Good to hear Ross say that representation, aka affirmative action, has, uh, merit.
3
If we’d limited these elite colleges to rich WASPs, a smattering of rich Catholics who look and act like WASPs (this category is for Ross), and a handful of ambitious Jews, we wouldn’t have this problem.
When the schools started letting some students in merely because of their intelligence or accomplishments, it seemed like a well intentioned idea, but now we have applicants whose families don’t even know how to bribe properly.
15
Ross Douthat: Harvard University, Class of 2002
At last, we agree on something
2
Race and Social Class are not opposite sides of the left right continuum.
Money is money.
Race is a continuum from poor black and brown kids going to mediocre schools in crumbling neighborhoods where they are expected to rise above their circumstances. What would you rather be...rich and dumb or poor and smart. Pick rich and dumb.
Look as social mobility in the USA. What are your chances of rising above your parents position in the ladder.
So the Asian parents grind their kids to the nub and they look great on paper. Is that the only reason they should get all the places in the Ivies?
Poor kids don't pick their parents. So should they get left behind?
Tell us oh wise Ross how the equalize opportunity in America.
5
SATs as a proxy for being smart? Really?
4
Duh! The whole point of the elite university system and legacy admissions is - networking! Meeting and socializing with the “right” people whose people knew your dad and your dad’s dad. You know, “keepin’ it all in the family” so to speak. Wouldn’t want any of those dirty little no neckers sneaking into our exclusive clubs. Why, before you know it, they’ll marry one of our sons or daughters and, well!, there goes the gene pool - not to mention the trust fund . . . .
13
I find it interesting that you found a case of a black person being fraudulenty admitted to a University as if it is representative of blacks getting into college. It's insulting. None of my college friends had legacy parents helping them and the only black people thst were welcome were those athletes that made money or prestige for yhe school. NOTHING about the environment was supportive or encouraging and you have the gall to suggest this is how blacks get in school. This disrespectful attitude is why black people will not ever he in numbers in the GOP. How Christian of you Ross.
6
While I'm not a heavy podcast consumer, Oh how I yearn for Ross Douthat and Fran Bruni to sit down for a lengthy and, indupbitably, thoughtful discussion of the issues of college admissions and American meritocracy! Oh, Please!
3
It’s not about race.
Rich white people cheating to get into elite universities; Jussie Smollett’s racial scam it’s the same thing–people with money and advantage still want more.
Left and Right intellectuals struggle to keep their politics while trying to defend historically-cherished beliefs about an American meritocracy. People who should be meritocracy’s greatest defenders are its greatest opponents.
While cheating seems to be a universal game, poor people are the losing players when up against the rich, famous and privileged.
Smollett wanted more money, so he hired “extras”—people at the lowest end of the wage scale—paid them just enough to visit home but left them twisting in the wind when they got back. A Black police chief—using an innate street sense—smelled a scam and busted Mr. Smollett.
The city-college FBI graduates—using innate skills, honed like the Black Chicago police chief’s—smelled a scam and busted some rich white people. They might have originally believed some unqualified Black affirmative-action student got their place in their elite college of choice, but they discovered it never was an even playing field, even for them.
Hopefully a lenient judge won’t make Smollett do hard time. As a handsome gay man, he won’t survive in the penitentiary.
The famous and attractive women caught in the college scam are too beautiful to jail; they’ll pay fines equivalent to one episode of a TV series that they won’t even miss.
It’s not about race.
1
What is merit? What is smart? What is wise? What is class? What is race? What is intelligence?
High graduate entertainers Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh didn't need college educations to attain their status. High school graduate journalists Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings didn't either.
Being born white European male is inherently presumptively smart and wise in whatever endeavor you choose in America. All others must prove and verify their merit by every means measurable.
Defining class based upon economic and educational status is a cramped inhumane white ethnic European capitalist view. Meant to perpetuate the status quo ante. Cultural and moral values are the ultimate universal measures of class. Money and education have no relevance to either.
And the myth of color aka race is a result of lingering historical scientific ignorance and stupidity deeply rooted in white supremacy. There is only one biological DNA genetic evolutionary fit human race species that began in Africa 300,000+ years ago.
Color is primarily related to producing Vitamin D and protecting genes from damaging mutations from differing levels of solar radiation at different altitudes and latitudes.
Color aka race is a malign socioeconomic political educational demographic historical white supremacist nationalist right-wing myth meant to legally and morally justify black African enslavement and separate and unequal black Jim Crow.
There is only one race and class..human from Earth.
9
We've had enough scandals of autocracy, plutocracy, kleptocracy, gerontocracy, aristocracy, and theocracy to look into, those of meritocracy can wait.
2
Are you endorsing noblesse oblige, Mr. Douthat? Whatever makes you think that would be better? Where do you see that in our society? In the First Family? What kind of weird, throwback fantasy are you dreaming of? Talk about your Tory dreams!
6
What institution exists where intelligence does not merit power? What then merits power? A lack of intelligence? There’s no leadership if the so called leader does not possess some form of hard intelligence and emotional intelligence. I give you, the Trump WH where “intelligence” is merely loyalty to the wannabe infantile dictator and/or nepotistic ties.
This is essentially arguing - let’s do away with any objective measure of merit and intelligence since it brought us this mess. Let us do base everything on skin color, wealth and maybe a test to weed out actual idiots and create a true “ruling class” and toss out the pretension of merit giving cover to the wealthy mostly white ruling class at the elite colleges funneling them towards government and corporate jobs.
Why stop there? Hey let’s overthrow the American democracy and delve a little in social engineering such as eugenics and create an underclass or even better a caste system!!!
Conservatives are exposing their previously thinly disguised contempt for democracy, the so called meritocracy, and the nonwhite citizens of this country, little by little each and every day.
1
Mr. Douthat has an interesting premise which he has stated before: the US needs an elite class which is defined not just by grade point average and self-striving (which can turn very selfish very quickly), but by upbringing, character, and noblesse oblige to serve the body politic..even at personal cost. I think he's right...just look at the "quality" of politicians we now have...a bunch of self-strivers (with good SAT scores) who on the whole are a disgustingly corrupt crew. Not financially, but corrupt morally. Very clever and very ambitious...but for themselves and their re-election, not for their country. A classic elite class would sacrifice re-election to principle, because they don't need a political career to realize themselves....and because principle would be their north star to follow. Does that sound innocent? Yes, in part it is. But not wholly. Because that is how a truly elite class thinks...or at least aspires.
Does Douthat's "elite" imply a whiff of aristocracy in our government? Yes it does, as witness the Roosevelts, Kennedys, and the Bush family. Our country mostly has been the better for them, rather than the gutter rat who now occupies the White House. So I think some elitiism in our government has stood the test of time in the past and could serve us well in the future.
57
The amount of money upper administrative university officials make is obscene
and no less a part of the corruption of money in our society than that of our obscene 'legacy' political system
College presidents are often hired ..at disgracefully overblown salaries...and for mainly one purpose..their ability (see connections) to raise yet more money for their respective institutions..
much as todays 'legacy' politicians...spend half their time 'sucking up ' to.. or appeasing..fat-cat donors
Meritocracy ? .. please...
2
The problem with a meritocracy is what do you do with those that don’t merit? Leave them behind? I mean what does a meritocracy do for those that score below 1200 on the SAT. The left’s focus on who gets the cherry at the top of the Sunday has distracted from the fact the rest of the Sunday has been nearly completely taken away.
Ivy League schools account for 0.3% of undergraduate enrollment. The “scandal” at Georgetown involved 0.18% of the slots at Georgetown. Meanwhile, state and federal funding for education for the other 99.7% of the students keeps getting cut.
When I did my undergraduate degree, in-state tuition and room and board was the equivalent of working 30 hr/wk in the summer and 10hr/wk during the school year at a minimum wage job. Now at the same school in state tuition with room and board is the equivalent of 1 and ½ years of working minimum wage full time.
My grades were good, top 3% on SAT, but wasn’t going to get into an Ivy League school, white guy from Midwest with nothing outstanding to offer. I went to the State university, lived in the dorms, worked crappy jobs weekends and summer. Guess what, got out of school after 10 years, Masters and Doctorate included with NO student loans. Got a decent job saved as much as I could and am now one of those single digit millionaires that Mr. Manjoo likes to talk trash about.
That ain’t happening today. And that should be the story.
14
A system of admitting students by lottery might even be fairer. Or bind submissions with all marks of identity erased.
2
The elite schools should see see their average SAT scores (1512!!) go down. It is "really" low if we remove all those falsified, corrupted scores. Meritocracy would then be truly meaningful.
1
I have also soured on affirmative action based on class rather than race... because instituting this wouldn't result in a mix that seems "fair" or representative. How about getting schools to accept 2/3 of their students based on their current methods (but removing the faux water polo and soccer player grifter parents' bribed entries) and then accepting the remaining 1/3 of the class based on class rankings across all schools? so admitting the top 1 or 2 percentage of students from all high schools... whether it is a high school in a lower income part of Appalachia or a segregated inner city school in Brooklyn...
I guess we should be humbled and grateful that an Ivy League “aristocrat” like Douthat has deigned to share with us his wisdom from on high. After all he is a member of that rarefied “ruling class…legitimated – through intergenerational continuity, through representation and through aptitude.”
On the other hand we mere mortals who have learned a few critical thinking skills through lowly state institutions should be able to put on our hip waders and slog through the waist deep effluence that flows from Douthat’s smug and condescending conduit of perspicacity.
We can discern in Douthat’s framing of the universe the Great Chain of Being that descends from the Divine through the angels to the human hierarchy at the top of which, apparently, are the Ivy-educated aristocrats that a democratic society needs to function.
We can also reference Douthat’s patron saint, 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke, who Douthat echoes on this very issue. Burke felt that only a certain class of individuals, those steeped in tradition, leisure, privilege and education was fit to lead. Its inherited talent and integrity provided good government and a crucial barrier between government and the tyranny of the masses. Burke insisted that social equality was a pernicious myth, and that “true equality” is not the right to rule, but the right to one’s station in life.
I humbly thank Burke and Douthat for that sobering dose of reality, and will now slink back to my pre-ordained station.
11
So after writing essentially a campaign ad for Warren’s socialist agenda (including breaking up privately owned companies like Amazon, Facebook through government edict) now you are advocating racial quotas (again by government decree I presume) and a less merit based admission based process for private elite universities. You are making Trump look good...
1
In a country with a government “by, of, and for, the people” there isn’t supposed to be a “ruling class!” When the wealthy control access to the means of becoming part of government, you have taxation without representation. Revolutionary wars were fought over such things.
3
It was wrong for ivies and selective universities to discriminate against blacks in the Jim Crow era, against Jews in the 1930's and 40's, and Asian applicants today.
It is still wrong.
Just pick fairly, whatever that may entail.
1
Just enough “meritocracy” to keep poor blacks and Latinos out, but not so much that rich whites can’t buy their way in, huh, Ross?
The difference between affirmative action and rich parent action is the difference between Obama and Trump or Sotomayor and Kavanaugh.
Personally, I prefer the Justice from the Bronx projects who tutored kids in Trenton on the weekends to the elite MD prep school student who got wasted every weekend. Based on how they spent their law school years, who do you think knows more about the law and justice even though both went to Yale Law?
By the way, any poor, middle, or working class kid who got higher grades and SAT scores than one of these students who bribed their way in, should be suing the pants off these schools.
1
Speaking of "smahtness" and premises, this incoherence fails to articulate a clear premise.
4
So the Ivy Leagues are shaping a "ruling class." How well has that been working for us??????
2
Really, Mr. Douthat? "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."
Ruling class? That is medieval. Perhaps you mean a catholic ruling class? That is what we have right now.
That is what must go. The people who run the catholic church have been allowed to thumb their noses at Separation of Church and State as OUR Constitution dictates. They have been allowed to suck in tremendous tax-free wealth in real estate and donations. They have been allowed to provide "private" schooling for their chosen ones, using those tax-free benefits. They are right now robbing us blind through OUR health care system as they try to suppress Women's choice of how to live life.
The ruling class wreaks of entitlement, inherited/stolen tax free wealth, corruption and insatiable greed. They have no place in OUR United States of America.
WE THE PEOPLE will hire/elect Socially Conscious Women and men to MANAGE Our America. Your little "ruling class" can go back where their ancestors came from.
1
Father Douhat embraces the inevitability of ruling class (read “rich white”) exclusivity. Yawn.
5
UPenn gave us Donald Trump of the ruling elite and Yale gave us Brett Kavanaugh of the ruling elite. Sure, there are counter examples. Yet like Trump and Kavanaugh, too many of ruling elite believe that they obtained their lofty status from hard work and intelligence and not privilege. Somehow there has to be a better way.
8
One point that is generally missed is that elite institutions are not all the same: some are best for the would be scientist, while others excel in liberal arts, or performing arts such as music, entertainment or sports. Such specialization is already well established for applicants to graduate programs, and should perhaps be extended to undergraduate programs also. An elite institution that seeks to be all things to all applicants end up being second best in everything. Once applicants recognize this fact (and many do), there will be less pressure to "get into Harvard or Stanford" and more into Princeton, MIT or Caltech. It will also reduce pressure on the average ivy league school such as Penn or Dartmouth and enable them to recruit a better class with more diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Meritocracy, while it sounds democratic at first blush, is just one method of choosing an elite; one that relies on some arbitrary choices about what talents to value.
Douthat is right to question whether meritocracy is always the best way of choosing an elite. But he disregards the prior question whether we ought to have an elite, which always has the corollary that there will be a majority assigned to the lower status classes whose talents are deemed less important.
Those of us who grew up lacking the skills and sophistication that define meritocracy may have a different definition of merit. I never had any problem scoring well in the SATs, it is doing everyday tasks where I am handicapped. Memorizing pins,phone numbers and names and being able to write simple sentences is a Herculean task. Writing so that even I might read what I wrote is an impossibility. Copying a quote often requires me to look at the quote six or seven times to get a single word correct is of little merit and utilizing a manual to perform a specific task reminds me of my namesake who simply cut through the Gordian knot.
At 71 I finally understand I do not function inside the box. I cannot nor ever could wear a watch and I cannot deal with Smartphones, cellphones or even landline phones. I can barely handle a single task and just the presence of a clock that must be obeyed is crippling.
The greatest mind of the late 18th century was the renowned conservative philosopher Dr Samuel Johnson who gave us the ability to communicate in the English language and whose presence at any intellectual gathering in London was a coup. I am no Samuel Johnson but right now I can think of no better persons needed from from our institutions than Dr Johnson who made people think and who above put a smile on their faces as they confronted their foibles and their handicaps.
We cannot compete with machines no matter what our "merit" we need to be able to laugh at ourselves for trying.
4
Getting accepted to an Ivy is a privilege granted. How about those Ivies be required to return the favor in some form of obligation, wisdom and service and patriotism?
After graduation, instead of being handed a golden ticket, the options are - straight to grad school or one year of mandatory service of some type - military, peace corps, teaching, volunteerism, etc. After those obligations are fulfilled and more wisdom attained, they are then guaranteed the life of opportunity that piece of paper can represent.
5
Schools like Yale and Harvard are known to select students who are in the top .1%, by generally accepted academic measurements. The problem is, those schools don't have enough space for all those in the top .1%, which means they have to come up with other criteria. You don't really want to admit somebody who has already peaked at the age of 18--you want somebody who will develop and, ultimately, make some positive contribution to society. Thus, admissions is never going to be "fair" or based on pure intelligence. Each school has to figure out combinations of talents, interests, and qualities, along with intelligence to make sound decisions in accepting students.
1
We want to perpetuate the class structure in our society by maintaining percentages as close as possible to steady state (we are deviating in the opposite direction in the Trump and GOP ran USA that worries me). That is the formula that had worked so far. Keep the middle class happy, have a couple of rags to riches stories for the poor and maintain the oligarchy of the 1 Percent.
The myth of meritocracy is needed to maintain normalcy in the society. Otherwise people wake up and rebel against it.
When you tell people, say from Scandinavian countries, the way our college system works, legacy candidates, sports recruits, racial quotas et al, they find it hard to believe. And why shouldn’t they? After all, so many in continental Europe went to totally free universities (that are called that there) and managed to become Einstein, Freud, Schroedinger, Tesla, Heisenberg, Pasteur, Poincare, Landau and Perelman.
Time to emphasize meritocracy rather than getting away from it. There were plenty of people I went to school with or taught after at Columbia and Harvard who clearly did not merit to graduate. If the examinations were fair and there were no donor parents calling department heads for jacking up grades who would object to attrition rates that are way above zero?
4
I think Douthat underestimates the importance of meritocracy. Meritocracy is the reason US produces most Noble laureates and the most innovative companies, which in turn allows not so meritocratic to also thrive in the US economy. Non-meritocratic societies, like all third world countries for example, have weak economies and unhealthy social fabric with the powerful ruling over the poor masses. Given this, we need more meritocracy, not less, despite its faults - rise of the new elite for example. But there will always be an elite in any system humans devise because we evolved for over a million years to be in a hierarchy, isn;'t it better to have an elite that is meritocratic at least?
3
My small city high school has a student body that is 58% Asia.A significant portion of these students are naturally bright. However, many families spend huge amounts on tutoring and test preparation. Some parents hired consultants to help their children through the entire application process. I wasn't aware of this when I watched my granddaughter work late into the night on her college essays. She took several practice tests on which she scored 99%,but only 98% on the ACT. That didn't get her into the Ivies. However, she is doing great at KCL where she is acquiring an international education. We put too much emphasis on testing and prestige. Education is learning about the world and making it a better place.
3
The solution is rather obvious but it won't happen. Take the top 10% of applicants selected by a professional, neutral board, and then randomly select the admits out of that pool of excellence. The randomization will insure diversity. Add double-blind admission regarding parent's income and you would approximate a meritocracy. It will never happen though because the elite have the system rigged.
2
Elite private colleges are finishing schools that offer a minor in actual scholarship. Because public education is so underfunded they are also some of the few locations where young people can get in contact with actual learning. A robust public college system would remedy this and open up leadership positions to actual competition.
