, the friend of privilege. If you combine SAT scores with high-school GPA, you get a slightly better predictor of college grades than you do using GPA alone. But the SAT, a highly stressful rite of passage for American teen-agers that has cost their parents, over the years, many millions of dollars in test-preparation schemes, is a largely worthless product.
College does enable social mobility, but it’s not happening at the most selective schools. According to the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, children whose parents are in the top one per cent of the income distribution—roughly 1.6 million households—are seventy-seven times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than children whose parents are in the bottom income quintile (about twenty-five million households). At what are called the Ivy Plus colleges—the eight Ivies plus schools such as the University of Chicago, MIT, and Stanford—more than two-thirds of the students are from the top quintile and less than four per cent are from the bottom. The most extreme case, according to Tough, is Princeton, where seventy-two per cent are from the top quintile and 2.2 per cent are from the bottom.
Such data suggest that higher education is not doing much to close the income gap, and that it may be helping to reproduce a class system that has grown dangerously fractured. This is the phenomenon that the man who coined the term “meritocracy,” Michael Young, predicted back in 1958, and it has been tracked by a number of writers since. In a classic history of meritocracy, The Big Test, published in 1999, Nicholas Lemann concluded, “You can’t undermine social rank by setting up an elaborate process of ranking.”
This inversion of what meritocratic education sought to achieve is the subject of The Meritocracy Trap. Daniel Markovits thinks that meritocracy is responsible not only for the widening gap between the very rich and everyone else but for basically everything else that has gone wrong in the United States in the past forty years. “The afflictions that dominate American life,” he says, “arise not because meritocracy is imperfectly realized, but rather on account of meritocracy itself.”
The Meritocracy Trap is an academic’s book. Markovits is a law professor at Yale. He draws his evidence from an impressive range of studies, by other researchers, of income inequality and its effects on the quality of American life. But the book completely lacks a human element. It is as though Markovits constructed simulacra of human beings out of his data: this is what the numbers tell you that people must be like. It is almost impossible to recognize anyone you actually know.
“My students at Yale—the poster children for meritocracy—are more nearly overwhelmed and confounded by their apparent blessings than complacent or even just self-assured,” he writes. “They seek meaning that eludes their accomplishments and regard the intense education that constitutes their elevated caste with a diffidence that approaches despair.” I happen to know some current students and recent graduates of Yale Law School, and they don’t seem diffident or despairing to me at all. In fact, they seem, understandably, rather pleased with themselves.
The Meritocracy Trap is an exhausting book—bombastic, repetitive, and single-minded to the point of obsession, a mixture of Cotton Mather, Karl Marx, and MAGA. Brimstone rains down from every sentence. Markovits thinks that meritocracy is making everyone miserable, not least the meritocrats themselves. “Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry, never finding, or even knowing, the right food,” he says. (Maybe not the most apt metaphor. One thing that high-income earners do seem to know about is food.) Meanwhile, middle-class Americans “are dying from indirect and even direct self-harm, as they—literally—somatize the insult of their meritocratically justified exclusion.”
“Merit is a sham,” the preacher saith. “Merit itself is not a genuine excellence but rather—like the false virtues that aristocrats trumpeted in the ancien régime—a pretense, constructed to rationalize an unjust distribution of advantage.” The successful have sold their souls to Mammon: “Meritocrats gain their immense labor incomes at the cost of exploiting themselves and deforming their personalities.”
The MAGA part of the book is the complaint that the “élites” have rigged the system to benefit themselves at the expense of the middle class, whose tastes and values they sneer at. (This is Trumpian, but not Trump, who is the ultimate system rigger, the crony capitalist par excellence.) Meritocracy, Markovits says, throws élites and the middle class alike into “a maelstrom of recrimination, disrespect, and dysfunction.” Every social ill that afflicts working- and middle-class Americans—the opioid crisis, the decline in life expectancy, the incidence of out-of-wedlock births—is the consequence of what Markovits calls “meritocratic inequality” (a phrase he uses more than a hundred and forty times). The educated élite has become a self-perpetuating caste, drilling its children in the rituals of meritocratic advancement and walling itself off from the world of the average American.
