Higher Admissions, page 8
Young coined the term “meritocracy” to warn against it, but, at least in the United States, over time it has come into widespread use, mainly as something positive. The term is meant to stand in contrast to “aristocracy,” meaning a domain where the circumstances of birth, not merit, determine success. The etymology of these terms is telling, because “aristocracy” and “meritocracy” mean literally the same thing: rule by the best. Back in 1958, Young felt he couldn’t use the word “aristocracy” because of the strong association with inheritance it had taken on over time, so he simply substituted a Latin prefix for the original Greek one to get across what he meant. Perhaps the lesson should be that eventually, any system of distributing rewards runs afoul of the unstoppable urge of prosperous parents to pass their advantages on to their children.
In thinking about testing and higher education, it’s important that we not let the positive valence that the word “meritocracy” has taken on—the idea that if a system can be called a meritocracy, then it must be good, period—shut down the discussion. It may be helpful to think about some possible alternative definitions of “meritocracy,” because doing so clarifies how particular the definition is that Young, and also many Americans who position themselves as defenders of meritocracy, have used. Joseph Kett’s 2013 book Merit reminds us that although the word “meritocracy” didn’t come into common usage until fairly recently, the word “merit” appears regularly in the writings of the most prominent politicians of the founding period of the United States and consistently thereafter—meaning a variety of different things. The same point can be made globally. Just to give one of many possible examples, within the vastness of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace there are a couple of references to the advent of a competitive examination system for promotion to high-level government and military roles in early nineteenth-century Russia. One exchange between two minor members of the nobility goes like this:
“I ask you, Count—who will be heads of the departments when everybody has to pass examinations?”
“Those who pass the examinations, I suppose,” replied Kochubéy, crossing his legs and glancing round.
“Well, I have Pryánichnikov serving under me, a splendid man, a priceless man, but he’s sixty. Is he to go up for examination?”1
Kett proposes a useful distinction between “essential merit,” a positive quality of an individual person, and “institutional merit,” a set of standards established and maintained by an organization or a profession. (You may have had conversations with people who tell you proudly that the place where they work is a meritocracy, by which they mean that they consider it to be open to all, regardless of background, and to reward people based only on good performance.) The definition of both kinds of merit has varied greatly over time and in different circumstances. Nonetheless, in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century, “meritocracy” came to be very often used to denote a standardized test–based system for adjudicating the allocation of what were becoming ever more scarce and precious slots in the most highly selective universities. This understanding of meritocracy collapses the broad concept of merit into something much narrower: stellar academic performance during adolescence. It favors a formal, structured system over a looser, less organized one. It confuses a numerically very small elite selection system with a universal national opportunity structure. It blends Kett’s distinct individual and institutional varieties of merit into a single, conceptually blurry concept, and therefore assumes that the purpose of a meritocracy is to make sure that a limited number of rewards, golden tickets to success, are distributed fairly; as Kett quotes a British sociologist, Keith Hope, saying, “When Americans talk about merit, they really mean desert.”2
As a thought experiment, if we are to understand meritocracy as meaning, simply, that success goes to the deserving, then how about just leaving it to the marketplace? Those who made the most money would be assumed to be those with the most merit. Anyone who is reading this book will likely regard that idea as absurd on its face. What about all of the large and small imperfections that exist in market systems and make them unfair—the favoritism, the self-dealing, the corruption? What about the tendency for the rich to get richer and to pass their advantages on intergenerationally through inheritance and other means? What about the market’s overvaluing of some fields and undervaluing of others?
But it’s worth asking whether a test-based meritocracy is much less unfair. Does it really, as James Bryant Conant promised back in the 1940s, completely upend the class system once a generation? Does it give every person a completely equal chance to succeed? Does it disable the long-running historical tendency of meritocracies to degrade into aristocracies? Of course not. If you work in an academic setting, it’s tempting to see academically determined measures of merit as being less flawed than market-determined measures, but that may just show that the world you’ve succeeded in, whatever it is, often feels essentially benign. A 2013 quantitative study of a large sample of high school valedictorians by Alexandra Walton Radford showed a very strong association between a family background in the top income quintile and the likelihood of attending one of the country’s most selective colleges, even among this cohort of outstanding students. Inside an elite university, one sees highly able students from across a range of backgrounds; this makes the system overall appear to be much less biased toward the prosperous than it actually is.