5
This :"students thought of themselves as representatives of groups and heirs of family obligation", would be a return to a sense of being a person more accurate, and away from the hyper-individualism that is truly hurting us, and that passes for the norm today. Along with this would be the concept of stewardship; what ever advantage you have is solely there for the welfare of all, and not the Trump driven, "It's all about me." In other words, look for the helpers, not the high flyers.
3
Merit is the way to go. Merit is not the issue. Poor education from pre-K to high school is the issue. Give all children a good education and merit will find its way.
9
One of the greater scandals of "meritocracy" even absent all the cheating and favoritism involved, is the heavy ascription of lifelong merit to people based on their performance in high school. Because that's what an ostensibly fair and unbiased (no cheating) college entrance system would provide in terms of college admissions. And seriously, why would anyone in their right mind put a great deal of weight on the high school performance of a person in his/her 30s-40s-50s as a criterion for anything except maybe a role in a sequel to Grease or Fast Times at Ridgemont High?
2
Nice photo of Dunster House; it didn't used to be thought of as the essence of Harvard. That description was reserved for Eliot House, where the preppies hung out. Dusnter was full of westerners and public school boys.
The use of Title IX and federal funding to destroy the Ivy League was Strom Thurmond's revenge on the liberal establishment for civil rights legislation. He achieved his goal. The Ivy and the Sacred Seven are gone with "les neiges d'antan." What remains is not what made America great.
Strom's achievement has given the USA a meritocracy conspicuously lacking in the values formerly attributed to 'the establishment' -- although the Payola scandal earlier established that attribution had a few defects.
Mistaking correlation for causation, and degrees for education, has caused much damage to young people, and cost many parents far too much money. Going to Harvard doesn't make you rich; it won't make you wise if your parents bought you in where you don't belong or don't want to be. The USA is full of good schools.
Virtue cannot be legislated or bought. If colleges had more freedom to be different, and youth more room to develop on its own, the US might be a better place.
7
It takes an awfully high perch of privilege to anchor your column about meritocracy on the entertainment or amusement value of the scandal.
6
Your diagnosis maybe correct, Ross, but your prescription is treacherous.
The biggest argument against legacy admissions is the Bush family. It is telling that the white establishment in this country exalts its institutions until other races understand them and climb up the same ladders. Then, there is a rapid mobilization amongst the same class to move the goal posts. The white establishment doesn’t want “those types” among them.
They then feed the less fortunate among them the self-fulfilling lie that “those types” are responsible for the misery of the less fortunate. Divide and conquer. Rinse. Repeat.
There is nothing elite, exalting or exalted about the white establishment: both its whiteness and its establishment nature is painfully suspect to address the needs of the future.
If we weren’t all outraged by an idiot in chief right now, your column would have been a scandal. But that’s what the white establishment has got us: a rapid race to the bottom.
73
I feel compelled to mention that Arizona State University, which has skyrocketed to one of the top public colleges in the nation in recent years, offers the Obama scholarship to high performing students from low and moderate-income families. The scholarship covers tuition, room and board, books and supplies. just about everything a student needs. My son is the recipient of one of these and it gives me more hope for his future, as a boy from a single parent household that doesn't earn a lot of money, than I ever thought possible.
14
At Yale, I taught an undergraduate who won a Pulitzer Prize three years after graduation. Let’s not delude ourselves: There are some astonishingly gifted students whose talents benefit enormously from the resources and opportunities that an Ivy League university can provide. But even at elite institutions, star undergraduates are far from universal. At the public flagship, urban research university, and liberal arts college where I’ve also taught, undergrads may lack the polish of their Ivy League counterparts, but are just as bright and far more diverse, and bring much more real-life experience to the classroom. The real crime in higher education is the inverse relationship between resources and student needs. The students who need the most support and mentoring attend institutions with the least funding. – Steven Mintz, University of Texas at Austin
453
@Steven Mintz: How exactly do you propose correcting this, without affluent alumni who give generously?
@Penseur - where the PUBLIC institutions are concerned, it could be corrected (but wont in todays political/social climate) with taxpayer money.
In my opinion it historically has been the public school system in America which has made it great. This includes K-12 education and in particular the wonderful land grant research universities.
Ironically the Morrill Act of 1862 which allowed and initiated the Land Grant universities was a creation of Republicans and signed into law by a Republican president, A Lincoln in 1862. How times change.
58
@Steven Mintz Test scores and grades are not relevant for many college applicants.
Taking into account the college slots taken by legacies, jocks, affirmative action admittees, and cheaters like those whose parents were arrested in the college admissions bribery scam, there aren't many slots left for qualified but middle-class, non-minority kids at the top schools.
There is no easy solution to the problem because legacies, jocks and affirmative action seem to be here to stay. And, yes, some cheaters.
14
part of the problem is the decline in support for high quality public universities. When places such as UC Berkeley or the U of Wisconsin were in their prime it didn't matter quite as much as now about getting in to elite Ivies. But though the elite (such as Nelson Rockefeller once helped create public universities (and national parks, libraries...) now the upper class has mostly turned its back on public universities (and national parks, libraries...) which with high tuitions, struggling budgets and pressures for "retention" have declined in cachet and substance. Sad.
9
was it james madison who of all our fathers mosy clearly explained the need for "status"...? an especially fraught goal in a democracy that declares we all have an equal and unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, life, and liberty.
it seems that most of the europe and asia have a simpler way than we do to use higher education to gain status. they simply focus on its literal function...learning intellectual skills that will be necessary for work that is rewarding to the individual and society.
the complexities of status are held in abeyance or limited substantially while one pursues an education... during this period the only status that counts is educational achievement . It seems to work pretty well for the rest of the world. I dont know why it cant work as well for us.
4
Ross, come on. Do do you think those "robust" SAT scores are an indicator of being "smaht" or being relatively bright but by tutors that charge $400 an hour?
And your diagnosis of these scions' shortcomings as "...deficiencies primarily in memory and obligation, wisdom and service and patriotism" is spot ON.
Easy enough: all legacies must now enroll in Memory and Obligation 1311, so as to commemorate their families' tradition of entitlement (and their alma mater's obligation to accept all descendants, no matter how blockheaded). Advanced heirs may enroll in Wisdom, Service, and Patriotism 4311 to congratulate themselves on their noblesse oblige.
2
Not so fast Mr. Douthat! Hasn't your way already been tried. Wasn't it the British who insisted on creating their Empire on the backs of just such a public and private system of education that you seem to be suggesting; where-by the scion of the hereditary elite are expected to attend elite 'Private' schools (which would occasionally let in a few of the more promising sons and daughters of the lower and middle classes)? But the lower and middle classes are to be relegated to 'Public' institutions, where they are expected to learn to serve the needs of an Empire ruled by, "Their enlightened Betters".
And yes, wasn't the quote, "Waterloo was won on the fields of Eton" often used by the elite in Britain to justify the perpetuation of this class based system right-up to the time of the disintegration of the the British Empire, following the fall of the British Raj in India ( And then finally, after 500 years of control by the aristos, this opened up the opportunity for the lower and middle classes to gain control of the British government)?
I say no thanks Mr. Douthat to your veiled wish for a return to the crumbs of the inconsistencies of as system based on 'Noblesse Oblige', either in higher education or anywhere else that could possibly determine winners or losers in our society.
4
@Birddog: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy incurred on athletic playing fields has influenced the course of human history.
I don't buy your claim that elite institutions exist to produce leaders and your argument therefore has no bearing from that point on. To the extent that 'leaders' are produced by these places, they have internal controls to sort out the riffraff, so that pure merit admits w/o financial or family ties still have no chance of getting into the right fraternity/sorority or skull and bones because they will fail a credit check or genealogy inspection. I went to an ivy league school and am well aware of the many different circles inside the door. There are many concentric rings to lock the merely meritorious out of the sanctum of the wealthy.
6
How about a market oriented approach to admissions at the pricey exclusive schools? 1/3 of the slots would be filled by auction, going to the highest bidders. No grades or SAT scores required. 1/3 of slots would be diversity recruitments, broadly defined and based on ability and need. These applicants would be fully supported financially, thanks to the generosity of the auction bidders. The final 1/3 would be filled by the traditional route of grades, accomplishments, athletic ability, etc, blind to family income, legacy, ethnicity, race, etc. This approach has the advantages of being predictable, transparent, balancing the different goals of college admissions committees, and raising $$ for schools. Oh, and the wealthy parents who paid bribes to Singer wouldn't have to go to jail to get their lazy kids into fancy schools.
6
If I understand the premise correctly, the failure to implant a sense of noblesse oblige in the products of elite universities is the root of dissatisfaction with the current preferential system.
Mr. Douthat's premise apparently being the graduates will in general be materialistic,prestige seeking adults irrespective of the selection criteria. Is this a reflection of the elite institutions or our society in general?
1
The rich game and cheat to get those high SAT scores. They are also the ones who repeatedly vote for the demise of public funded primary and secondary education. This is not meritocracy but the privileges of the wealthy class. I've had the misfortune to interview engineering students from these platinum plated schools. Far too many had good grades but little actual training to be engineers. But their parents had wealth and power enough to get them into those schools.
5
@Jeff...When you interviewed engineering students from bronze plated schools, did they have lots of actual training to be engineers? You did interview bronzed engineers, didn't you?
Ross, you, and a number of your readers, have a confused way of thinking about meritocracy and merit because you begin at the wrong place. You ought begin with an old saw.
Talent is universal, opportunity is scarce. That does not mean that every human being is identically talented. It means that every human talent is randomly distributed throughout the world's population. Not everyone with talent finds the opportunity to develop that talent. Then you should take the next step:
Talent + Opportunity + Work + Luck = Success
This means that talent and opportunity are necessary but not sufficient. Even talented people must work hard to succeed. Often those who work hard do not succeed. The difference between success and failure is all too often luck. Catching the lucky break and dodging misfortune defines success or failure.
Humans, especially those who have achieved great success, find the randomness unsatisfying. So they rewrite the equation as:
Merit + Work = Success
What they are really doing is labeling the combination of talent, opportunity and luck as merit. Relabeling doesn’t change the underlying reality.
6
@OldBoatMan
Essentially, I agree. I would just reframe it thus, only because the word "talent" can be variously understood.
DNA (both IQ and personality traits that do not sabotage that IQ) +
Talent + Opportunity + Work + Luck = Success
Work, in itself, is less of a factor than most people realize. That is not to say that little work is involved in success; it is to say that people who won the genetic lottery actually need to apply less effort than the majority do to achieve the same and much more.
Perhaps it goes against American impulse to admit that people, not as "groups" but as individuals, are born with unequal abilities -- certainly true in the academic realm, which are the institutions we're talking about here. But it is a fact.
1
@OldBoatMan...My suggestion..
T x O x W x L (Might lead to) S
With multiplication, rather than addition, if one of the variables = 0, S = 0.
With (Might lead to), rather than = [equal], the individual variables may be robust, but their product may not pass a threshold = S
Anyway, interesting stuff. Thanks
@calleefornia...To paraphrase an old guy, "genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration". Another guy said "80% of success is showing up". Still another said "Questions, not answers, are the mark of thought". Of course brains matter - nematodes aren't likely to garner any Nobels (except in Literature) - but IQ is just one factor among many.
I 've been reading a book about the massive U.S. codebreaking operations during WWII. The work required math, analysis, synthesis, creativity, teamwork, mental agility and speed, and adaptability as code systems changed frequently.
To free up men, thousands of women were recruited from all walks of life across the nation, and many of the most gifted did not come from privileged or educated backgrounds. Many had had to go to work young, could not afford college, or had parents who were willing to invest in college only for sons. They were ordinary secretaries, clerks, switchboard operators, seamstresses, school teachers, and farm girls.
Yet given the opportunity, many showed unexpected technical, mathematical and innovative ability, and sometimes brilliance.
It made me wonder what undiscovered talent we are missing in the race for the perfect applicant.
13
"But the “more meritocracy” world...could be worse than what we have...that intelligence alone really merits power...has given us many present difficulties, and if extended may only give us more."
What? Trump was elected based upon a lack of meritocracy. He was patently unqualified either by his intelligence, his academic achievements or his record of public service. More meritocracy is exactly what we need, not less. No more comedian presidents. No more charismatic presidents. No more rich businessmen presidents. Achievement in leadership is the merit we need.
3
Something is rotten, and rotting, in America, Mr. Douthat.
How did Donald Trump get into Wharton?
How did Jared Kushner get into Harvard?
How did W Bush get into Yale and HBS?
Actually we know how W of the “gentleman C’s” got into Yale, which allowed him to get into the White House.
And there was a book published in 2006 with Jared as exhibit A of what’s wrong with our university admission system. Teachers at Kushner’s prepschool were disgusted that he got into Harvard when there where more qualified students who should have been accepted.
Thankfully for Kushner, his Dad “donated” $2.5 million to Harvard and, surprise, he was accepted.
Now he, the corrupt, unethical, sleazy advisor to his corrupt, unethical, sleazy father-in-law, sits in the White House, palling around with thugs, getting money by the bucket-full to bail out his horrible investment in NY real estate.
I wonder how much he’s getting for our state secrets?
Another thing is the utter corruption of college sports, where colleges, which are supposed to be about education, rake in bilillions in sports and pay coaches more than anyone else, all the time exploiting student athletes.
But ultimately the rich have gamed the system.
To them, they want to brag about where their kid matriculates. If it’s an Ivy, even better.
It’s yet another trophy, to go along with their jets, their places in Aspen, their yachts.
Time to bring back the estate tax, ban off-shore accounts and raise the corporate gains tax.
9
Mr. Douthat is apparently thinking of the ethos of British elite schools during the British Empire that were supposed to produce moral, dedicated and patriotic rulers of the world. Well, we all know how it turned out. And judging by the stupid Brexit mess, the abandonment of intellectual meritocracy has had long-term consequences. Since I taught both in the US and abroad, I know that the main problem with American elite schools is the student body. On the average, American students are not as smart, dedicated or ambitious as their Asian and European counterparts. And intelligence, plus intellectual curiosity and ambition, are the only things that count in higher education. Your race, your class, your gender, your personal problems don’t count. While colleges in the US are turning into a combination of a sports arena, wellness resort and psychiatric facility, graduate schools are being filled with students from China, India, the Middle East and elsewhere who are determined to succeed - and are succeeding, against all odds. Check out high-tech companies - 40 percent of their founders and an even higher proportion of their workforce are born abroad. This whole debate is irrelevant. You can pay millions to get your offspring to Harvard and then I’ll fail her with a stroke of a pen and give a high grade to a girl from a province in China you’ve never heard about who will go on to success while your daughter will end in a rehab because she does not know how to deal with adversity.
6
One look at Jared Kusher and it is crystal clear that we have to rethink this infatuation with the Ivy League. Has there ever been an institution (perhaps besides West Point) that has produced more dangerous blockheads than Harvard?
Still this ridiculous aura surrounds anyone who went there. Enough already.
5
How did the 32 indicted parents get to the point in life where they could bribe, for tens of thousands of dollars, their children’s way into elite schools? The vast majority are products of the meritocracy. They went to good, but not fabulous, schools like Providence, Boston Univeristy, Northeastern etc. A few were lucky enough to attend Cornel and Duke but they are the outliers. Many started companies and made themselves the bosses. That’s how they worked their way up. A small percentage went to medical, dental,law, and business schools. Meritocracy doesn’t stop at the Ivy League. Rather, the Ivy’s are a trophy these people wanted. Don’t wring your hands over the elite schools’ admission policies. The fault lies with the individuals who benefitted greatly from the real meritocracy and decided not to trust it enough to work its magic for their kids. Imagine this: a doctor had so little faith in his own gene pool that he hired someone to take the SAT for his kid. Give me a break!
It is NOT meritocracy's scandal at hand.
It is called bribery, and meritocracy rejects that.
Meritocracy offers opportunity to the best prepared to move forward with that opportunity.
That is still compelling, just large men make good football linemen, quick women make good soccer stars, and the brightest minds make the most useful discoveries.
Restore meritocracy. Reject legacy, bribery and random selection when handing out scarce opportunity. Remove ability to pay from the calculus of admission decisions. Let the truly best and brightest in first, what ever shade or ancestry. Diverse student bodies WILL result.
2
@howard
Precisely!
Democracies should make it possible for anyone who shows skills to advance! Ability and results should be rewarded.
But bribery undermines this.
3
Earn your way into a high-level university or the highest political positions in the country by:
a) Inflating your academic and/or financial worth
b) Buying your way in with the help of willing intermediaries
c) Accepting help from other questionable sources
d) All of the above
1
When certain stones are turned over, the results can tell a lot. What a coincidence that a mass murder was carried out in the name of white privilege. After all, these are two sides of the same coin. Ross's conclusion seems to be that the end justifies the means. This conclusion is very disconcerting.
How much human potential can any society afford to waste?
3
It's not that we ever need more meritocracy. It's that we never really had it. It has long been a fraud and a fiction to cover for privilege, generally white privilege.
5
Bradley Bleck,
I believe the privilege to which you refer is wealth privilege- and not all ‘whites’ have that, most don’t.
Most of the poor,in this country, are designated ‘white’.
The elite colleges raise billions. They do so largely from alumni. There is a reason why they take legacy admissions. Schools are caught. Society wants to hire people with college degrees. How smart and how well educated seems less important. The colleges what their faculty to be a best as possible to turn out the most admired papers and books. Do colleges want to be superior which is why they went to letting in vastly more White Protestant men to letting him Catholics, Jews and Women and now people of color, or do they only want to let people with money in.
My father came to the US from Scotland as a 12 year old with his family. Like so many other Scots, they settled in Appalachia, and after high school, my father worked in the WV coal mines for over ten years before moving to upstate NY to get a better, safer job in a chemical plant. Despite being lower working class, I was able to earn two masters degrees from MIT, all expenses paid. In fact, I earned a salary while attending MIT because I was fortunate to have a very influential uncle. Of course, his name was Uncle Sam, and I attended MIT as an Air Force Officer. Believe me, you don’t want to scam your way into MIT. You will be miserable. I have never worked harder at any job than my two years at MIT. It seemed like every waking minute was devoted to studies. It was also the best two years of my life. BTW, MIT does not award Latin honors, like cum laude, nor does it award honorary degrees. I have no experience with the Ivy League, and have no idea why they are so influential. I would guess it is due to the contacts you encounter.