Back in the fifties, Markovits says, we were all on the gravy train together, or, at least, white men were. The well-off ate the same food and drove the same cars as everyone else. You could make a good living as a middle manager or an assembly-line worker. Americans didn’t get high-handed about virtue issues like identity politics, racial bigotry, and gay marriage, issues that Markovits thinks the average worker rightly regards as irrelevant. We need to bring that America back.
Of course, in that America, almost a quarter of the population lived in poverty; ten per cent of the population, Americans of African descent, was effectively barred from social advancement; and fifty per cent of the population was mostly consigned to women-only jobs. Not great for everybody. The book’s model of a town that is decaying because of the scourge of meritocracy is St. Clair Shores, Michigan. St. Clair Shores is a virtually all-white exurb of Detroit that flourished at a time when most of the world’s cars were made in the United States. Many things besides college-admissions practices led to its decline.
The Marxist part of The Meritocracy Trap is the interesting part. Like Marx, Markovits sees society as constituted by the dynamic between two social classes, the élite (which he calls “the ruling class”) and the middle class. He uses a stereotype to represent each class: the partner at a Wall Street firm who takes home five million dollars a year versus the packager in an Amazon fulfillment center whose every movement is monitored and who has little or no job protection. Strangely, apart from the references to Amazon, the tech economy is almost completely missing from the analysis. Markovits’s focus is on CEOs and élite-professional-service (EPS) workers: corporate lawyers, management consultants, and investment bankers, people who get rich by helping other people get richer. This is possibly because those are careers pursued by law-school graduates, who do not train to do tech work.
For Markovits, both classes are the prisoners of meritocracy, just as Marx thought that both the capitalist and the worker he exploits were doing only what the system was making them do. That did not prevent Marx from calling capitalists greedy and cruel, and it does not prevent Markovits from calling élite workers selfish, corrupt, and immoral. But, like Marx, Markovits thinks that the whole system is a Frankenstein’s monster. We created the meritocracy with good intentions, and now we are its victims.
What would a post-meritocratic world look like? Markovits doesn’t know, and neither did Marx know what a post-capitalist world would be like. There will be less alienation and inauthenticity (as Marx believed, too); other than that, we can’t really imagine a post-meritocratic world, because the élite has made its own values everyone’s. “Present-day ideals concerning justice, entitlement, and even merit are all meritocracy’s offspring and carry its genes inside them,” as Markovits puts it. “Meritocracy has built a world that makes itself—in all its facets, including meritocratic inequality—seem practically and even morally necessary.” Meritocracy seems the natural way of running things, so that when you ask why meritocracy isn’t working people say it’s because it’s not meritocratic enough.
One obvious response to Markovits’s complaint is that, thanks to globalization and the digital revolution, the twenty-first-century economy is enormously complex and requires highly trained people to operate it, and so the returns to education have grown. Markovits’s answer is that the twenty-first-century economy was made complex by the élite in order to monopolize high-paying jobs for itself. He thinks that fancy financial instruments, like junk bonds and derivatives, were devised to reward the highly educated, since less educated people can’t manipulate them. “The appearance of super-skilled finance workers induced the innovations that then favored their elite skills,” he says. He goes so far as to suggest that computers were invented to raise the value of higher education.
Markovits is right that the concept of merit is now tied up with a certain idea of work, and the two are not easily separated. College-educated people believe that you are supposed to work hard. It is difficult for them to respect someone who treats his or her job as a paycheck, rather than as a source of achievement and fulfillment. Markovits presents a lot of evidence that élite workers are putting in crazier and crazier hours while middle-class workers have become victims of what he calls “enforced idleness.” They work less because there is less work for them to do.
He is also probably right that the top-earner work ethic reflects the fact that people are now socialized to think of themselves as human capital. He thinks that this alienates highly educated people from their own labor, since they are driven to maximize the return on the investment they have made in themselves. But artists and athletes are embodiments of human capital, too, and they are also driven, sometimes obsessively, to succeed. We would not say this makes them inauthentic.