What if, instead, we defined meritocracy in terms that do entail education but do not entail selection—that is, in terms more consistent with the Truman Commission report? By that definition, we would recognize that higher education is strongly associated with opportunity, and we would conclude that it should be provided to as many people as possible, at as high a level as possible, rather than emphasizing the selection of a lucky few. Promoters of meritocracy often like to use the metaphor of a race, with everybody placed at the same starting line. Empirically, that is wildly undescriptive of American society as it is today, but even in theory, wouldn’t it be better if the starting line were the completion of higher education, not the beginning of higher education? Wouldn’t it be better if we lived in a society where it mattered that you had finished your education, and where that was a realistic possibility for everybody, but where it didn’t matter so much where you had gotten your education, because your performance in whatever work you did would be the determinant of success? It ought to be axiomatic that when a society makes highly consequential, life-shaping choices about people when they are young and still living at home with their parents, it is well-nigh impossible for those choices to be background neutral.
Besides the “merit” aspect of meritocracy, there’s the “-ocracy” aspect—the question of whether any society can successfully land on just the right criteria, and just the right selection method, so as to produce a truly wise, benign, unselfish elite. A sacred text for Conant and other promoters of the testing system was a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1813, during their long, remarkable postpresidential correspondence. “There is a natural aristocracy among men,” Jefferson wrote. “The grounds of this are virtue and talents.… There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.… The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.”3 The SAT was meant to bring what Jefferson had dreamed of into being, in an orderly, bureaucratized form.
Rarely quoted, though, is Adams’s reply to Jefferson’s letter, which was highly skeptical—indeed, sarcastic:
Your distinction between natural and artificial Aristocracy does not appear to me well founded. Birth and Wealth are conferred on some Men, as imperiously by Nature, as Genius, Strength or Beauty.… And both artificial Aristocracy, and Monarchy, and civil, military, political and hierarchical despotism, have all grown out of the natural Aristocracy of “Virtues and Talents.” We, to be sure, are far remote from this. Many hundred years must roll away before we shall be corrupted. Our pure, virtuous public spirited federative republic will last forever, govern the globe, and introduce the perfectibility of man.… Your distinction between the aristoi and pseudo aristoi, will not help the matter. I would trust one as soon as the other with unlimited Power. The Law wisely refuses an Oath as a witness in his own cause to the Saint as well as to the Sinner.4
It’s true that some vital roles in society require extensive technical education and training, but competent experts are not the same thing as a natural aristocracy that essentially rules, presumably without the inherent flaws of previous and supposedly unnatural aristocracies. Adams’s warning was prescient, especially in light of the tendency of inheritance to play an ever-greater role in elite selection, once a set of criteria is established.
The founders of the American system of admissions testing were not cynical in their incessant use of rhetoric about democracy and opportunity. Indeed, their use of this rhetoric at the outset has been helpful to later efforts to make the system somewhat more fair. It would be more accurate to accuse them of being disingenuous and naive than cynical. They could be seen as disingenuous because Conant, especially, was overwhelmingly more interested in elite selection than in mass opportunity, and he took pains to disguise that in the way he presented his vision to the public. There is a big difference between democratic elite selection and true equal opportunity for all. They could be accused of being naive because Conant didn’t see how impure both the “merit” and the “-ocracy” aspects of the system could become, rather quickly—the former because of the heavy aspect of status heritability among the privileged, the latter because of the association, especially in the United States, between selective higher education admission and pecuniary success, rather than public service. (It surely would have disappointed Conant to see, all these years later, how few of the students admitted to the most elite undergraduate colleges spend their entire careers in government.) Conant predicted that private universities in the United States would disappear entirely. Instead, they remain the country’s most prestigious, and the leading public universities have come to resemble the private ones in their heavy reliance on fundraising. Most of the country’s leading scholars of poverty, inequality, and social stratification have chosen to locate themselves at these universities, and it’s no mystery why: they have the resources to fund ambitious research and to attract brilliant graduate students, and they have the prestige to attract attention to their faculty members’ work. The pull of the elite end of the system is nearly impossible to resist, for anyone who has access to it.
Recent American writers about meritocracy—from Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein on the right to Daniel Markovitz or Michael Sandel on the left—have tended to agree with Young’s premise that (in Murray and Herrnstein’s phrase) a highly significant “invisible migration” has taken place in which, during the late twentieth century, very smart people were identified by standardized tests and brought to highly selective universities, where they replaced the previously dominant, not especially bright, class of boarding school aristocrats. This was not a change that would show up on national statistical surveys because it involved such a small number of people, and it did not even amount to a complete change in the population of elite universities, but it felt world-historically dramatic to the inhabitants of that small, intense world. Think, for example, of January 1993, when George and Barbara Bush, children of great privilege who had met at a country club dance in a wealthy suburb of New York City, turned over the White House to Bill and Hillary Clinton, who had grown up in middle-class provincial obscurity and who met in the library at Yale Law School. The new meritocratic elite inhabited the same institutions as the old aristocratic elite, and they began to take on the characteristics of a new kind of hereditary upper class, by intermarrying and raising their offspring with an obsessive concern with elite education.