6
@JSK
Yours is the tale of what should be possible to anyone in America.
1
This just in, sir: if they’re that smart, why cheat at all? And if the argument is that morality and work are the criteria...the cheating happened in amateur sports, whose whole, like raisin dettre is the building of discipline and character. And not the sports available to all, either: water polo, for example.
So is the point here to twist yourself into pretzels in order to avoid telling the truth—that the kefties are mostly right, this is the orivileged and the moneyed cheating to keep their kids moneyed and orivileged? That the righties are mostly trading in alibis for what they really mean...don’t let nobody but white guys in.
1
Does going to an elite school really make much difference in the lives of kids who are already from elite families, born into the ruling class? Did Harvard change Jared Kushner's life path in any way? His father wouldn't have hired him for the family business if he'd gone to State U? Although maybe if he had gone to a state school, he wouldn't be headed for prison right now.
2
Brains remains at least half the qualification. It would be nice if character were the other half, but measuring that has always led to quotas based on prejudice. I’ll stick with brains, noting that brains are assymmetric—smart can understand less smart better than stupid can understand smarter, which leads to endless confusion and resentment.
"...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."
Uh no, Mr. Douthat. It's not intelligence that's given us the many present difficulties. It's weaponized stupid combined with power and money.
We have an entire political party that rejects reason, facts, and science, one that places more value on ideological purity than competence, partisan loyalty over integrity, and unearned privilege over genuine achievement. The sooner they are driven from power, and the oligarchs behind them, the better.
1
If we really want the legacy kids to rule us, should we let anyone else vote in elections?
1
Meritocracy is like Communism, Capitalism, and Religion, in theory they appear optimistic, optimally efficient, and fair, but behind the curtain flawed human nature condemns these mechanisms to abuse and failure.
People cheat, they're narcissistic and selfish. Vigilant oversight, transparency, and democratic regulation are necessary to keep us all from the abyss.
4
Sometime in the past year or 18 months the New Yorker published an article about the Asian affirmative action committee controversy and in it quoted a Stanford dean as claiming to be producing the next generation of ‘citizen leaders’. That seems dubious. It is more likely that the citizen leaders are coming t Stanford. Let’s let Stanford (and whichever other elite institutions are up for the challenge) prove it. It’s hard to convince most people that an admissions no committee can make a distinctive n between two 4.3 /1600 mandarin speaking soccer playing violinists. Pick two numbers (gpa, sat) or an index of these and develop a pool of students (there will be plenty) all of whom are acceptable and then run a lottery. Perhaps a radical change is the prescription?
2
Humans are going to have to decide: Does everyone go into the future or just a select few survivors?
I'm talking about over-population as climate catastrophe descends and inequality explodes.
3
An implied false equivalence, a surprise coming from this at-times inspired and always fair-minded columnist, between the plight of disadvantaged kids and the no-plight-at-all of advantaged kids. You have to be kidding: What specific continuity is provided by legacy admissions besides the cozy continuity afforded to the already way advantaged family?
The biggest irony in all of this is that some of the biggest opponents of affirmative action for minorities and people of disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds are the same people who see nothing wrong with making a huge donation to a college to get their mediocre, undeserving spawn admitted.
Does that make them racist, or morally repugnant, or just hugely un-self aware? Or all of the above?
2
Look to who is in our prisons and mental hospitals, and look to who is feted in our elite (read: most expensive) colleges, and you will see the deliberate isolation and abandonment of the "irrelevant class"...people who capitalism doesn't really need and so treats with the same regard that those on the "Trail of Tears" received.
Merit can be a factor, but in a family, if the parents lavish everything on the child with the greatest grades, and ignore the smallest child, in terms of performance on a standardized test, you will see the roots of violence, which almost always comes from institutional and family bullying.
I gave up on any regard for Harvard or Yale or "The Church" and certainly cutthroat capitalism a long time ago, and have found that abandonment quite helpful in regaining my sanity. There is a reason we are willing to watch our Earth be destroyed and its people be killed in stupid wars, and that reason is how we are controlled in both our union less jobs and our mass education system that makes all of us cringe in fear of disapproval.
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
3
Here's the thing: It's all over pretty soon unless the U.S. goes hard Left.
Catastrophic climate change, exploding human over-population, a new arms race, and the prospect of individuals living forever. ALL OF THIS IS COMING TO A HEAD - NOW.
About seventy years ago, there was an opportunity for America to lead the world in a new direction. The EU was new and great. But the U.S. dove into capitalistic greed. Nothing new under the sun here. The same old dog-eat-dog struggle of peoples and nations as throughout human history.
And it was the Christians and their GOP that promoted the dirty deeds of inequality and war.
1
The system does not really reward intelligence. It give power the appearance of intelligence.
5
Crescat scientia
Vita excolatur!
Professions, sports, fun, success, social status, merit, money.
What are these things?
Just distractions!
The essential function of a university is the development and dissemination of knowledge for the good of humanity.
Where, in all this widespread discussion, does the basic question of knowledge for the good of the humanity appear?
1
You waged the Cold War on the ideological premise you were the meritocratic system. Now you'll throw it away?
1
Push me pull you between half the money on one side and half the people on the other. This'll be too close to call.
Everybody knows that America isn't a meritocracy and that admission to an Ivy League college doesn't signify superior intelligence.
So what's the point of this Ross Douthat column? That believing "intelligence alone really merits power" has given us "many present difficulties." To which I reply, "Which specific difficulties might those be?"
Ross must not have read any of Donald Trump's Tweets or listened to any of his off-the-cuff rants. He must not have noticed how abysmally ignorant our two most recent Republican presidents have been. If he had, it would be obvious to him that over-reliance on intelligence in high places isn't a big problem for America at present.
True, many other serious faults led those two guys to be lousy presidents besides their low-functioning brains.
Still, I'll take intelligent over stupid any day.
3
What if -- gasp -- education were simply an end in itself, a path toward enlightenment... discovery... ingenuity...understanding... empathy... problem solving... and dare I say soul ...not just a path toward creating the next generation of a "ruling class..."?
3
We have freighted college unjustly with the goal of reducing inequality. Higher ed can only reproduce extant inequalities.
Wow Mr. Douthat, that is some tortured logic! Since meritocracy is perverted by the wealthy and powerful we should do away with it. Just allow the scions of wealth to drop the charade off pretending to compete, and just waltz into the privelage they have been destined for. Your argument exposes the rotten moral core of conservatism, that the wealthy and powerful should be able to retain their wealth and power regardless of their deeds and actions, and the duty of everyone else is to uphold the privelage of the elites. That seems to be the world you are arguing for, and I find it repugnant.
3
You know, it is not only Trumpistas who are getting sick and tired of the “...Elites...” and how the system seems to be rigged. There are millions of Americans who have worked their entire lives who have next to nothing in assets other than their home, which may not yet be paid off, BTW.
I am big city Democrat and I have had just about my fill of guys from Harvard and Yale and Wharton and elsewhere thinking that they run the world and thinking that they can tell the rest of us what to do.
As for Douthat?
A Ruling Class? No thanks. Since he is a well known convert t a Church where you have to call the clergyman “...Father...” maybe he is just a bit too nclined to deference. I am getting sick and tired of deference- and that includes deference to Democratic Party “...insiders....
3
The implication that our ruling class is both hardworking and intelligent is so obviously absurd that its only worth is as an indication of the author's inability to be embarrassed.
3
Same old tired hash as “we need more WASPs”. In America we award legitimacy to meritocracy. This isn’t going away; it’s practically our foundational myth. To give up on that dream, you might as well bring back the king. Which I suppose will be your next column.
Consider the conclusion to Mr. Ross's column, the gist of which is this:
It might be better if elite universities were reserved for children of the elite .... so that those children could later send their children to the same universities ... and so on and so on ... thus perpetuating a self-selected elite "ruling class."
Holy cow. Just holy cow.
4
Most of the disastrous foreign and domestic ideas and failures put forth on the American people during the past sixty some years have been led by so-called "conservative" white male Harvard, Yale and other Ivy grads. We can't even escape these narrow-minded privileged, spoiled and coddled men on our Supreme Court.
3
"Elite institutions," Ross writes, "exist to train the ruling class." Indeed! Heaven forfend a dweeb with a degree from the University of Idaho ruling over us? Give us the Brain Trust! The Best and the Brightest! Harvard, Yale, Princeton! What could possibly go wrong?
1
So - let me get this straight - after decades of hearing about affirmative action as being antithetical to meritocracy because "undeserving minorities" took the place of whites we learn that rich, white people have been gaming the system, and your conclusion is that the rich, white cheating is A-OK because they are so much smarter anyway?
Imma need a beer to decipher that pretzel logic.
2
The best and brightest drafted thousands of poor people die in Vietnam and let the rich dodge service. Elitism at its finest.
4
If readers search "cheating" on the NYT home page, they'll find dozens of stories about academic cheating at Harvard and elsewhere. I was looking for the series the paper published a few years ago about extensive cheating in elite NYC high schools by kids desperate to win admission to Ivy League schools. Some 40% to 60% of the kids admitted to cheating.
But this NYT editorial does a splendid job of tracing the history of cheating scandals at Harvard back to the 19th century.
LINK: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/opinion/the-long-legacy-of-cheating-at-harvard.html
If you wonder why Big Government cheats and is distrusted, look at the number of Ivy grads and wonder how they got into those schools, how they got their jobs and how they win promotions. Is it by cheating their fly-over subjects?
2
Elite institutions "exist to shape a ruling class"?? In what school's charter do those words exist? Isn't it sufficiently obscene that our government is already run mostly by the rich and by the sons and daughters of the rich? Do people like Dubya and Trump's idiot son-in-law really need to have their march to wealth and power cleared for them by a dirty collusion between their monied relatives and said "elite institutions"? Nope, sorry: our universities (and particularly the best of them) must absolutely make it their business to promote democracy. Let the best, brainiest achievers enter their hallowed halls, with a national scholarship fund supporting the top 10 or 15% of the graduates of every public high school in America. Those who attend private and parochial schools can make their own way- with or without subsidies from their parents and without any such consideration extended by the universities themselves.
83
@stu freeman
Obviously elite schools exist to shape a ruling class. That isn’t a statement of approval. I don’t approve. It’s a description of how they actually function.
And I don’t think a strictly meritocratic set of admissions standards will fix the problem. I am not sure what will.
6
@Donald
Gee, and I thought they existed to educate! Don't forget that many of the graduates of today go into academic fields and research and medicine, not politics. And in the early days of Harvard, they went into the ministry!
6
@stu freeman
You seem to be responding to some other argument in some other column.
But yes, obviously elite schools exist to shape a ruling class. That isn’t a statement of approval. I don’t approve. It’s a description of how they actually function.
4
It seems to me that all the testing and preping for the tests is not to find out who is the smartest or will be the best student, it is to sort out the kids and find out as the Brit's use to say One of Us. Or to tell the truth who is Not One of Us. It is a sorting system not to really find the best and brightest to become the ruling class but to maintain the status quo. To excellent examples may be the last two Republican Presidents. Like George W Bush or not, who out there really believes he is one of our best or brightest? I will leave the current one out altogether, because we have just completely given up the pretence on this one. Maybe we too should just give up the pretence on selecting students as well. Find what is the bottom standard is and then take the whole pool and select them by lottery. Don't worry if you believe in Meritocracy the best will always flow to the top.
This is a great and thoughtful piece by Ross Douthat. And you don't have to agree with him to appreciate his insights. One question I have for anyone who knows is whether admissions was more meritocratic in say, the 1950s and 1960s when there was generally greater economic and social mobility.
@David
It wasn't. It was firmly entrenched in the Establishment. What we would call legacy admissions now. Jews were almost never admitted, nor blacks. At least not at most schools. (I know this from personal family lore)
Sure some bright kids might make it but definitely not a meritocracy. There was a phrase around at the time " a gentlemen's C" because gentlemen didn't strive too hard.
"Intergenerational continuity?" Otherwise known as an aristocracy. After 8 years of Bush Jr as president (Yale legacy), how can even Douthat seriously suggest that the feckless offspring of the wealthy have anything to offer the country by inheritance alone? How well did a thousand years of inherited aristocratic rule work for Europe, with its endless pretty wars, culminating in the self destructive auto da fe roof WWI? King Dubyah the Second? No thanks!
6
I graduated from an Ivy League college and taught at a branch of CUNY for over 40 years, At a public institution there are many excellent teachers whose main commitment is to teaching. At Ivy schools, an instructor's main commitment is usually research. Students who are very bright, well-motivated and well prepared will do well anywhere. Those that need additional help would be wise to attend a public institution in my opinion. Of course there are other non-academic considerations such as connections to be made, etc. However, I don't feel qualified to discuss these things.
The fact is that the first 12 years of education are more important for the student than the 4 undergraduate years. It appears that this was recognized by the Rs many years ago and education funding has been slashed. Who needs voters who know how to think? Education Secretary DeVos is the embodiment of the answer to that question - if you can’t profit from students forget about them.
4
1. Harvard is not a good school because it is WASPy.
2. The benefits of having attended Harvard do not extend solely to what is taught.
3. Educational opportunities were not necessarily better in 1900, so returning to the admissions practices of a previous century might have a range of undesirable consequences.
As usual we have a critique regarding the imperfections of any institutions run by imperfect human beings. A meritocracy, like utopia, will never be achieved but it is a goal. Schools try to adjust for the inequities of life by not relying on one metric because any system can be gamed or corrupted. The numbers we are talking about are very small, far less than 1% of admissions. If you are one of the undeserving it hardly guarantees you wealth or success if Yale let you in. The problem is the adults who think of their child's college as just another status symbol, no different than their too large home or very expensive car.
1
These elite colleges are designed to set people up for life. Many of these students graduate with zero student debt and start a job at or near a six-figure salary. What does a 23 year-old making six figures with little or no debt do with his money? He uses it to buy stock and mutual funds. By the time he’s closing in on 40, he’s rich.
1
High SAT Test scores do not represent intelligence or "talent"; that thinking is a grave mistake that can crush talented and creative people before they get a chance to develop. Leadership, creativity, innovation can't be readily determined from test scores or even high school grades - particularly when 18-year-old brains aren't fully developed. Opportunities for development should be implemented and encouraged. WWII was a horrible "gap-year" to experience, but it certainly allowed a lot of teens to develop into strong leaders and be ready to access the GI Bill.
1
Douthat writes, "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."
This is a misconception of what meritocracy is, and how standardized testing and college admissions works. It's not an IQ test. Some degree of intelligence is required, of course, but it's largely about effort. What kids will put in the time to really prep for the test? What kids have been taking challenging course work throughout high school and acing those courses? What kids have done outstanding extracurriculars and volunteer work?
Instead what Douthat is arguing for is a stratified class-based society based on family lineage which dubs "continuity," and some chaos based system in which "representation" is assigned based on race with little consideration for any real similarities between one and one's "representative."
This understandably enrages people. It's a given that it's very hard to attend an elite university or join any other elite group from the NBA to Goldman Sachs, but when there's a clear path, however hard, it's still somewhat fair. An obscure system that locks people out because they aren't the children of legacies is a symbol of utter corruption and kleptocracy.
3
Lot of good ideas. It is noble to aim for a perfectly fair admissions process. And reputed institutions should bring in a mix of all these ideas especially some amount of rationalization for talented but disadvantaged kids through an economic score.
But nothing contributes to outrage more than lack of transparency in the process. If Ivies have a backdoor, let it not be a process of discovery but an option available openly. This would reset the reputation of the institutions in question , distribute talented kids more equitably through the education system and enforce work ethic on all students once they pass out.
There is no tension between the three forms of legitimation proposed here because only one of them can be taken seriously. "Intergenerational continuity" (a euphemism for having rich parents) and "representation" (a euphemism for having a particular skin color) are totally illegitimate bases on which to justify privilege. The reason elite institutions won't openly embrace them--even if they seem to be stubbornly inevitable in reality--is because we don't live in the 18th Century anymore.
2
@Gb
Really? The power elites should not be representative of the communities they rule? That's an odd thought.
Nor should those elites have a sense of the long term obligation? Also odd.
I don't agree 100% with Mr. Douthat but I think he poses an interesting question. What precisely do we want our elites to look like? Intelligence can't simply be the measure. And they can't simply come from the community that already has all the power. I would say these schools need to take character into consideration. Legacy matters only if it seems to matter to the candidate as well. Community care that seems a more important criteria. How involved are you with others? That seems to me just as important as an SAT score.
Empathy.
His conclusion doesn't state this, but I agree with the idea that "intelligence is not enough". What we are missing in the equation is empathy. Many of our leaders ("the ruling class") are missing empathy, and it is a large part of the reason why things are falling apart in this country.
Most progressive business organizations now prioritize "emotional intelligence" in their hiring decisions, because teams fall apart without it. And when teams fall apart the project falls apart, goals aren't met, morale is low, attrition is high, etc. So they have started selecting on these traits to keep the business organization healthy.
Meritocracy can engender entitlement in the same way that wealth engenders entitlement. And entitlement in a democratic society acts as a kind of cancer. The kind that metastasizes. If we don't take steps to remedy the situation it will end up killing what is great about this country, but not before an extended amount of pain.
I agree with the conclusion of this article, but let's be more explicit and say that we need to start selecting our future leaders for empathy as well as intelligence and achievement.
*(Politicians are also "hired" to do a job--why should the selection criteria be any less rigorous? Or were they hired? Perhaps they bought the job. Perhaps this is the exact same issue that forms the basis for this article.)
@Rachael
I think you are close but empathy doesn't get it for me. Empathy is too sentimental a term (and too easily exploited for a process). Being involved in your community (which no doesn't mean setting up a non-profit in most cases) that is what shows you will put your intelligence to the service of others.