The Meritocracy Trap does not offer much in the way of policy advice. In a brief conclusion, Markovits suggests eliminating the cap on Social Security taxes and giving the money to companies as wage subsidies to create more mid-skilled jobs. He mentions a program to create 4.4 million public-sector jobs. And he recommends depriving private schools and universities of their tax-exempt status unless they take at least half their students from the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. To do this, he thinks that they should double their enrollments. He does not endorse a wealth tax, student-debt relief, or “college for all” free tuition, policies that progressive politicians have proposed to increase social mobility and reduce income inequality.
The weirdest claim in The Meritocracy Trap is that the American educational system is designed to produce super-skilled dealmakers and number crunchers. “Elite schooling is carefully calibrated to train students . . . to resist the urge to pursue their own peculiar authentic interests in favor of doggedly shaping themselves to serve ends set externally by the meritocratic system,” Markovits says. The suggestion that Yale professors are trying to get students to shape themselves “to serve ends set externally by the meritocratic system” is ridiculous. People who work at schools like Yale and Stanford and Chicago are devoted to exposing students to as wide an array of art, ideas, methods, and ways of being as possible. Curricula are constructed and classes are designed to get students to explore, non-instrumentally, the world of knowledge and to reflect on their goals and ambitions in an informed way.
“Populists who say that colleges and universities are bad for America may have narrowly political motives,” Markovits tells us, “but a clear-eyed understanding of meritocratic inequality shows that they are not wrong.” It is alarming when a Yale professor says that colleges and universities are “bad for America” (a Fox News phrase). It feeds the idea that the way to address inequality and discrimination is to reform college admissions at places like Harvard and Yale.
This idea rests on an error of scale. The most highly selective universities—the eight Ivies plus MIT, Stanford, Chicago, and Caltech—enroll less than one half of one per cent of all college students in the United States. You could swap out every legacy, donor offspring, and faculty child (not to mention, since almost nobody does, recruited athletes) in those schools for an underprivileged applicant and the inequality needle would hardly budge.
Colleges should always be asking themselves what they are trying to achieve with their admissions processes and whether they are working fairly and in everyone’s best interests. But the focus on private colleges’ admissions is a distraction from a development that affects far more people: the defunding of public higher education. Those are the schools in which seventy-three per cent of American college students—14.7 million people—are enrolled.
Steven Brint, in Two Cheers for Higher Education, says that the average appropriation per student in public institutions declined by twenty per cent between 1990 and 2015. Many flagship public universities, such as the University of Virginia, have basically been privatized, and charge tuitions that are unaffordable to low-income students. There are sixty thousand undergraduates in Ivy League colleges. There are four hundred and twenty-eight thousand students, seven times as many, in the Cal State system alone. Those students should be getting more resources.
Some of Markovits’s criticisms of college admissions don’t seem to have been thought through. He cites the increased competition for admission to top schools, referring to a time, not that long ago, when the Ivy League accepted thirty per cent of its applicants. The figure is now around five per cent. But low acceptance rates are a good thing. They mean that the pool is bigger. Applicants no longer need to have gone to Groton or be able to pay full freight to have a fair chance of getting in.
Commentators do not seem exercised about the admissions preference given to varsity athletes, but they are about the legacy preference. Eliminating that preference is a much less efficacious reform than it seems. Most American colleges are not highly selective. According to Brint, no more than five to seven per cent of college students attend a school that admits less than half its applicants. The average admissions rate at four-year colleges is sixty-six per cent. Legacy preferences at most of those schools do not significantly reduce the non-legacy’s chances. At any college, many legacies would be admitted without the preference. In the more selective colleges, the legacy preference is supposed to be used to tip the choice between equally qualified candidates, so eliminating it turns the decision into a coin toss, meaning that half the time the legacy still gets in. There is also, of course, no guarantee that the applicant taking the legacy’s spot is not also privileged. Some colleges rely on alumni loyalty in order to survive financially, and, in turn, to provide financial aid. Would they, too, be expected to eliminate legacy preferences? There is, finally, the question of whether we want the government to tell private universities whom they may and may not admit, beyond the stipulations of anti-discrimination law. That could be a very slippery slope.