One reason why the controversies over affirmative action have been so fierce for so long is that, structurally, the dreams of Conant, Clark Kerr, and likeminded mid-twentieth-century higher education leaders came true. The small number of highly selective American colleges and universities are for the most part more prominent, more successful, and further distanced from the great mass of schools than they were seventy-five years ago. They are highly overrepresented in the leadership ranks of many fields. If their goal has been to enhance their own institutional preeminence, they have succeeded magnificently; if their goal has been to create a fairer American society, not so much. In recent decades, research has generally supported the instincts of students and their parents who are applying to college: a degree from a highly selective university carries a significant lifetime earnings premium; the attention these universities pay to their students is far above average; their degrees carry valuable credential and network effects long after graduation; and their students come overwhelmingly from affluent families. Left to operate on its own, the system demonstrably underrepresents large elements of American society, and that affects not just campus diversity but who’s in the room, and which perspectives are represented and respected, when consequential political and economic decisions are made for many years afterward. It’s an issue obviously worth fighting over.
As part of the process that led to the University of California’s elimination of standardized testing in admissions, the university’s academic senate was invited to produce a report on testing. Anybody who assumes that University of California faculty members can be counted on to line up with the Left on all issues would be surprised by the report, which is a strong endorsement of the continued use of the SAT and ACT in admissions. (The university’s board of regents, in eliminating testing, was rejecting the academic senate’s recommendation.) The main argument of the senate’s report is that the tests not only add to the predictive power of the high school transcript—they are actually slightly more predictive than grades. So why not use them? Saul Geiser immediately fired back after the report was issued, asserting that if you take the income and education levels of applicants’ parents into account, it restores the superiority of high school grades to test scores as predictors of academic success. There is a larger issue here than who’s right about predictive validity coefficients. The academic senate’s report assumes that highly selective universities should choose their students primarily on their potential to perform academically on arrival at the university. But graduates of the University of California are, on the whole, likely to wind up in careers that are high status but not academic. It’s the idea that the university is selecting a class of future leaders for a highly diverse state that widens the focus of admissions decisions beyond a sole concern with undergraduate academic performance.
Through all these decades of controversies about admissions and about affirmative action, there has been the idea, shimmering like the mirage of a desert oasis on the horizon, that there might be some way of selecting students for elite universities that everyone would agree is fair. It’s the ever-elusive admissions equivalent of the Holy Grail, or the universal solvent, or the Northwest Passage. The main conservative version of this is to eliminate consideration of race in admissions. (And even the current Supreme Court is apparently not completely comfortable with the racial effects of strict “colorblindness”—that appears to explain its having declined in 2024 to hear a case challenging the admissions policies of a highly selective high school in Virginia, which substantively was almost identical to the 2023 Harvard and University of North Carolina cases.) Then there’s the idea of eliminating the admissions preference for children of alumni—something that two unsuccessful presidential candidates over the years, Bob Dole and John Edwards, have proposed as federal legislation, and that three prominent colleges, Amherst, Johns Hopkins, and Wesleyan, have recently done. Preferences for athletes and for donors’ children could also be eliminated.
Probably the most persistent reform idea is of a race-blind socioeconomic preference. Anthony Carnevale, when he was at ETS, produced a “Strivers Index,” which would identify SAT takers who got scores significantly higher than one would have predicted from their socioeconomic background factors. Some years earlier another ETS psychometrician, Winton Manning, proposed adjusting the SAT score itself to account for a student’s socioeconomic background. Richard Kahlenberg, a policy analyst at the Century Foundation, has been advocating for class- rather than race-based affirmative action for decades, including in briefs he has filed in challenges to affirmative action that have come before the Supreme Court. (Even Kahlenberg, however, has endorsed race-conscious policies meant to integrate the student bodies of public schools rather than selective universities.) During the arguments before the Court in the most recent cases, several justices asked about the possibility of keeping affirmative action in admissions, but on the basis of class rather than race.
In October 2023, a few months after the Supreme Court decision banning race-based affirmative action in admissions, Opportunity Insights, a Harvard-based research institute directed by the economist Raj Chetty, issued a detailed report on admissions at the Ivy Plus schools—the most highly selective universities in the country. The report’s headline finding was that students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution have a much higher chance of admission than anybody else, and that isn’t because they have superior grades or test scores; the primary mechanisms by which their parents convert family money into admission are through the preferences for children of alumni and for athletes.5 The obvious implication is that getting rid of these preferences would make superelite admissions—which, the study takes pains to stipulate, pays off handsomely in the form of access to high-paying private sector jobs—considerably fairer.