Despite the public perception, a very small percentage of America's "ruling elite" have ever taken a single class at any elite university. In fact, one major problem with our government is that we do not have a pipeline of academic politicians and civil servants as they do in Europe. Our government suffers for lack of long term experience and an apprentice culture. Every 4 or 8 years an administration reinvents the wheel in Washington. Sure, Clinton, Bush, and Obama had Ivy ties, but the only other majority Ivy League representation has been on the Supreme Court. Representatives and Senators usually represent a wide cross section of American experience and industry, with an obvious tilt toward "old" money in the Senate. This will change as current industry leaders -- tech especially -- become more politically active.
Even amongst Fortune 500 C-suites and boardrooms, elite universities are under-represented compared to public perception of economic domination. The only school that I believe can brag about over-representation is MIT, whose graduates have started companies that would rank in earnings as the tenth largest economy in the world.
Notice that no Hollywood type can bribe their kid into a school like MIT. A fake tennis player or Instagram start would not last long in at least one Cambridge place of higher learning.
3
It is a bit unusual to make a case that a society, who wants excellence in the services and professions it values, imagines that the match between quality of student and university is hardly relevant. Let's take a simple example. The society desires to cure cancer and needs people of mastery in biologic sciences. As a given, Universities vary in quality of research labs and Professors. So do we want the most talented to go to the most enriched school?
The arguments focus on admission but stop at the waters edge. Merit is not even a true metric in most schools. How may schools use the Socratic process in courses? How many favor debate over uniform agreement? How may present course meant to challenge and not simply reinforce?
China , with all of its faults , favors and protects education above all else. It is full of well educated people. They raise competition to any art form but pay a price for it as well as receive a gain. But they get a stronger and more skilled society.
We are on the road to a happier mediocrity .....
Fix scandals. Fix fraudulent admissions or “ degrees to highest donors” admissions.
But please retain a system that notes and then especially nurtures our students scoring highly on the National Merit tests or ACT.
Please retain schools with some of the world’s top labs and scholars to train brilliant researchers.
We need them in biology, chemistry, medicine, aeronautical engineering, bio-engineering and other fields.
In engineering: They will produce the next generations who will engineer great new projects and solve clean water issues. They will create methods to cost effectively bring into every city the technology that uses recycled plastic as part of the mix for roadways that are vastly more durable than what we have at present.
(Plastic road technology has been proven to work in Holland. In addition to being especially durable, it has a built in substructure that helps contain flood waters! Can you imagine how important that will be as global water makes floods more common!?)
4
@Jean
Sure its great to have top notch engineers but if those engineers only care about making money for themselves, it will buy us nothing. We need them to care about the world. So that has to enter into the equation. Or we've spent time educating a mind for nothing.
1
The university is a business that has secured tax free status AND cloaked their business as a worthy charity deserving unquestioned support. The public doesn't recognize this and replaces the business model with an empty vessel and fills it with notions that Douthat explores. The public simply wants to know how their kid get's an edge on their competition. All of the upset is about how people game the system and their shock and horror that it is not fair!
Universities are designed to create new knowledge in all disciplines.... of course this is a terrible business model and the solution was to create the system we have. 500 students in a lecture hall interacting with graduate assistant TAs managing the customers or non status adjunct faculty conducting much of the business profit center called teaching. Marketing manages the graduate side by claiming that their students are the best, elite. etc.
Once you acknowledge that American University is a business and it is a twisted, corrupt, secretive mess you can move beyond the upset and make choices about what would serve the public.
Your tax dollars pay for this hot mess between exemptions for property tax, exemptions for charitable giving, and tax exemptions for profits.
4
How quickly conservative opponents of racial diversity programs change their tune when the beneficiaries of special treatment turn out to be rich white kids. Several writers at National Review who have cheered anti-affirmative action lawsuits against elite universities have been struggling this week. Some insisted kids admitted with special parental "help" can likely do the college work anyway. (Not consistent with claims that racial diversity policies result in admission of students who can't succeed.) Seeing no other way out of the corner, several have thrown up their hands and want to get rid of all entrance criteria other than SATs/GPAs. Not helpful when there are 15-20 qualified applicants for every seat and do we really want to just reward drones who score high on tests and grind through high school? Douthat goes the opposite direction and gives up opposition to racial diversity policies if that's what it takes to preserve the special privileges of the wealthy. The current scandal was the cheating by parents and students, full stop. The problem is obsession with admission to a few dozen colleges. It is not a scandal that everyone can't go to Harvard whether that is because of legacy admissions or racial diversity policies. Great public and private colleges all over the country produce leaders in business, tech, government and the arts. Take a deep breath and think about what your kid needs as a person not a status symbol. Let colleges make admission decisions.
8
Some people go to "elite" universities because their faculty are better than those at second rank universities, and they provide (for those willing to take advantage of it) a better education.
Some people actually want a rigorous education in science, math, or even history. Harvard and Princeton (and Caltech and MIT for the first two subjects) can do that better than second rank universities like mine. Those applicants can only be found by demanding top SAT/ACT scores because there is no other unbiased measure of talent and preparation.
Yes, they may be overwhelmingly East and South Asian. So what? If those are the smartest or best prepared applicants, welcome them. If I had a choice of school for my children that included one whose students were 80% East and South Asian, that's where I would send them.
4
@Jonathan Katz
To your point, I think admissions to colleges should be held separately for different majors (as in some European countries) and possibly using different criteria. Otherwise Harvard and the likes may miss future Einsteins who don't play violin (or football).
1
The concept of "meritocracy" provides a rationalization for the obscenely unequal, materialistic & mercenary country we have become, but it does not describe any reality that I can see. When the most powerful are as likely to be Trumps & Kochs and Zuckerbergs as contributing members of society, when teachers and caregivers and the brilliantly creative may be desperately poor, "meritocracy" is an unfunny joke. As an ideal, it prescribes one measurement of success, whereas in a healthy culture everyone should have their own.
Whether rich or poor, people overwhelmingly inherit their economic status. The questions we should be asking are not about pretending that society is one monolithic competition that we should make fair, so that the intelligent and industrious in their wealth rule over the dull and lazy in their poverty. We should rather ask how society can help every individual find their fulfillment. Whether they aspire to an undemanding job that allows them to pursue a higher avocation, whether they want to be a nurse or an entrepreneur, they should be valued and rewarded so that each benefits from, and feels their debt to, the society.
330
@Martin
This is one of the finest posts I have ever laid eyes on. It describes not only all that is wrong with our current status and priorities, but also a hopeful way out.
I am not sanguine about our ability to make that jump - but thank you just the same.
36
@Martin
Martin - Your post was balm to my tired old eyes. Please consider running for political office or becoming a speech write/staff member for a politician who has the values you so eloquently state. As a society, we have moved so far away from anything resembling an ethical or moral place I think if my children were of college bound age, I would be encouraging them to attend university abroad and to emigrate there. There are nations that do consider the common good, after all.
39
@Martin
Wonder if the universal basic income idea would go a distance towards the kind of society you describe . . .in addition to helping to alleviate some degree of poverty (which, is this Calvinist-inspired society, we treat as a lack of worth rather than as a lack of funds), it might help to mitigate some of the status consciousness that results from the unequal distribution of rewards that is inherent in capitalism . . .
15
Merit can be debated endlessly but as long as we have tremendous wealth inequality we will also have unequal opportunity. There's simply no way to measure merit accurately when one person attends fine schools, enjoys economic security and intellectual stimulation and another suffers crumbling schools in unsafe neighborhoods featuring high crime rates.
445
@Eric Caine
Private schools are not required to be fair as long as they do not violate discrimination laws. Really rich people donating buildings and millions should have their offspring attend. Then the school can free up money to help the bottom 20% attend without crushing tuition and expenses.
3
If intelligence doesn't merit power then what does...stupidity? The most important question implied but not answered in this column is: how did we get to this point? What's driving this madness. People care about getting into "a good school" because hiring managers conflate the prestige of the school with the quality of those who attended. Part of this scam is driven by privileging athletes over scholars. Another part by demanding that all of our universities reflect the diversity of our population when this isn't always practical. But the main driver of this insanity is the admission policies of our top colleges. You'll frequently hear admissions folks talk about how their process is "holistic," but what does this mean for an applicant? Turns out it's pretty arbitrary. Good grades & a perfect SAT score are no longer a guarantee. Under a holistic admissions policy, a student with a 3.9 GPA gets turned down while an award-winning tuba player with a 3.2 GPA gets accepted. The student who was the Chess Club President might get preference over the student who had higher ACT scores. No wonder our kids are stressed out. Holistic admissions adds irrational subjectivity to admissions decisions. The practice makes it impossible to explain who gets in, who doesn't, & why. Holistic admissions become a guise for allowing cultural and even racial biases to dictate the admissions process. This nonsense has to stop. Admission to top schools should be based on grades and test scores. Period.
37
@Bill Brown I agree, and don't forget the money required to attain all those 'Holistic' differentiators. There is already an advantage for the wealthy on academic support, but this is really exacerbated when all the extra-curricular ($$$$) activities become part of the equation. How about giving students credit for having to work part time, or take care of the siblings while both parents (or one) worked. THAT shows more potential and responsibility than being carted around to paid 'holistic' activities.
10
@Bill Brown Good grades and a perfect SAT will guarantee admission to hundreds of very good public universities and private colleges in the U.S. It doesn't guarantee admission to the few dozen colleges and universities viewed as the most elite because those schools receive 15-20 qualified applicants for every seat in the incoming class. High school students aren't stressed out because those few dozen schools have holistic admissions policies; they're stressed out because they have told that if they don't gain admission to one of those colleges, they're prospects in life will be limited. That simply isn't true, but for parents and kids invested in that idea it's hard to see how their disappointment would be less if rejection was based on a lottery among kids with high GPAs/perfect SATs. And how would higher education be affected if every seat at the most selective universities in the country is filled by someone whose only accomplishment may have been excelling at high school academics and test-taking?
19
@Bill Brown If the tuba player declared as a music major, well then, why shouldn’t the tuba player get in? A recognized star, “award winning,” in the field, and a solid student. Universities need students in all their colleges—fine arts, music, history, literature, numerous sciences, etc. What the major is still matters, and should always matter. Thus, music majors should be competing against music majors, etc. If you declare business or psychology then the number you are competing against just increased.
9
The Ivy and exclusive schools all have gigantic endowments. Why are they not creating more seats? They seem very self-satisfied, enjoying the grasping, scraping, and dirt-fighting tactics of applicants (or their parents) to obtain admission. For example, Stanford and Harvard have money that they basically cannot spend. Why not offer more seats to very deserving applicants? Ah, because they actually don’t want to water things down and lower their acceptance rates. Thanks for nothing. It really is a dirty system, all around.
67
To answer your question, they offer need blind admissions — which, in some cases, means free tuition. They can do more with their endowments; but suggesting they do nothing for economically disadvantaged students is not accurate.
9
@Amy B
A school like Harvard would have to build more dormitory space and Cambridge is already overbuilt. I don't think anyone would want to see high rise dorms there and it would change the academic experience.
2
"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."
Family obligation? How quaint! Ross, you truly are antediluvian if you think old rich families and the value they ostensibly place on public service for the common good or out of noblesse oblige duty still reign supreme in today's sharky climate.
Can't you even admit--not treat it like a joke--that the most recent spectacle of rich actors, actresses and bankers paying megabucks to a huckster to present a non-athletic student as star tennis player for guaranteed admission is both ethically and criminally wrong?
I don't think there is an answer for big money buying access or rationalizing that the wealthiest families should be primed for ruling (as opposed to governing), but I just don't see how your analysis here is helpful unless you have a specific political agenda to advance.
230
@ChristineMcM
It does seem as if Ross is seeking the return of a type of "noblesse oblige".
But, with certain notable exceptions, that has generally led to the attitude of "picking up the White Man's burden" and eventually to despotism, even if that despotism was sometimes somewhat more "benign".
But, you know, he is used to hierarchical systems. Catholic Church and all.
11
@ChristineMcM big money buys everything in this country including our government. Reverse Citizens United before it's too late.
26
@Rick could not agree more.
8
Why not set high minimum standards for admission to elite universities but then choose by lottery from all who meet the standards? This would lessen the influence of money but should still give a diverse student body.
I don't see any reason for legacy admissions. European universities don't have them and seem to do fine.
177
@Nick L
In good part the legacy admissions are related to the need for funding. A great public university I know had almost 80% state base funding in 1980 and now it is less than 20% (now mostly tuition and any outside funding they can find). Similarly private universities depend on interest rates on their investments, which rates have been historically low. Buildings used to be named after famous faculty or administrators, but now are named for rich donors.
European universities have basically full funding, so no need to sell their souls.
31
@Nick L - re "minimum standards" -the benefit a particular student may derived from an education from a particular *elite* educational institution goes beyond those minimum standards.
As with a lot of things in life, what that individual with the requisite minimum standards may be blessed with will be augmented by experience. Unfortunately many otherwise qualified students have experience limited to going to school and summer vacation. What about those with a bit more - summer work experience, volunteer initiatives, military background, Peace Corps, etc? A lottery would do those people a disservice.
As for elites and legacy admissions at European universities - I don't know much about the issue, especially at the continental universities, but um … Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews (and a few others) in Britain? Really???
4
@Nick L
Previous court decisions (Title IX especially) have made the recruitment of women an especially important aspect of Ivy League admissions. Athletic programs are an enormous part of these small schools - Harvard has as many Division I teams as the University of Michigan! Filling all of those sports rosters for both men and women takes away at least 1/4 of all freshman spots from non-athletic applicants. Schools obviously "double down" on some athlete recruits because they can be used in the minority affirmative action quotas too. In terms of elite universities, each acceptance simply represents a slot that must be filled in each class and roster, so the best applicants often check many of the boxes. The minority (non-Asian of course), LGBTQ 3-star linebacker from North Dakota who will double major in French literature and electrical engineering can write their own ticket anywhere. This is also another reason so many white crew, lacrosse, fencing, and soccer players have been searching for Hispanic heritage on 23andMe the past few years.
2
I’ll put some guy named Barack Hussein Obama up against a long, long list of full-on upper-class twits in terms of smarts, discipline, work and character any old day in the week, and twice on Sundays.
Or as a certain Federal judge noted apropos of a certain criminal this past week, lots of folks without your luck and advantages aren’t going to the slammer for more than seven years.
Briefly put, meritocracy my...ear. If we were in a meritocracy, a certain president would still be “pouring drywall,” as he bragged about doing for a big, big six weeks.
Yes, “pouring,” what what Donald said.
6
The strangest thing about this clever merit-musing is that Mr. Douthat seems to take for granted the notion of The Elite, and their sacred birthright to rule over the rest of us plebes; as well as the idea that Elite Universities are the best-quality universities, well-designed to produce our ruling class. To those of us who spent a lifetime around universities (in my case 13 years as a student and 40 years as a teacher), this is a truly bizarre fiction. To us, "elite" institutions have always been places where the children of the privileged and the insufferably entitled receive their final social gloss, so that they may then claim their birthright to lord it over the rest of us poor suckers. Is this un-American? Hardly. Our hallowed Founding Fathers established this Republic not as a meritocracy, nor as a haven of equal opportunity, but as an exclusionary minority-ruled sweet deal, where women, the blacks, the natives and the poor were rigorously barred from the franchise. The most salient feature of Douthat's "elite" is that it has always been crassly self-designated. TG
1
@Thomas Givon F.Y.I., the columnist is a graduate of a privileged, private high school in Connecticut followed by an exclusive Ivy League diploma from Harvard. Perhaps this elitist educational pedigree has something to do with his exclusionary attitude about who should and should not shape the student bodies of these institutions.
I think our 'elite' class is deficient more in empathy, compassion, and humility than anything else. They certainly have enough money, enough entitlement, and enough arrogance to cover the entire population. And probably for the next two or three generations. I found it very insightful that one 'beneficiary' of the recent scandal's indicted parents seems to have viewed USC as mostly a way to enhance her own Instagram influencer career, while she trifles away at school without much intention in pursuing the 'schooley' part of it. Since she's gotten about 90% of the way around the whole baseball diamond of success before Mom let her out of the house, and I'm sure is convinced both that she earned it all, and that she deserves it as well, she'll do just fine in life with or without the BA from USC. It's just a shame that some lower-middle class kid who really tried hard, and wanted to get the *education*, isn't in there because Ms. Instagram influencer is taking up space posting about how everything in the dorm room came from Amazon. Trump was right - "the system is rigged". It is heavily favored for the already wealthy, the rich have already won, and that's just the way it is. Trump in the White House is just another affirmation that being rich means not having to follow the rules, and still "winning" the game. The 'game' *is* rigged - and we've already lost. The wealthy are mostly upset when we don't just realize it, and give up.
4
I was going to rant about Ross (I do often) until I read vitdoc's fable about all minority students at a "top 10" law school failing the bar exam. Doesn't happen. [All the minority students at my top 2 law school passed the bar.] Amazing how a scandal of rich white people can be turned into an argument against
Both vitdoc and Ross have bought the pernicious rationale of the Bakke case - that a striving middle-class student was denied a spot he had earned because of minority admissions. Bakke, decided four decades ago, didn't even consider the legacies and lacrosse players that took up more slots than affirmative action.
Neither SATs or grades are absolute measures of merit guaranteeing a right to admission. SATs measure some things, not others. Grades are often a function of school decisions. A relative described her excellent prep school as having a pass-fail system: pass, you get an A; fail you get a B. Probably doesn't happen in inner city schools.
Colleges have a reason to want writers, artists, debaters, oboe players in their student body, as well as students with other extracurricular activities and backgrounds. Not so sure why they would want mediocre athletes.
The scandal that parents and some kids cheated should cause colleges to look at their priorities. It shouldn't be used as an argument to prevent admission of the kind of kids who parents have neither the means or intent to bribe their way in.
2
The world is full of con artists of varying degrees and as a nation we have succumbed to "rule' by a snake oil salesman.