The main significance of the legacy preference is symbolic. It represents, to many people, the perpetuation of privilege. Eliminating it would send a positive message about class. What it would not do is reduce income inequality. You would just be replacing one group of future high earners with a slightly different group. The social effect would be minuscule.
People also complain that college admissions is a black box. It is. But if the process were transparent, if everyone knew the recipe for the secret sauce, then applicants would game the system. (And privileged students have more resources to get good at the game.) They try to game it as it is, so the recipe changes from year to year, as admissions officers figure out what to discount or to ignore when they review applications. It can seem, from the outside, that every applicant is competing against every other applicant. In fact, colleges have many buckets to fill, and applicants are mainly competing inside their own buckets. There is no single definition of “qualified.”
Finally, it’s not the colleges that endow the degree from Princeton or Stanford with its outsized market value. Stanford and Princeton do not look for future hedge-fund managers or corporate lawyers when they put together a class. They look for people who, among other things, will take advantage of the educational experience they offer. It’s the businesses that recruit from those colleges which have fetishized the Ivy Plus credential. If we really want different kinds of people to get those jobs, maybe we should ask those firms to take half their new employees from the bottom quintiles.
Are universities “bad for America”? The main purpose of the Ivy Plus universities and schools like them is not to credential young people. It is to produce knowledge. That is what university endowments support and what professors are paid to do. Virtually every piece of data in Tough’s and Markovits’s books comes from research done by an academic or someone with academic training. Would we be better off with less of this knowledge?
Despite Markovits’s hyperbole and overwriting, his conception of meritocracy as a machine that runs itself is a powerful one. He and other critics could be right that meritocracy, like free-market capitalism, generates inequalities naturally. There is at least one purely meritocratic industry in the United States: professional sports. An athlete basically has to engage in illegal activity for attributes extraneous to ability to affect his or her career (and even then . . . ). Yet, since the seventies, the growth in income inequality in professional sports has mirrored the growth in society as a whole. Star athletes make millions, and below that level wages drop off very quickly. LeBron James is paid more than thirty million dollars a year by his team; the median annual wage for all professional athletes—people who make their living playing spectator sports—is $50,650.
At this point, whether meritocracy is responsible for the economy we have or whether the economy we have is subverting the aims of meritocracy doesn’t really matter. Even if we randomized college admissions, there would still be sorting, and only a tiny fraction of the population is going to get those CEO and EPS jobs. If social mobility means that a bigger bit of that tiny fraction is from disadvantaged backgrounds, the faces may change, but the level of income inequality will remain more or less the same.
“Merit is a sham.” What Markovits means is that merit is a self-justification in the same way that the divine right of kings was a self-justification. In a meritocracy, the winners, the people who benefit from the system, tend to believe that their success is due entirely to brains and hard work, not to the accident of birth. But merit as opposed to what? Teachers and employers evaluate people on some criteria, however defined, and people who rate better are given more opportunity. Should they not be? The problem is not that some citizens are lawyers and some work in Amazon fulfillment centers. It’s that the economy is structured to allow the former class of worker to soak up most of the national wealth.
The educational system is not working to everyone’s advantage, and it would be convenient if fixing that fixed the larger problem of wealth and income inequality. Tough’s book makes us feel that college can work better, and that progress in increasing access is possible. But we should not be afraid of the use of political power. As a polity, we are in a bizarre place where workers whose lives and prospects have been damaged by the increasingly skewed distribution of wealth and income have helped bring to power a government whose most significant legislative accomplishment is the passage of a tax law that effectively redistributes wealth upward. That government’s leaders love to pose as the enemies of the élites, but they are turning the federal government into an EPS. There is a good chance that they will be given another four years to help the rich get richer. ###
[Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001. His book The Metaphysical Club (2001) was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. See other books by Louis Menand here. He was an associate editor of The New Republic from 1986 to 1987, an editor at The New Yorker from 1992 to 1993, and a contributing editor of The New York Review of Books from 1994 to 2001. He is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. Menand received a BA (English) from Pomona College (CA) and a PhD (English) from Columbia University (NY). In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.]
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