The Scandals of Meritocracy

Ross Douthat, The New York Times, March 16, 2019

Why more merit might not be what elite education needs; original article contains links

Image from article: Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Credit Charles Krupa/Associated Press

In the last year elite college admissions has been touched by three different but related scandals. The newest one is also the most entertaining, because it includes pretend water polo players, staged standardized tests and outright bribery, all to help desperate rich people and TV stars buy their progeny into a top-flight school.

The other scandals are less amusing, involving dilemmas of race and meritocracy with no celebrity leaven. One involves revelations from the latest affirmative-action lawsuit, which has exposed how Harvard’s rejection of qualified Asian applicants seems to uncomfortably resemble the old Jewish quotas of the 1930s and 1940s. The other involves a brace of Ivy League admissions offices being taken in by a tough-love Louisiana school that produced fraudulent transcripts for its African-American students, while its founder treated the kids brutally behind the scenes.

In their different ways all these scandals feed into two critiques of elite academia, one more left-wing and one more right-wing, which take different routes to the same condemnatory claim: These schools claim to be meritocratic, but they aren’t.

The left-wing critique focuses on class, noting that the desperate-rich-parents scandal is just an exaggerated and criminal version of the general way that legacy admissions and athletic programs boost wealthy applicants, making elite schools into havens of privilege despite their best-and-brightest boast.

The right-wing critique focuses on race, arguing that racial preferences are corrosive to merit-based admissions, because the quest for racial balance creates unfair and discrediting results — a “not too many Asians, please” quota system, a seeming tilt against lower-middle-class white applicants, and a bias (to the point of credulity, in the Louisiana case) in favor of African-Americans and Hispanics.

You can blend the two critiques by noting how racial bias in admissions and economic privilege interact — the tilt against lower-middle-class whites may reflect the fact that schools want richer kids (and their tuition dollars) to take up the “white” slots, while affirmative action can benefit the children of wealthy immigrant families as much as the descendants of slaves.

Blending the two critiques can get you the centrist prescription for reform: Elite schools should emphasize class-based rather than race-based affirmative action, the argument runs, while phasing out preferences for jocks and legacies that give privileged whites their own leg up — a combination that might yield a still-diverse, more authentically meritocratic upper class.

I used to believe in this prescription. But lately my skepticism about meritocracy itself has made me doubt whether we need more of it.

Elite institutions, by their very nature, are not a mass-opportunity system. Even (especially?) in a democratic society they exist to shape a ruling class. And the tension between legacy admissions and affirmative action and merit-based admissions is really a tension between three ways that a ruling class can be legitimated –— through intergenerational continuity, through representation and through aptitude.

The “more meritocracy” argument against both legacies and racial quotas implicitly assumes that aptitude — some elixir of I.Q. and work ethic — is what our elite primarily lacks.

But is that really our upper class’s problem? What if our elite is already diligent and how-do-you-like-them-apples smaht — the average SAT score for the Harvard class of 2022 is a robust 1512 — and deficient primarily in memory and obligation, wisdom and service and patriotism?

In that case continuity and representation, as embodied by legacy admissions and racial quotas, might actually be better legitimizers for elite universities to cultivate than the spirit of talent-über-alles. It might be better if more Ivy League students thought of themselves as representatives of groups and heirs of family obligation than as Promethean Talents elevated by their own amazing native gifts. It might be better if elite universities, in being open about seeking a specific ethnic mix and encouraging an intergenerational tradition, ceded a certain amount of talent to public universities, and even saw their average SAT score go down.

And who knows — the Ivies might even teach undergraduates a little more rigorously if they weren’t so determined to prove they admitted the smartest kids by never ever letting anyone flunk out.

This is all admittedly fanciful, because to be open about racial quotas would require private schools to sacrifice federal funds, and to emphasize legacy advantages would cost them in the U.S. News rankings. And it might be culturally impossible, given the sway of the meritocratic idea, for elite schools to lean into their aristocratic profile rather than insisting (in whatever defiance of reality) that they are offering opportunity to all.

But the “more meritocracy” world — the world where bipartisan criticism produces a Harvard class of 2032 with fewer legacies and non-Asian minorities and an average SAT of 1570 — could be worse than what we have. Because such a change’s essential premise, that intelligence alone really merits power, is the premise that has given us many present difficulties, and if extended may only give us more.