People who believe that American society (or higher education) is a meritocracy are full of themselves.
1
The trope of “connections” and the “network” available to elite university grads is outdated. I went to Stanford and while there were certainly some who hob-nobbed with wealthy be-sweatered alums from the right frats around the chequered tablecloths before the big game, most of my fellow grads just applied for jobs and went on to work based on their major. It is almost as likely to see tech firms here in the Valley founded or staffed by grads from good non Ivies. It’s too bad that parents and grandparents think we still live in a time of leather chairs and smoking jackets, and “co-eds” and “chums.”
I love reading the NYT, but the paper's obsession with the elite Ivies is just sad. IMHO, we need to:
1. Raise taxes and increase the revenues devoted to public K-12 education.
2. Raise taxes and increase the revenues devoted to public higher education.
Berkeley. Michigan. Virginia. Texas. UCLA. Washington. All of these schools used to be superior to the elite private schools. Harvard administrators never cared about Yale or Stanford, Harvard outgunned those schools eliteness-wise. They could not stand that a public school for the hoi polloi, Berkeley, outranked them in virtually every department. That unfortunately has been changing. We need to return to the days when we poured resources into public education: when America was great.
10
@Ladyrantsalot
On the money! THE PROBLEM is that demand has increased but the supply of excellent education has declined Public education has suffered from the quest for lower taxes We are the richest nation the world has ever seen. We should stop acting like Scrooge Raise taxes Pay for excellence
2
Who says that a Meritocracy runs this countries and not a Aristocracy?
1
What are we doing to our children?
Implicite in the mad competition to get one's children into an elite school by any means, is that life without an Ivy League diploma is hardly worth living. Many people who attended a state university or community college, and those of us who have lived a life with no college education at all know that is absurd. In fact, I would argue that pressuring adolescents to constantly hyper-perform or their life is forfeit is a recipe for a miserable life, even if they do end up with a six figure salary right out of college.
2
Too bad that the SATs don't also measure creativity and strength of character. Snowplow parents would then have to do a complete makeover.
1
If elite universities become a dating club for aristocrats, they don't deserve my tax subsidy.
1
The essential problem? We have such a large and ever-widening gap between "elite" universities and our deteriorating public system. Post-WWII the USA built the best public university system in the world, perhaps in world history. However, the selfish narcissistic baby-boomers (my generation) and a failing "conservative" ideology, that is looking worse every day with their Trumpian baron, is systematically trashing our public universities. This is largely through disinvestment by the states and a philosophy that public education must be the cheap alternative to private, elite universities. America, it's time to rebuild and reinvest in our public colleges and kill the pernicious student loan debt-trap while we're at it.
5
"Einstein was a genius, but I'm sure that 100 people just as smart as him died in the cotton fields."
- That Science Guy Whose Name I Can't Remember Right Now (paraphrased)
1
Intelligence and wisdom certainly aren't the same thing. And the correlation between IQ and success seems to be quite low. Intelligence can even get in the way of wisdom, if it keeps you from really paying attention.
1
American private colleges are just social ladders like English private schools were .
The quality of education is mediocre even if they have some good professors from Europe, philosophy from France ( Derrida, Michel Serres, etc... , but the transversality is bad. Good professors from Europe will tell you easily in private ( they come to make money - chuttt !) that the level is lower than in Europe .
But in the USA you cannot criticize anyway. You just do what you are asked to do.
“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.”
And those mostly white right-wingers probably don’t realize that if racial preferences were removed from admissions, most of their kids wouldn’t make it in, being outshone by Asian kids. That would actually be fun to see.
3
Make the big Universities spend their endowments and double or tripple admissions
This just goes to show I can sometimes agree with a conservative.
I think we've established the average SAT score for Ivy League schools is at best a misleading statistic. We don't actually know if Ivy League students are "wick'd smaht." Parents are gaming the system and colleges are reluctant to let underachieving students fail. What percentage of the student body legitimately earned a 1570? Even among those who did, what percentage were simply prepared for that specific test but otherwise fail reasonable tests of intellectual preparedness? We don't know.
Before we go abandoning aptitude as a legitimate basis for college admission, we first need to accept that aptitude is hard to measure and easy to cheat. This discussion precludes any consideration of reforming affirmative action or legacy consideration. However, I would politely suggest legacy admissions are by far an easier target for elimination. Harvard is worth $45 billion. If they can't figure out how to turn $45 billion into a sustainable operating budget, they don't deserve to be called an elite school.
Athletic preference is even easier. Ivy League athletics is an oxymoron. You try watching a game sometime. I'm glad the kids are getting exercise but wow. You won't find any recruiters in the stands.
1
Ross, I read your articles with a bit of skepticism but do often appreciate your perspective; however, on this topic I find your reasoning deplorable and insidious. I fear, though, that you may be correct that admissions are about power and shaping the elite. I also think you are off base on your tying merit to intelligence. Merit should be tied to discipline, hard work and achievement: not the kind that pads resumes, but real work, real interest, real curiosity and genuine accomplishments that students can be proud of. Please read Jenine Capo Crucet's article, "Wait, How did you get into college?" posted on the NY Times the same day as yours. Maybe you will question what kind of elite colleges are shaping.
Confirmation of our latest SC justice embodies the ultimate admissions scandal.
1
“What if our elite is already diligent and how-do-you-like-them-apples smaht...and deficient primarily in memory and obligation, wisdom and service and patriotism?”
While the hypothetical ‘what if’ is a nice enough thought, it appears to be a fairly self-evident falsehood.
Distasteful as I find the invocation of “Intelligence Quotient,” especially as it pertains to comparing the value of human beings to each other, the notion that society’s “elite” are of overwhelming intelligence is somewhat absurd.
"intelligence alone really merits power, is the premise that has given us many present difficulties, and if extended may only give us more" What? Have you been under a rock the last couple of years?
Yes we have some serious "present difficulties" and it is not intelligence in the oval office that caused them.
1
What people are not talking about is this fact: demographics for college students show that, in fifteen or so years, there will be so few students who can pay upwards of 300k for college that most schools are on a fundraising tear to just survive into 2050. Schools fundraise through alumni; alumni want to send their kids to those schools; schools don’t really have a choice; the system only perpetuates itself.
Perhaps the bigger picture is this: let the “elites” have their fancy schools. Go to a state school; get your foot in the door; THEN outwork and outperform the lazy and entitled “elites”. If you can’t beat them at the college acceptance game (and you can’t), best them in the market - still very much a place where merit means something.
1
Mr. Douthat, Are you serious? You are either misinformed or being deliberately obtuse to actually base your argument on SAT scores as an accurate measurement of smaht.
I have been a HS teacher for 37 years, 27 of those in private international schools, and I can tell you (a thing which you certainly should already know) that SAT scores are about as contaminated a piece of data as can be imagined.
At the school where I currently teach my Asian students begin to be intensively tutored multiple hours a week BEGINNING IN THE FIRST GRADE! And this abomination continues right through to 12th. These students reflect a constellation of "skills" which can be taught in intensive, one hour sessions of drill and kill. Some mechanical elements they nail. But read books, think??
When you put them in my HL Literature class and I force them to consider abstract questions such as the origin of identity, the shape of a good life, and the difference between public and private virtue, they freeze. If it can't be spat out as a pre-digested bite from Google or a tutoring session, they are helpless. Only sustained pressure over a year or two can break this paralysis.
You know/or should know some of what I am describing. Go back and read the Harvard Faculty Statement of Common Purpose from a few years ago. This situation is not as simple and facile as you are presenting it.
Smart is not a skill. It is an integrated largeness of mind and character, and this elusive quality cannot be gamed.
1
There are no better examples of the lack of merit in the meritocracy than George W Bush and all members of the Trump family. Every one of these got into an elite college on Daddy's money and/or name, every one of these was an undistinguished student. Every one of these now rule the rest of us, fully confident that everything they have is due to their natural talents and brilliance.
And we are all worse off for it.
1
Sorry, but our academic institutions do not become better places when we keep out the smart kids to make room for the intellectually mediocre privileged. Colleges are places where creative, gifted, intelligent people get together to bounce ideas off each other in order to come up with new solutions to the many problems that plague us. How can one be creative if one's goal is to protect the status quo?
1
i confess bewilderment in the tendency to interpret college admissions cheating in educational terms -- the nasty elites, the disenfranchised minorities, the sham of institutional integrity, et cetera -- rather than put this scandal alongside all the others of recent notoriety: pederasts protected by the vatican, presidents suborning perjury, parliament befuddled by brexit, drug companies acting as drug pushers, movie moguls molesting starlets, wall street brokers selling toxic debt, politicians graduating into influence peddling, political consultants selling elections and voter fraud ... see any resemblance across all those particularities?
there is a kind of rot throughout civilization that seems to consist of the same elements: a trusted institution, social actors of presumed integrity, and some form of moral failing that leads to corruption.
but if you don't allow yourself the gratification of moral judgment, it seems people everywhere are becoming more self indulgent and more fearful. there no longer seems to be a concern for general welfare or a concern for how one gets ahead. there is also a miasma of anxiety about the future that does not seem to have a clear focus.
this scandal is not really about higher education, but about the cracks that appear in all our institutions -- medicine, law, politics, religion, finance, education and all the rest.
Character counts or at least it used to. These Hollywood cheats who are so critical of those in middle America because of their values have lost all credibility. They have been laughing and ridiculing them for years. Who's laughing now? People should just tune out these criminals. They need to be taught a lesson. Their reputations are in tatters and may never return.
For decades minorities (except Asians) have had to bear the burden that others would perceive that they weren't really all that good, and were only admitted to elite universities because of racial preferences. Now wealthy students will have the same burden, but because of there wealth rather than race.
But can't we agree that if we are going to have affirmative action, it should be based on class rather than race? Does anyone think Malia Obama (for example) needs a racial preference to get into Harvard? If blacks are disproportionately disadvantaged they should disproportionately benefit from class based affirmative action.
3
"Ruling class"? Didn't we fight a war over that? Will we have to go back to tugging our forelocks in the presence of our betters?
1
The "elite" schools are there to produce war criminals, corporate exploiters, cynical compliant politicians as well as a slew of columnists there to mystify, mildly complain and basically police the narrow parameters of what is permitted to be discussed.
3
I've been reading about this scandal as have all of us for a few days now and am still waiting for someone to make the obvious connection between the corrupt behavior and the rise of charter schools. I think there is a very real connection. In a nutshell it is this: Charter schools are basically private schools and I've noticed that they have incredibly robust marketing campaigns to get students; in New York City, it's pathetic how they are all out there trumpeting how great they are. And this has leaked into the public schools sector, too, because they too are now having to get enrollment figures to justify their budgets; in fact, their enrollments are directly linked to their budgets. People in favor of this competition (and I know there are many) seem completely oblivious to the downside: They have made education more of a commodity than ever before. When I was growing up, I knew only one kid who went to a private school. Public schools, for all their failings, make school about EDUCATION and education alone. But when you introduce competition, you immediately force them to market. How many millions of dollars are being wasted on this? It's incredibly wasteful. Unfortunately, as the old Southern saw goes, you can't get a hog to butcher itself. We are stuck now with this insane commoditization of education and to my mind this is exactly the result one would expect: I can buy my way in, there's a price and it doesn't matter what I need to do to pay it. Pathetic.
1
What is the “product” of the so-called “elite” college’s degree?
For any given input, say, a hundred students with an SAT of 1550, what, objectively, is the output that can be attributed to those students’ learning in that college?
Don’t use income, as the good ole boy/gal network will give those elite grads a glide path to Wall Street and Boardrooms.
Use something more objective: patents issued; peer-reviewed articles published; doctoral degrees earned.
In a propensity analysis, compare a 1550 SAT cohort that attended the “elite” schools with another demographically identical 1550 SAT cohort that attended a state university.
So, what is the real value-add?
None.
What is really going on is that the life-long status of having attended an elite school gives the individual bogus prestige and insider access to the system that cheats, systematically. There is no real cognitive value-add of attending an elite school. It is all about getting into an exclusive club, life-long.
That is why the elite, and just about everyone else around the world, covet getting into such schools.
It has nothing to do with learning or education.
1
Could the heart of the problem be that a degree is merely another bauble to be acquired in the never ending attempt to put on an outward show that masks the core insecurity of being? I dunno. Maybe the Wizard of Oz does.
Pedigree has always been king. It does not simply boil down to IQ and work ethic, you need to be someone who can be groomed to be among the Crimson, or whomever. To gain admission you need brains, and the Marie Antoinette factor is important too.
1
It is endlessly debatable, whether intellectual or scholastic aptitude is an environmentally or genetically acquired character. It may well be both: not everyone can be trained to sprint 100 meters in 9 seconds or manipulate numbers like Ramanujan.
The shenanigans of the radical militant Left and conservative wealthy Right aside, the merit system of university admissions is still the best, as long as it is divorced from ethno-religious twists and does not deviate from the ultimate goal of achieving scholarly excellence.
3
One simple point, Ross.
Concern with so-called "race-based" admissions may be most visible to you and others because some right-wing voices are so often heard, but in the 21st post-genome century, race-based admission is very likely a concern of intellectuals like Adrian Piper, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Professors Adolph Reid and Dorothy Roberts and even me, ordinary citizen who voted for the Liberal Party in the most recent Swedish election.
I learned from reading Times coverage of the Harvard Admission Department's primitive views on race, that individiuals there actually seem to believe that a person assigned by the Census Bureau to race x is sure to have certain personality characteristics predictable from knowing that race designation.
This at one of the great universties in the world?
Each of us is an individual with a genome 99% the same as the next individual. Ross, try this: Read Thomas Chatterton Williams "Losin' My Cool..." In his first life he adopted certain behaviors that he thought gave him appropriate credibility, given his surroundings. In his second life he adopted some new behaviors. And then, when he publishes his next book analyzing the American commitment to "race", read that and report on it here.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
Brazil has recently introduced race quotas. The problem begins in how you even define race -- especially in deeply miscigenated societies (most people have mixed ancestry), such as Brazil. The solution to correct social injustice is to provide good education for all, not create compensations of dubious validity.
@Jorge LThanks same flaw in USA. "Race" is self defined since. I used to be in contact with a Brazilian sociologist who was concerned about proposals to use "race" as you not. Long way to go. Larry L.
Many people, including myself have advocated for a mandatory national service program for all emerging adults after they get out of high school, either in the military, and better yet in all those areas where other people or our environment need care. I don't know that it would be guaranteed to address this crisis we have but I think it would give many students more perspective about what they want out of college, and how they go about getting in to it.
4
"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. "
Has it come to this? "A ruling class?" Has the faculty been told?
Is that what Ross Douthat learned at Harvard?
Most elite schools want to see their graduates become "leaders," but ruling classes are not part of their mission statements.
A better concept of the purpose of education in general is frame it as Human Development.
A modern elite research university is not the best place to develop your skills in many fields: athletics, music, art, and many technical fields upon which we depend. Sometimes the best opportunities for some individuals can be in military service.
For those with early demonstrated aptitudes a good college education in a large urban university or a small college can be transformative to the trajectory of their lives.
In the end everyone must find their own way to make the most of their abilities and personal interests to give meaning to their lives.
The admissions process at elite colleges and universities will always select fewer students than those who can profit from four years at that institution. In any given year they may admit a so-so marimba player rather than a more skilled violinist if that is what the college orchestra needs.
The pressure of life at elite universities may not be the best environment for a given student's personal development.
But lifelong learning awaits.
1
Given that colleges and universities are supposed to allow maturing of minds and bodies so to improve ourselves and society, a real chance to learn how to think for ourselves and allow, even encourage, constructive criticism based on the facts reality presents us with. and learn to be effective and efficient in our social intercourse, it behooves this country to free the poor from the shackles of money, and be able to attend higher studies as a matter of course. Colleges ought to be free for those with no means, and gradual fees according to their means. For that to occur, we need to set our priorities right, take some money from a bloated military (even diplomacy, in these Trumpian times, has been relegated to an orphan status) and give it to education for all. After all, is there any better investment than the one dedicated to develop the talent, and entrepreneurship, of it's people?
Elite schools graduates daily illustrate the saying "it is not what you know it is who you know".
Graduating from an elite school tends to guarantee a successful life. If you want to be on the Supreme Court, you are apparently required to have gone to an Ivy League law school. That's the real problem. That's why people pay to get into Ivy League schools. It isn't the education they get their, it's the people they meet.
1
A scandalous op-ed. Douthat claims there's bad people on both sides, those who want affirmative action and those who use privilege to buy admissions. Claims the moral path is to use class instead.
Douthat's class idea, using family income to distinguish privilege, hugely favors whites. The most difficult hurdle for blacks is lack of assets, not income. Poor whites own houses, have relatives who own businesses, others with property or stock, at five or ten times the rate of poor blacks. It's assets that permit children to get a leg up, to get a loan or mortgage, including student loans.
Systemic privilege is more insidious than pasting a face on an athlete. Universities don't use the rich to defray affirmative action. Tuition high? They're ranked by endowment, compete for global "talent", leaders swim with the 0.1%, but mostly everyone else's is high. Universities nowhere near failing due to underprivileged. University bankruptcy rates are below corporations.
Douthat opines that Harvard treats Asian candidates like Jews in 30s and 40s. 10% Jews were officially admitted, actually lower. Harvard's 2019 class was 30% Asian. History repeats, first tragedy, then farce.
On a personal note, privilege legally buys admission to UC. 1/2 of Berkeley's freshmans come from a few prep schools. Law says only tests & GPA count, meritocracy. Prep schools provide grades, kids spend years preparing for tests. I was a TA when law passed. It dumbed down the next class. Meritocracy.
1
The premise here is that the Ivan League (as my solid middle-class Dad would call it) produces really smart graduates.
That one is hard to prove. Really hard. Remember how the "Best and Brightest" got us into Vietnam and perpetuated that grisly undeclared war for years? There are other and countless failures of graduates from those and other elite colleges.
I had the opportunity to provide a "legacy" to my daughter and grandchildren for one of these schools. I worked to get in and worked to stay but my career, a good one, was based upon the education (thru the PhD) from a land-grant school known best, at the time, for its vet school. That department,now, is the equal in all categories to any of the so-called elite school's department.
I often counsel young folk that college provides a three-legged stool: 1) you learn how to learn (education is not static but dynamic); 2) you learn a "vocation" (how to survive so you can learn); and 3) you form the basis of a network of colleagues and friends so you can enjoy Life and find opportunity.
A community college can do that as well as any in the Ivan League. What the Ivan League provides more than others is "privileged" networking.
My daughter and grandchildren were not interested in legacy. They have prospered. My granddaughter, in particular, chose to go to a large metropolitan, highly diverse, college when she could have "gone elite".
She's working on her PhD at the Sorbonne currently. All on her own.
My parents ran a little candy store and needless to say none of my teachers ever suffered from a lack of very good chocolate around the holidays. A couple of times when I got into spots of trouble in school this also ended up with bottles of Scotch.
Thanks Mom and Pop for coming to my rescue when I needed it and always doing everything you could to help me.
1
I am a college professor in Boston. I discussed this issue with my honors students. Their reaction was that this was no surprise. They understand that the students who go to that school across the river are the beneficiaries of a "rigged" system.
Does this refrain sound familiar? At the bottom of this cynicism, as Mr. Douthat rightly points out, is a belief in a kind of zero-sum Hobbesian meritocracy, which he also rightly criticizes.
As a citizen, I am concerned with creating more access and opportunity, through increased public and private funding, for so-called average students, whom I have seen become exceptional students with the right education.
Affirmative action's legal and educational purpose is not to "even the playing field." The Supreme Court's holding in Fisher v. Texas, views affirmative action as a tool to create an educational experience that is more diverse because it is beneficial to students as citizens. Numerous educational studies have shown that more diverse classrooms improve learning outcomes.
At the root of my students' cynicism is their clear-eyed knowledge that if they do not have money, college debt consigns them to potential decades of of indentured servitude to creditors. That is the reality of this debate - we have created two worlds, one for the elite, and the other for the rest of us. The solution for this dilemma is free secondary education.
1
Ross is on to something...what really has the Best and Brightest given us in the last three decades: Vietnam, Facebook, Amazon, Boeing...What our educational institutions have always struggled with is establishing a moral compass that serves as the foundation for both sound reasoning and decision making. In the last few weeks we have stark examples of corporations---Boeing/Facebook---and CEO's/movies stars/etc.---engaging in activities that provide stark examples of wildly spinning moral compasses resulting in poor judgement calls. The British elite boarding school system had as its goal the building of character---but, it's only "accomplishment" was subjugating millions upon millions of men, women, and children to colonial rule---which, when justification was called for, the response was: we deployed our boarding school values to the project of civilizing savages. I know liberal arts education is on the decline, and, it is questionable, whether even that course structure might infuse a measure of humility and empathy into the meritocratic rush to be the next face on Fortune magazine, but, instead of our elite schools examining their admissions process, they might spend some time, questioning how they might better live up the educational goals and values written into their school mission statements.
I think the true problem is we preach that the evils of inequality and social injustice can be remedied easily, particularly by education, when in fact education in an unjust society will largely yield injustice.
2
The top students have to go somewhere. They might as well go to universities and colleges that are hard to get into. And the non-top students might as well go to places where they are not competing with the top students. Is that really a scandal?
Why aren't Ivy League schools free??
Their endowments could easily foot the bill.
Take money out of the picture. And find out how to get kids to put some real skin in the game... like real evidence of scholarship (not those tests), devotion to work, study, and national service for a few years before they are ever allowed to get in the game of applying for admission.
Also, make the faculty get some skin in the game. Make them do the work of meeting and evaluating randomly selected applicants.
Then, make it a lottery.
Daryl's Rural Roadside Vegetable Stand and Occasional Dairy Produce
1
You are correct in that elite schools are not institions of “mass opportunity” and, therefore, some criteria of selection is needed.
The virtue of a purely meritocratic system (exclusively grades, for example, as used in parts of Europe and Latin America) is precisely levelling the playing field in regard to class, race or family ties — inherited traits over which candidates have no control and which, by extension, should not serve as a basis of selection.
Test taking is a skill which can also be inherited, granted. But all students have a shot through study and hard work.
1
Maybe universities, especially the Ivies, should focus on teaching ethics, principle, critical thinking, resistance to propaganda, all the humanitarian things that help us to avoid our true selves. The emphasis on job placement, earning many riches, getting to the top of the heap is misplaced and not helping us to get away from our ids.
4
I can’t help but notice how these colleges are trying to portray themselves as victims of the latest scandal. As though they didn’t have control of the system they created. This scandal just exposed what so many of us already knew: colleges are social clubs. Once you’re admitted, the game is over.
1
Ross I always read and appreciate your columns. You are thoughtful, knowledgeable, and you try to be honest and objective. I am not being snarky when I say I agree with many of your points but seldom with your overall bottom line or essence. Too conservative for me I guess but again your opinions are worthy.
Here are the things on which we ought to concentrate:
1st and foremost the inequality of education up and down the grade levels. Education is the leading factor re: lifetime earning and contentment. It is not the money so much as it is the empowerment and freedom a good job gives. One needs more and more education to be truly comfortably middle class. In my day a high school education - even technical - allowed entry into solid middle class given some talent and ambition. A single highly-skilled worker could put their family solidly there. But by Bush 1 it took maybe 2 to do that! Today at least 1 "professional" plus some help from partner. Education counts!
We must make good education universal (like healthcare must) - NOT regional - NOT income related.
Second the GOP has turned the definition of morality, ethics, and scruples into stances on abortion, gays, and church going. Elite higher education seems to amplify that - venality abounds in our leaders NOT noblesse oblige. Look we elected Trump! Scruples has to be a prime requirement for leadership. The "general welfare" has to be taken seriously!
GOP antithetical.
Address that Nation!
1
I found myself agreeing with the Ross' critique but not his solution. Here's one: a lottery among those in the top 10% of their high school class to choose who gets a slot in one of the Ivies. If we can't overcome income inequality, at least this would be a step toward opportunity equality. No legacies. No racial quotas.
1
"heirs of family obligation?"
Love the noblesse oblige.
Too bad we had to have a revolution and all that. How much simpler it would have been to recognize the wisdom of the previous "system," and let those who have, keep it. The rest in support. Lovely!
3
Mr Douthat's observations probably will rub a lot of people the wrong way, but no matter. People who prefer not to deal with the inconvenience of reality will stick to their social agendas in defiance.
One aspect that is missing from all of the talk about elite universities is what careers benefit the most from a(n advanced) degree from one of them. Not all careers benefit equally and not all graduates benefit with equal skills, despite the pedigree of the diploma.
My guess is that access to political power and governance is one of the areas that an elite education, along with its rich network of people who have exercised power is one such career.
My experience is that access to corporations is somewhat advantaged for elite graduates, but that advantage has a short shelf life. Results matter and not all elite school graduates produce acceptable results. Corporate executives understand this.
On the other hand, those in the investment banking and "McKinsey-level" business consulting professions make out like bandits. Huge payouts attract very smart, very serious, very competitive, very hard working people. Either they perform or they don't. Elite school guys (mostly but not always male) do really well here.
The list goes on. Medicine would be interesting.
The point is that middle class graduates who go to public universities can compete and win. Sometimes not as easily as others. Sometimes, more so. An "elite" diploma only goes so far in most career paths.
4
As my daughter who attended an Ivy League school reported, “ The hardest part was getting in; the rest was pretty easy.” Her masters degree at a flagship state university was a bit different: “difficult to get in and difficult to stay in.”
While being an out of state student at a public university is roughly equivalent, when everything is said and done in terms of tuition, fees, books, room and board, an honors program in a state school these days has decidedly more benefits than drawbacks. The major benefits being smarter students, more diversity and little grade inflation.
If she had to do it all over again, the Ivy would not have been the choice she would have made as an undergraduate. They do, however, offer an amazing education on the graduate level as do those flagship state universities. At that level it’s all about the quality of the program not so much the school.
6
Read their websites. The schools do not claim admissions are based on objective standards of merit.
4
Most people with ordinary talents can get a good education at most colleges - they don't have to go to elite institutions. The historical purpose of elite institutions was to preserve the advantages of titled and rich, whatever their talents, and obviously this is still going on. A better purpose would be to identify the truly gifted, whether in science, literature, politics, etc., and allow them to get more extensive education. This is probably what benefits society the most. Douthat opts for Plan A and preservation of the mediocre aristocracy.
5
Mr. Douthat argues in multiple directions without ever mentioning true north.
He, and almost every other observer, stipulates to the idea that the most selective or elite schools are a special treasure and that precious spots must be doled out so, so carefully. That is simply not true.
The most selective schools are "special" primarily because of highly burnished reputation. They earn that reputation by branding and by inviting as many applicants as possible in order to reject more and more of them. They are aided and abetted by college rankings, particularly US New and World Report, which is a irrelevant beauty contest. The process of proving selectivity is driving a generation of students into high stress, anxiety, depression and eating disorders, all in service of compiling perfect grades and test scores. In doing so, creativity, originality, imagination and risk-taking are virtually eliminated. I've spent many years in this world, and far too many students at these colleges are cynical, burned out, sad and frantically running on the same treadmill that got them there. Or they drink themselves half to death as a way of dulling the meaningless nature of it all.
There are scores of amazing schools in America. Education is not a competition. The brouhaha over this latest scandal is just more evidence of how ridiculous the whole chase is.
8
Ross Douthat seems to suggest that we hold our universities accountable for producing citizens, not merely avaricious competitors. The problem of the elite has too often been a hubris that demands the right to self-governance but shirks away from any demonstration of a noble outcome. I pause at his suggestion that our "elite" universities produce our leaders. Or perhaps they do and are producing a class that seems bent on the ignoble and tearing apart our American Grand Experiment of democracy.
How about a more level playing field that does away with the Ivies, replacing them with publicly funded universities that give deserving students free tuition and pay professors more than coaches. Or how about eliminating coaches and sports teams altogether, allowing gifted young athletes to go pro without the fiction of a college education that offers easy courses, gimme A's and allows them to skip classes for practice whenever the coach demands. If Trump is an example of what elite schools like Wharton produce maybe they're not so elite after all.
7
@Christy Except for your last sentence ( do we really need to put Trump everywhere?) I agree with you completely. Europe has done quite well for centuries with public, free ( or low priced ) universities with no frills like athletics, campuses, expensive dormitories and social life.
4
Once upon a time we had great public universities. CCNY and the California state schools for example. CCNY probably has more Nobel prize winners than any of the Ivies. Rebuild the public universities, and lower the reputation of the "elite" schools. Let them be schools for the wealthy, but understand them as such.
15
In post WW II America, admission to CCNY (now CUNY) was the ultimate goal of a large group of brilliant but not affluent NYC high school graduates. Their life achievements after graduation are self evident.
In 1969 a group of student activists forcibly closed the campus demanding and receiving a more inclusive admission policy. This resulted in many attendees, minority and otherwise, who were ill prepared for college courses. The academic excellence of years past is now is a distant memory.
Yale grad and former editor of Harper's, Lewis Lapham once wrote a brilliant piece about the perils of "achievetrons" - the people who are out to "achieve" at society's highest levels; the people we often refer to as "the best and brightest". Lapham lists these (mostly white) men throughout our history, which elite institution they attended (it was the same ten over and over) and then these men's legacies, which included, wars, genocides, environmental degradation, economic recessions/depressions, corruption, etc. In other words, it was these very people who had been responsible for the vast majority of misery experienced both in our country and abroad. According to Lapham, it was little secret as to why this was the case: what these elite learn at our elite universities is not a dedication to serving society but rather a dedication to serving themselves.
Does Ross really think these people have done a good job leading the world? Can our world even survive more of these "leaders"?
35
@Elsie
Thank you for this.....I would just add "dedication to serving themselves and their class."
1
Wondering: Is there any way to measure if these so-called elite universities actually produce elite talent for employers? What if employers gave standardized tests for all applicants, and hired only those with the highest scores - sort of like Civil Service exams in private industry. Would Ivy League grads always score higher than the kid from State U for those positions?
The reason parents want those seats for their children is because the diplomas from those schools confer almost instant employability -- and often at the best (and best paying) positions. And, of course, the old (girl)boy network is almost criminally obvious (see: federal courts, especially the supremes).
It might be world-changing (and save parents a lot of tuition money) is at least one large employer tried this.
3
Thanks Mr Douthat for confirming you don't favor equality of opportunity one of the bedrocks of any democratic society. We're obviously not there but clearly you don't believe we should be even attempting to get there.
4
Many of the commenters here don't seem to understand that it is not the quality of the education one receives at elite an university , or even the prestige of holding a degree from said school that really matters, but rather the networking and connections to the right people, people who can promote and advance ones career that is the true advantage of attending Elite schools. Remember it is often not what one knows but whom one knows that matters. Meritocracy is a misnomer. Graduating from Yale, even with a degree with honors is no more difficult than obtaining the same degree from say SCSU (both being in New Haven Connecticut) but the network of connections one could cultivate while attending Yale is what might very well make a significant difference in ones career path.
13
The people one meets at these schools are not valuable simply because they provide useful connections in later life. Rather, it is because they are interesting, serious individuals. With a few exceptions these are not party schools, and intellect is valued. This is not to excuse gaming admissions or to deny the value of many public institutions but only to say there are many intrinsic benefits to attending an elite college. And, with the worsening underfunding of public universities, the gap between the well-endowed and the rest is increasing.
5
@Susan, agree.
That said, there are too many generalities being bantered about the topic. Our son and grandson were both top students in their high schools and serious students who went to an Ivy. Our son then completed the MD with honors at a flag-ship state school and has devoted himself to his patients. There were no benefits from fellow students helping his career, just a good solid education among other highly motivated and goal oriented students. Our grandson is now following in Dad's footsteps!
Not all Ivy students, including minorities, will be successful for multiple reasons. Will some graduates get a leg up due to connections--certainly! But this is true in real life and jobs. I saw innumerable examples of people getting ahead in the military, industry, and academia based upon how they smoozed, their friends, and where they went to school! In most cases, competence and intelligence were not driving factors.
@tim
Not so. The Harvard MBA is a pre requisite to a CEO position. The successful completion is a merit badge and a necessary inclusion on a resume being reviewed by snobbish Boards Of Directors.
Universities are merely trying to deal with the fundamental problem in American education: we have among the best and highest achieving secondary schools in the world, but this excellence is not evenly distributed. So long as we lack equity in education we will continue to trip all over ourselves in efforts at diversity and affirmative action and thus make room for more not less discrimination on the basis of race, class, ethnicity, etc. How we get there, however, is not pretty. Step one: eliminate private schools at the secondary level (see Finland a country that consistently scores at the top of educational metrics). They only serve to offer a way out for the wealthy to give their children excellence in education while denying it to their children's less affluent peers. They also perpetuate the notion that "those other people" are not like us. And worse, in the South, they have historically been used as a tool for segregation. Once everyone's kids are in public schools, the wealthy will be fighting to make those public schools rigorous and excellent. Then universities will not need the SAT, ACT, or AP courses to discriminate between applicants. Their marks will tell the tale. And we'll all be better off.
3
@G James
If everyone went to public high schools, funding problems would disappear overnight.
The real issue is that more robust and consistent funding of education, especially those public schools with poorer populations at the K-12 level is where the issue of meritocracy should be addressed. That is where the playing field must be leveled but it is the hardest sector of education to address. No one has the courage to push this point at the state or local level. Until we even out the K-12 field, the college system will always be rigged against the poor.
14
Solution: no more opaque admissions. If a student hits a.specific, published minimum standard, (s)he goes into the lottery pool. Standards should vary for different socio-economic groups. Even better would be if the criteria are the same for same tier schools, and there would be only one lottery. Of course this means that elite institutions must give up power. But that's not a bug; it's a feature.
Public schools must be funded and should accept all who qualifies. Education is a right; not a privilege.
7
The often morally questionable scramble, process of Americans to attain status, to gain admission to Elite Universities?
Elite Universities, the very concept of such, their ongoing existence and development, are ground zero refutation of not only political concepts of the left or right or center (any current politics) to describe the human future, they refute even notions of progress as conceived by thinkers such as S. Pinker.
The very fact of civilizations rising and falling historically, and the gradual buildup of what best remained from these civilizations, their moments of genius as knowledge and wisdom, and the continued attempt to build up such knowledge and transmit it down through the ages, favors politically and economically increasing emphasis on the minority group of the gifted and talented, their protection, their status above all society, and of course this sits badly with either socialistic or fascistic or libertarian or what have you politics because such don't match this necessary historical process by which humans can truly develop further to master themselves and the world.
And everybody seems to at least unconsciously know this regardless of politics. Regardless of political leaning everybody seems to feel the need to go through Elite Universities, like in sports to make the team anyway they can, because making the team not only guarantees success no matter which way society politically and economically twists and turns, it puts one above "now" society.
2
For over a century sociologists of note have noted that elites rise and fall over time. That is the weakness of aristocracy entrenched. Meritocracy is theoretically better but as Douthat notes high scores may not mean much, whether genuine or forged. The best way to judge applicants to a school is to interview them, have them use the Queen's English in an essay written not at home with helpers but in an examination room setting. Of course this is cumbersome with the large number of applicants.
Perhaps we need to rethink whether college is for everyone; provide good work experience training and good paying jobs that are not academic at all. Many students go to college only because of parental pressure. Families should not be ashamed to have sons and even daughters who are plumbers, electricians, etc. They make a lot of money and if money counts as it seems to it will identify our real elites.
Then people will ask -- not what school did you attend, but how much money are you worth? How much do you make on average annually?
What everyone seems to miss is that if unqualified students are buying their way into elite colleges and universities then why aren’t these same students flunking out. They are certainly cut from the athletic teams of these schools, but how do they survive in the classrooms?
The reason is that these schools don’t provide a rigorous education any more, while their athletic teams still pursue excellence. Students can take 2 or 3 “gut” courses a semester and graduate with a B.A.
When I went to school the the President addressed the freshman class and said 2 out 3 students here today won’t be here at the end of the year. He was right.
I recently asked a neighbor’s son what he thought about XYZ College. He said “it’s a country club with books”.
Meritocracy is not the problem because it does exist at these schools any more.
1
Universities could do what China does, and much of Europe, and rely on more systematic testing. They don't because they don't want to: because it wouldn't help them, not because it isn't the right thing to do. I think they will get away with this for only a limited time.
1
The good news for Mr Douthat's proposals is that there are already US universities that think of themselves as elite, and which seem to serve to promulgate the view that its students are 'the right sort of people', from 'good families'.
When I (an academic) have come across them, I am surprised by their self-perception as elite: their reputations seem to hold primarily within the communities who derive their own sense of value from association with them.
This is not surprising. Just as British banks that cultivated scions of elite families were largely decimated by the introduction of competition, family run corporations underperform those with open competition for senior roles, and monarchies have given way to democracies, performance in the top ranks of academia is hindered both by presence of entitled people and by the perception of their presence.
Mr Douthat's "What if..." may be fun, but not sufficient for a serious proposal: I would need to see evidence that members of the self-perceived elite have the qualities hoped for them (memory, obligation, wisdom, patriotism). The first example that comes to mind is the 43rd President of the United States, whose patriotism involved ensuring he was safely on the home front during the war with Vietnam. Beyond this, I have seen again and again hard-working students from underprivileged backgrounds determined to make a contribution in return for the break that they have been afforded.
4
The arms race for prestige has also poorly served the students who *do* get in the top tier of schools.
In the two decades I have taught at a competitive university, the student body became more "impressive" every year––higher scores, more accomplished writing skills, more polished resumes. But they have also become more anxious, prone to depression, and often too career oriented to cultivate their intellectual curiosity.
Meanwhile, the maniacal focus of the media on elite schools has badly distorted public discussion of higher education. The real story is how erosion of public spending and support for the other 85% of higher education has led to a crisis of student debt and a thinning out of the educational experience for most students.
13
Reading this essay exhausted me - around and around we go, and we know we cannot solve this kind of problem. It's our deepest psyche acting.
I don't mean to sound blase about it because it's frightening to think world leadership is given to those (primarily) who attend only a few of the most elite universities. It's not that the rest of us read "Harvard educated" and decide to vote for a candidate (I don't need to tell YOU), but the fact that most of us wouldn't WANT to hang out with the crowd at Harvard Business School says it all. These people aren't real.
2
College is a business, externalizing costs to massive student debt and customer unhappiness: half admitted don't complete and many of those who do are in jobs not requiring a degree. I've taught undergraduate and graduate students at community colleges, a flagship state university, private secular and Catholic colleges, and a state college. FTEs or full time equivalent drives all. Too often:
Two year students are unmotivated or too busy with family and jobs.
Four year students' goal is satisfying parental demands or social pressure.
Graduate students, though looking for practical help, have tuition paid by employers.
Huge issues must be addressed:
1. "Empowering" student choice with loans and scholarships hasn't improved quality of education but fuels college spending on fancier dorms and facilities to market themselves.
2. Too many youth with other skills and aspirations aren't honored but herded off to college. Exploration of volunteer, military, travel, family service, self employment opportunities isn't encouraged. This to their harm and society's loss but colleges' short term gain.
3. Americans are being whipped into anti-immigrant frenzy but deny their reliance on them for cheap landscaping, construction, child care, retail, restaurant/hotel and gas station prices. Why shouldn't some of their kids do these jobs instead of being sent to college? There is dignity and financial reward, after all, in service and the trades.
Raising the minimum wage would help!
4
College is a business in the United States, other countries do not approach education in a capitalist way.
6
Oh, Mr. Douthat is going to get it for defending the legacy approach, and for good reason. Legacies at elite institutions, as currently administered, have little to do with respect for tradition, and more about true extenuation of privilege. However, Douthat is right that there is nothing particularly "pure" about filling a class with 1570 SAT scorers (which could easily be done by Harvard, Yale and Stanford, simultaneously, if you examine the numbers). I am no fan of critical race studies in general, but in this context, the critique of these elite institutions is correct. They are elitist.
Socrates was an ugly former soldier, but brilliant. He schooled those who would suffer his dialogues, and did not pontificate in writing. His engagement with Plato led to Plato's engagement with Aristotle. That led to Aristotle's engagement with Alexander the Great. The lesson emerging from that history of higher education, truly elite education, is that the teachers and the students should find one another.
If so, we might radically revise the admissions process to return to direct agreement on education between the teacher and the student. The administrators should be reduced to a truly administrative role. The professors have been cut out. The true would-be learners have been cut out. Let them find one another once again. It shouldn't be that hard in the digital age. The SAT is obsolete. The administrative admission process is both obsolete and corrupt.
3
Maybe given the size of our population we need to start thinking about the 100 best colleges in our country as elite instead 20 ( or in the case of Supreme Court justices just 2). Does anyone really believe that the education is that different?
4
There are reasons for having selection criteria -- it makes sense to teach within a certain range of student abilities. Trying to teach students who have trouble reading in a class with students who are ready for complex analysis serves neither student, for example. And teachers cannot be trained to do everything. So merit should relate to such needs.
Separate the cheating and bribing from the need to set certain criteria for entrance. And realize that there is no easy way to set those criteria.
Now, start your punditry.
2
I think we make a mistake in obsessessing over the vagaries of admissions to "elite" undergraduate programs. You don't need an Ivy or equivalent degree to have a meaningful and successful life. The more urgent issue, in my opinion, is the ongoing under-funding of public universities. As a society, need more investment in the things that build a strong nation, chiefly human capital and infrastructure. Let's focus on increasing the public investment in public universities and reducing tuition and fees and not get distracted by whether the admissions policies at USC and Yale are unfair. Ultimately, it really doesn't matter very much to society if some rich people got a leg up on admission to a private university.
7
At the end of the day, isn't it the results that matter? If you believe that an Ivy League education in necessary for success, then this is a scandal. If you want knowledge you can get it at a local college. The age of success and changing the world by inventing Electricity, Radio, or even the internet has changed to success by reading the social trends, like Facebook and Twitter. Either way, knowing Chaucer is pretty useless. I had a classic education and read Latin and Greek. Not sure it helped. But I went to very good university but didn't make social connections that lead to success, had to make success another way. Success, though is subjective. If you want to win the presidency, for instance, you may need to have the right connections. On the other hand if you cheat and lie to get that position, is that success, or is it the sign of the times as we slip into a two class society?
3
Go ahead and send your kid to a state sponsored university. If they go to class do the homework and graduate with a MARKETABLE degree they will do just fine. If they don't want to go the college route try the trades. Community colleges have excellent programs in the trades which pay well and are in high demand.
11
@Rick: Why "send" them anywhere? By 18 they should be mature enough to make the decisions about where to apply and why -- merely asking for parental support. If they are not yet that mature, perhaps they need to experience the job market for a couple of years while they figure things out.
We are thinking way too much about this and what is worse, we think we know something. We really don't.
The Ivies are places for our elites but at the graduate school level they also house depend upon those among the middle classes who found their academic stride and so emerged as ready to become leaders in their profession.
Still Douthat is right that this is about a small elite. So the real issue is not whether a movie star born in Queens could get her brats into a good school but what to do about the strivers who can't afford the Ivies.
I wonder if we will ever get there--the balance between merit, privilege, and giving help to those less financially advantaged. Has any nation ever done this? Not that I can see: there is always a juggling act. Some nations do not face the varied forms of diversity we see here in the USA. Mr. Douthat and I might define merit differently.
This does not mean we should not stop trying. There is likely more than one definition and/or perception of merit: this should be more than a test score (and many institutions attempt to account for some of those differences).
Our nation's economic inequality puts impediments in front of so many. We undervalue the education at numerous fine state and private institutions, only content to give the label "elite" to a few--yet many students go on to successful (again, what is that definition?) lives from other places, if given the opportunity.
I am not sure we will ever solve these difficulties--given the diversity of opinion and limited resources and endless political squabbles--but we can do better than what we have seen with the latest bribery scandals.
1
I don't know if my good, scholastically hard-working, athletic son "won" a spot in his "Hidden Ivy" school because I could "afford" to pay full tuition, but maybe. Perhaps that pushed someone else to the side. But, if that's "buying" his way in, I know I (!) may have paid for one or more of his buddies to be able to attend. AND, part of the reason I CAN pay $70+k is that my wife and I started a 529 just after he was born and contributed to it every year. That's what we were TOLD to do by every financial "expert" out there. We could have "scaled up" our lives, but instead we scaled up his options. Our cars are an '04 Ford and '07 Nissan. Now are WE the bad guys?
10
@Paul
How does paying your son's tuition pay for one of his buddies to attend?
How do you define "merit"? It makes a difference.
The schools define it as a catch-all, holistic ideal that consider the whole person, a totality of characteristics with a baseline of intellect.
The people suing the schools base it on test scores and GPA. The scores might have a solid base, but GPA depends a lot on how the school grades, the spread of grades, and whether teachers are praised or disciplined for grade inflation. Is a good test score the only thing a college needs to build a class?
The schools first fill the bucket with the obvious picks - the children of powerful people, the children of really good donors, the athletes, and the one brilliant teen every year who fills the adversity or ethnicity slot and gets into all the schools. After that you might as well just put the applications on the floor and throw darts, because 95% of those applications are going to get rejected, and most of the kids are similar on paper, most of them highly qualified.
Why don't we just admit that "merit" is a fluid term (just as the term "need" which determines financial aid is) and recognize that there is NO inherently fair way of distributing something that 95% of the applicants won't be able to receive?
My preferred solution? Any school caught in application scandal should be put on academic probation, and be forced to select 100% of applicants by lottery for 5 years. Treat 'em like sports with a death penalty.
5
All of the inequities involving college admissions are exacerbated by the increasing disparity of wealth in the country.
Your conservative prescription says it tries to stop change, which is like holding back the tide with a broom, but really it maintains the unfair, undemocratic, unsustainable concentrations of wealth in the country. Very unmeritocratic.
Instead, embrace change's inevitability and try to get the best from all walks of life to have equal voices in our futures. Some of the POTUSes from 'elite universities' who were 'legacies' have been far from elite leaders.
8
Using the author's criteria that the presumed elites need a training ground for noblesse oblige, when you consider FDR this makes sense in a way. However, the world has changed. So the Ivy League operates in a different perspective.
These days our problems are elites. Elites, whose shock over the democratization offered by the New Deal and later civil rights, and the success of the greatest middle class we might wind up ever seeing, have been in revolt. Tax policy now seeks to institutionalize a permanent ruling class who abhor having to spend much of anything on the general good or their fellow citizens. They now see government not as an engine of fairness and justice, but as an engine for personal profit, either by the direct transfer of our tax dollars or removal of oversight. Our world is one where Wall Street loses trillions of citizen wealth and lets us bail them out, while GM gets saved by tax dollars, then closes domestic plants. Frankly, I have had enough of privilege. The more absolute the power, the less accountability. No thanks.
The upper classes have failed because they kick away the ladders to success for the rest of us. When the best positions in these rarified ranks go to fellow Ivy Leaguers, the system has become a closed one where winners are ordained, not rewarded for their hard work and intelligence.
Sorry. I support democracy. You can keep your oldschool ties and the oligarchy that has become the inevitable result of looking out for one's own.
20
Ross mentions a purpose for so called "elite" or "Ivy League" schools - to "shape a ruling class".
It's obvious this is how things play out in the United States. Most presidents, for example, attended these schools. Additionally, because entry to these schools is less often meritocratic, and more often a combination of social connections, financial privilege, and in this recent criminal investigation - bribery - it stands to reason that the ruling class, created and protected by both elite universities and the obscenely wealthy corporate class, will continue to maintain political power at the expense of less and less representation of the wider body politic itself.
This devastating history, that chips and chips away at real democratic representation, not only takes opportunities away from children of the working class to join the "ruling class", it takes away every Americans right to be heard by their representatives in government, and thereby revokes the political power they transfer to representatives by way of social contract.
The result is that our republic changes, from representational democracy to oligarchy.
If this change continues to completion, it predicts a future in which disenfranchised Americans will eventually take that power back, because that power is ours innately - merely loaned to those who purport to represent us.
6
@PJ: Perhaps take a closer look at the reality of the class systems and school identities of countries like the UK, France -- and also Russia and China. In my experience abroad, it was not that dissimilar to what we have here.
1
Economic inequality in America has grown worse for decades. The middle class shrinks and lower bracket expands as wealth is unfairly funneled to the upper few percent. "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is the age old expression. The top 20% of US households own 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family (Walmart) has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.
The college admission investigation showed wealth used to give rich kids unfair advantage over middle or low income applicants. Theoretically there's oversight systems at colleges and society to prevent bribery, cheating and similar illegal tactics. Those caught are expected to face justice for illegal behavior. Sadly in America; rich criminals use excess "disposable income" to hire fleets of lawyers so they don't go to jail whereas the poor receive longer sentences for the same (and lesser) crimes. The inequality of applied justice is an often unnoticed crime in America where the rich escape punishment years after headlines are made.
Political economic policy holds lots of blame. Multiple Republican supply side economics failures needlessly exaggerated America's economic inequality. Presidents Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43 and now Trump have teamed with Republican-led Congress to pass "trickle down" policies that never trickled down. Wealth given away as tax refunds disproportionately goes to the 1%. The wealthy need to pay their fair share in taxes AND justice.
6
"...intelligence alone really merits power, is the premise that has given us many present difficulties,,,"
Is this true Ross? I see little evidence of this in politics. Nor in corporate leadership. Nor in spiritual/religious leadership.
Yes, we have many present difficulties. But not because those in positions of power posses exceptional intelligence. On the contrary.
15
Administrators must be loving this scandal. It completely takes people's eyes off the increasing failure of schools to educate, and do it in a way that's affordable.
I went to an Ivy league school in the 1980s. We lived in un-airconditioned dorms, piled up on each other. The average grade was a B-. Tuition, room and board was $18K
Now there are luxury dorms, the average grade is an A- and now students pay about $75K per year outside of financial aid which is mostly a debt, rather than grant system except for the few students who meet the income cut off for a free ride on Tuition (but not other expenses).
The student body has remained the same size, but the number of administrators has grown by 50 and the costs even higher as they demand more salary and benefits to do less work. Basically, a diploma is now a luxury good - the education is secondary.
Talented middle class students need not apply - no grants if your parents work so you can go to state.
7
Mr. Douthat, like USNews and World Report and way too many parents and admissions counselors, views SAT scores as a sound metric for "intelligence" and evidence of "merit". Standardized tests like the SAT are a poor proxy for "intelligence" or "merit".... but they yield a seemingly easy and precise means for ranking students and colleges, they are relatively cheap to administer, and they can be used to short-circuit a more comprehensive and more time consuming method of analyzing an individual's "intelligence" or "merit" or the "quality" of an educational institution. The SATs, then, are a easy, cheap, and fast way to assess "intelligence" and "merit"... and our politicians and voters are always seeking easy, cheap, and fast solutions to problems whose solutions are complicated, expensive, and time consuming.
6
It is true that many people who rise through meritocratic systems develop an awful attitude towards those they have left behind. It’s a real problem, responsible for many bad political desicions in the past that have led us to a breaking point today.
But to fix that problem by essentially abandoning the meritocratic principles that are central to American identity and one of your most admired features as a nation? I don’t think that’s wise. There must be a better solution.
You do have an option of admitting bright people and installing a sense of duty towards society in them. Their minds are still malleable.
Speaking of Asians, Confucianism stresses both meritocracy and leader-subordinate reciprocity. They don’t see it as mutually exclusive. Neither should we.
4
Such a lovely "random walk" opinion article...
As usual we focus on the wrong things. The true disparity in education happens in the "banality of evil" fashion by simply and systematically ensuring that those of lesser means (and typically of darker complexion) lack anything close to equal opportunity to learn in their formative years. This happens in a mix of ways. Educated well off parents providing what the state won't (and which parent can be faulted for this), or funding systems designed to favor well off neighborhoods (rather more insidious and truly counter meritocratic).
But by all means let us be distracted by who gets to go to Harvard. That's what's important.
14
This essay leaves me with some questions for both those who are scandalized by the story and those who are willing to issue bribes and bend standards to gain entry. 1) Where does an unbiased, totally neutral perspective exist in the human universe? I have yet to witness it. 2) What does an "elite" college offer that makes such a difference? Is the content taught any different from another institution? Is it that one gets to rub shoulders and make contacts with a unique class of people? 3) Does acceptance into a so called "elite" college guarantee economic success or a meaningful and purpose driven life? It seems to me that there are seriously skewed values surrounding this story.
4
Merit being equated with high test scores is only sensible on the surface. The SAT, replete with its own cultural biases, cannot predict success in or out of a school. The admissions system has long been biased to benefit the school, not the student. Affirmative action is the only route to remedy past inequities.
5
@sosonj the SAT is designed to test basic skills so that schools can see better through the puffery of applicants who were all first in their class.
As we can see, even culturally connected rich white girls needed to cheat to get the score required to demonstrate competency.
And there are plenty of studies demonstrating strong SAT performance correlates with better university readiness.
Every wonder why universities do not publish anything on how adminissions preference groups (including athletes and legacies) do after arriving?
In fact they work hard to prevent that data from being studied. While we may say being underprivileged is a form of merit, that metric doesn't make the individual a good student.
Two scandals in one week seem to confirm the decadence of US and the moral collapse of its “elites”: Boeing and college admissions.
Both reveal the existence of an “elite” which will do whatever it takes to preserve status, power or market share - even if that means sacrificing its basic moral compass.
This rationalization by Douthat really means that there will be great resistances at reform...
11
Once upon a time, I applied to an Ivy and was rejected; later, I got a PhD from the same Ivy. Still later, I remember reading an admissions committee member saying that you could lock the Harvard Class of [X+4] in a closet for 4 years, and they would emerge driven.
Perhaps it’s time to say that kids above the 90th percentile in SAT-land are equivalent: they will be successful without regard for the college they attend. Now, look more rigourously at admissions criteria for the Uber-Selective schools we’re discussing (Ivies, the “public Ivies”, the Ivy Wannabees like the columnist’s alma mater). If their entering classes dropped 100 points in their mean/median/mode SAT admission scores, it won’t matter. Establish a lottery, because it’s fairer than the present system. Enough said.
9
This column solves a mystery. Why did the South Dakota legislature recently fail to fund ascholarship for its poor students? Mr. Douthat's column confirms that there is a movement afoot to further cripple the chance to succeed of the lower class. Sadly conservatives are way off base when defining "meritocracy." It's not just measured by SAT scores, it's in effort and accomplishment, in overcoming adversity and being driven to make the world a better place. Merit is a studemt coming from the ghetto and starting an after school arts program that kept kids off the street. Merit is a volunteering at a nursing home and dreaming of being a doctor back home in rural Virginia. Merit is having what you would think a conservative would love -- that rare and magical gift of being able to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. But no. Somehow or other now conservatives think it is the pampered children of the rich who haven't done anything for themselves their whole lives, let alone anyone else, whose sense of entitlement eclipses empathy, who should be educated for leadership at elite universities.
27
The problem with college admissions is not that they overlook the kid from the ghetto who started an arts program, it's that there are too few of them and many more qualified, but undistinguished, applicants than there are spaces.
The private elite schools are still dependent on funding from alumni giving and their full sticker price students. Many of those alumni -- those with a later-life surplus from which to give -- do not take kindly to the reverse type quota system now in effect. With no increase in enrollment size, the make up of student bodies that, back in their day were almost 100% white male, are now (by quota requirement) held down to about 20% white male. Those schools work hard at new concepts in gender and racial mix.
Meanwhile the number of qualified while male applicants has remained the same or increased. When then those denied admission, by quota, are grandsons or grandsons of friends, it does not sit well. It feels like reverse discrimination! Yes, I know all the arguments to the contrary, but that is indeed how it feels. It is difficult to argue with feelings. A factor to be considered. I do not know the answer.
5
Despite all the capricious and arbitrary diversity window dressing and hand wringing nonsense, sufficient IQ, hard work and accomplishment rule as the basis for success; as it should, as it must. Accordingly, this should be the only basis for entry.
I would put more emphasis on hard work and accomplishment than IQ measures. Selecting candidates for admission this way should result in a good diversity spread.
Ideally, the tuition at such places should be free and rely for support on the contributions of their successful alumni.
2
@Michael Dowd "sufficient IQ, hard work and accomplishment rule as the basis for success"
This is true, but it is notable that that list does not include "graduating from Harvard."
Mr. Douthat and most of the commentators are focussed on the entry side. Only very few deal with the outcome. This is shortsighted.
When I read Op-Eds of Ivy league professors or alumni I ´m very often disappointed. This should be the working result of a true elite? When I say "elite" here this is understood as "hand picked best and brightest" not in the modern sociological sense as code for those who were bluntly called potentates or ruling powers in the old days when language wasn´t as streamlined as it is now, to put it mildly.
In best cases these working results are as good as those of others. Too often for a true meritocracy in the understanding of Mr. Douthat they are not. Particularly fact base is too often poor, frequently overlaid by ruling narratives and ideologic principles and focussed not on primary sources but on real or supposed authorities. This can go wrong badly. The most recent piece of this kind I remember is an Op-Ed of a MIT professor about NATO in NYT for instance who ignored even the explicit simplest reasons why this organisation was established.
Networking is not always positive also, to put this mildly as well. We have much experience with the same thing called "Klüngel" here. The assessment got more and more negative because this phenomenon is prone to establish "closed shops" where mutual advantages are prioritized in daily life and social and quality control is abolished in fact. Extremely advantageous for insiders, detrimental for the rest.
4
None of the scandals and none of the solutions referenced here touch upon the most significant change in elite college admissions. In the last ten years, according to the Washington Post, admission of foreign applicants has increased 46%.
Foreigners do not receive financial aid, which is a boon for the colleges and promotes wealth based admissions. Moreover, while receiving tax benefits and other government benefits, elite schools are servicing fewer and fewer Americans.
33
The problem does not stop at the educational level. Even professors are hired based on who they know, not on their abilities or talent. The same is happening in government and corporations. This country used to be a land of opportunity for all. Not anymore as class consciousness has gone back to the European model.
12
A „European Model“?
All admission to public university, be it for undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate and postdoc position in Germany are based on academic merit. Applications are assessed by a panel of scholars, shortlisting the most qualified/academically relevant and inviting them for interviews (graduate and above) whereas most undergraduate admission adheres to the GPA achieved in the last two years of university study. It is not uncommon for the children of leading professors to fail in their admission to the schools were their parents teach as they simply do not have the grades. Legacy, Money, or Sports (except when they are part of the national team) do not matter in admission, nor do extra-curricular activities unless one achieved honors at the national or international level. Rich parents may send their kids to private university but as the German proverb goes, they are for the stupid kids of rich parents.
And in France, admission is so tough to achieve to the Grande Ecoles that students study at university level for one to two years to survive the Ecole‘s own admission test.
Admission is solely based on your merit, not your parent‘s money. Furthermore, public education in Germany/France costs around 500-1000€ p.a. and not 50.000€ p.a. like in the US.
1
@ART I actually missed the era of the country being a land of opportunity for all. My mother had very limited career options and, at that time, not even everyone could vote. Try being Jewish (or a woman) and getting into Princeton in the 1950's or 60's. Try being black and getting into hotels and restaurants in the South back then, too. And before that it was worse, much worse.
Whether the private education system should be a meritocracy or a private members club is not for the society to decide. But a society can decide how much educating the future generations is worth by the effort and resources they devote to public education. It is good for the hypocrisy of these so called elite schools to be exposed, and they should be allowed to play the role of country clubs for rich kids. The focus should be on building a truly meritocratic education system for all.
4
This wouldn’t be a problem if public schools were funded at appropriate levels. The problem with elite schools isn’t that they’re selective, or even that parents bribe them with massive donations, it’s that public schools are systematically deprived of the same funds that allow the 1% to bribe their way in.
22
Status gives one a much longer and more satisfied life. No surprise that normal parents do a lot for their children to get them status. No status makes a lot of people unhappy. That's the truth most purposefully deny. Capitalism must be changed or depression and drugs will bloom even more.
9
@Anna: There is no class competition in Russia or China?
Come now!
The advantage of meritocracy is that it is something students can and must do by themselves. Representation is something a student is, not does, and legacy is something a student's ancestors did.
The disadvantage of meritocracy is that whatever the measurements of excellence measure is what the system strives for. Schools structure themselves so they can score higher on a certain magazine's list of schools, and the list exists to increase the magazine's circulation while not costing too much to compile and not being open to charges of subjectivity. So what schools use to measure themselves is structured by the workings of the magazine business rather than what they determine is needed to educate. Such developments, where the tail winds up wagging the dog, are well nigh inevitable and certainly absurd.
Today's meritocracy is a meritocracy of winning, a meritocracy of competition, and in a meritocracy of competition it is competition that forms the meritocracy, not some Platonic ideal of merit. People must find merit in doing a good job, not in winning a competition. A meritocracy of competition is a fatally flawed meritocracy.
Legacy can mean dubya or the Trump kids. Representation's bad results are not so serious. Meritocracy will give us scammers and gamers of the system as well as honest workers; the gamers use the honest workers to win.
We need a meritocracy that includes honesty and honor rather than salesmanship. It must matter how people win.
14
Douthat seems particularly obscure today, but I understand what is saying to be that academic merit is not the best standard for selection of our society's most important positions. I agree with that point. For example, there was a time when the most important jobs in the judiciary went not to the smartest people, but to the people who best understood the needs of their constituents. (E.g. Gov. Warren of California) They could hire academically smart people to be their clerks. This same dynamic held true at many institutions. Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure wisdom, so academic talent has become the measure of merit. I would not recommend going back to the ways of the 1950's, but we should find a way to give credit to non-academic skills and talents.
8
You raise a valid and disturbing issue, namely that the upper reaches of our federal judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court bench, has effectively turned into an exclusive reunion gatheringhas negative consequences far more damaging to society than what is occurring on the undergraduate levels.
This quote tells you that Ross Douthat does not understand the concept of democracy: "Elite institutions, by their very nature, are not a mass-opportunity system. Even in a democratic society they exist to shape a ruling class. "
In a REAL democratic society, there is no such thing as a "ruling class". That is the whole point of a democracy.
88
Yep. Douthat’s prob is common among the Right these days: if you have a shred of decency, your nose is getting rubbed in what your politics means and does, and there’s no way to square your cheerleading for money with your claims of morality.
It’s not that tricky, really. Some time back, I worked my way through a good state school and a pretty fancy university. No dough, no water polo. Just working, and lucky to have had the chance.
Since then, guys like Douthat have been slamming doors. Not really interested in his cheap excuses for that.
4
Ross's faith in noblesse oblige from an entrenched aristocracy is quaint. Aristocracies have always mixed in a lot of barbarism alongside their more altruistic endeavors. Further, a sense of entitlement based on birth is not obviously less damaging than a sense of entitlement based on achievement.
If you want evidence of the dangers of inherited privilege, I offer as exhibit A Donald Trump.
62
I think Ross misses the point entirely. A point no conservative SHOULD miss.
The problem is that we should not be figuring out how to engineer who gets to go the Ivy League schools (or any other school for that matter) in order to generate certain social outcomes we want.
The whole point is that the only thing that can come closest to being fair and equitable is a purely academically merit-based system of admission - preferably based on standardized tests.
The great genius and innovation of the SAT was that it put everyone everywhere on the most level playing field that was possible. It allowed students to be be judged most closely by achievement - rather than class or race or legacy - than anything else.
Social engineering stinks, and only increases social resentment and anger exponentially - as the last 50 years has illustrated. Achievement based on a single-standard comes closest to being fair and acceptable to all.
One reason sports in America is so enjoyable and devoid of this argument is that everyone agrees - if you can beat the other guy, you deserve the rewards. No one seriously argues blacks are being kept out of NHL hockey or that whites are being kept out of the NBA. Because they have a lot of certainty that there is one standard of why players are chosen - athletic superiority.
College should be about academic standards and ability. Period.
Everything else about higher education is a sideshow.
30
@John Cato
The fallacy of standardized aptitude tests of ability is that its bell shaped curve standard of proof of ranked ability happens to also mean that the natural aptitude measured by surveys of age groups has a natural shelf-life, both for individuals and the groups, and rises to the top only to decline. Athletic skills that is decline at different ages of the game players or performers (Gymnastic age groups for example peak before track and field athletes, as do musical prodigies, computing freaks, and football players. The more an ability is natural, the more closely it follows a rising and falling curve of developmen). The abilities that continue the longest rise are all learned. But learning is mostly about opportunity and personal preference. And opportunity is not nor ever has been meritocratic.
No one, incidentally, seriously today argues that racial segregation laws prohibiting blacks competing in prizefights, professional baseball, our military, law and medical schools with whites was because the blacks could not be trained to compete with whites. And no one today seriously argues that our anti-miscegenation laws were because blacks and whites could not have mixed-race healthy families and children.
2
@John Cato The SAT has never been on a level field. "Rich kids" always had the option of getting tutoring that "poorer kids" could not afford. Children whose parents have Ph.D.s etc have an advantage over children whose parents never went to college.
2
@John Cato
If parents can pay for expensive individual tutoring sessions to prep their children for the SAT or ACT you have a definite leg up on another applicant who may be equally talented and hardworking, but who can't afford these services. Hardly an equal playing field!
2
"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."
Let that sink in.
25
@Aaron
Am I the only one who suspects that in Douthat's first draft that "mass oppotunity" was "equal opportunity" in that sentence?
4
Barak Obama, GW Bush, JFK, FDR, TR Roosevelt, etc back to Jon Adams, Obama and Clinton demonstrated you can come from middle and lower class and make it to the office of president. And...join the elite.
1
I guess it all depends on how you define meritocracy. Douthat alludes to one measure, SATs or other tests. These were in fact originally introduced as a way to increase the role of merit in admissions, giving bright and talented kids a chance to compete with legacies and wealth. Why athletics is added to the mix is beyond me, but there certainly are other types of talents worth recongizing. Douthat may be arguing that wealth and the connections it brings is a form of meritocracy; i.e. that there is some advantage that these people have to make them leaders in our society. I think the big question is whether it makes them leaders in some sort of meritocratic way (I doubt it) or by buying the priveledges that wealth provides (more likely) that is not availalbe as a "merit" factor for others.
8
@Larry Figdill
The fact that wealthy parents and Hollywood celebrities had to bribe people for their kids to secure admission shows that the meritocracy is working. That your parents could pay $500,000 for you to gain admission to Harvard or USC does not mean you'll do better there than a scholarship kid.
How about an admissions process that is completely anonymized? No names, no photos, no indication of who the applicant is - just grades, test scores, essays and the rest of it the luck of the draw.
29
I find these discussions really amusing. My wife went to a top 10 law school a number of years ago. They admitted about 10% of the class basically as affirmative action admits. At the end of 3 years none passed the bar exam
I spent 6 years at Stanford in graduate and medical education.
What I found is that the intellectual stimulation was wonderful with Nobel prize winning professors and from the other students. Not everyone was a genius but overall they group was very interesting. My son when he was in 4th grade was having problems with his teacher because he seemed distracted and was difficult to control . We transferred him to a "gate" program and he flourished. As he put it at the time "the other students get my jokes".
So one of the greatest differences between the "elite" schools and less "elite" schools is the character of the student body. Every school will have some outstanding minds but some have a lot more. It is this interaction that separates these places from others.
Putting people in these institutions that don't belong there will not bring them up but often frustrate them like the students who failed the bar exam . So until a better system is found to figure out who belongs a meritocracy approach is still the best. How exactly to best define merit still can be debated .
21
@vitdoc Oh please. Where's the discussion of adderall, both for distracted kids and those meretricious students? Anecdotes about your wife's class are too neat by half. I work with plenty of white Stanford grads who are less capable than many from less elite backgrounds. Outstanding minds are not distributed by geographic coordinates or income. Ever hear of regression to the mean? A system that favors the offspring of successful people will decay.
3
@Brian
Regression to the mean definition:
in any event where luck is involved, extreme outcomes are followed by more moderate ones
Intelligence is largely heritable, not an act of luck
1
The top 10 law schools have 90 % pass rates on the bar exam, so it is absolutely impossible for 10% of "apparently affirmative action" students to fail. That would be a disaster of epic proportions for those schools.
What you are saying, is: your wife's class was about 10% African-American and Latino. Your wife thought, without any evidence, that they were not academically qualified. Then maybe a couple of them failed their bar exam, confirming your prejudice to the point of your now making preposterous exaggerations.
3
Meritocracy is the best way.
The recent scandals reveal bad behavior and unjust results precisely because they violated the principle of meritocracy.
Occasions where meritocracy is betrayed ought not to be excuses to dump meritocracy.
Dumping meritocracy because occasionally it is betrayed is completely upside-down thinking.
Instead, occasions where it is betrayed ought to be used to make it less likely to occur again.
That requires hard work
-- analysis of how meritocracy was betrayed,
and establishment and implementation of practices that make it less likely to be betrayed in the future.
Will betrayal ever be completely eliminated?
No.
Of course not.
But that is no reason whatsoever for not redoubling efforts to make it less likely.
Sure, that is hard work.
With the nitty gritty details.
On the ground.
Every day.
Hard work.
But not at all a reason not to undertake it.
Just like a myriad of other things in life.
Just as automobile accidents which occur as a result of unsafe driving or unsafe vehicles ought not be occasions to dump the principle of automobile safety, including safer driving habits and behavior and safer vehicles.
Instead, automobile accidents ought to be analyzed to find out what went wrong and to develop and implement better practices to improve driving behavior and vehicle safety.
Just as automobile accidents will never be eliminated entirely is not a reason not to constantly work -- yes, work -- of improving driving behavior and vehicle safety.
5
Why not assume that GPA, SAT, and essays are the best available measures of intelligence? Based on that assumption, make the curriculum changes necessary to produce the most effective elite. It's a novel idea, but it might work. Call it a college education.
4
@Fred
As long as everyone gets SAT coaching. Test-taking is a learned skill separate from academics. A good reader will have a vocabulary advantage, but all the rest is practice and parlor tricks. If we're going to judge people by it, they should all start with about the same level of preparation.
I know what I'm talking about. First, I went to a private school that gave SAT-format exams starting in early grades. When I took the real thing, it was familiar, no cause for nervousness, no need to figure out instructions.
I also taught test prep for Stanley Kaplan for years, and learned hundreds of tricks and strategies for increased accuracy, efficiency, pacing, specific problem types, and point maximization.
I practiced enough timed tests that I could bake brownies perfectly without a clock. The math approach taught me things I never learned in school. To this day, I can get very high or perfect scores on almost any multiple-choice test, even when I'm less familiar with the topic.
I was a good student, but my scores probably said more about my socio-economic status and family environment than about my innate abilities.
12
@Fred As a non-American when I observe the US College admission system Its subjectivity does surprise me. At the same time it is difficult to look at SAT as an indicator of merit. It is a low level difficulty exam and it is possible for kids with resources to be coached into doing well in such tests.
There are certain exams in developing countries like China and India which are at least three times more difficult than as SAT. Coaching is an important ingredient of success in those exams too ( known as JEE, BITSAT) and they lead to the best local Colleges ( IITs, BITS etc, examples of their alumni are Sundar Pichai, Sabir Bhatia, Vinod Khosla etc.). An interesting fact is that almost negligible students from wealthy families are able to pass those exams and get into the aforementioned institutions. The reason is that wealthy students seem incapable of applying themselves and making the effort needed for those exams even when coaching is available. Overwhelming number of successful students in those exams come from lower middle classes.
While higher education in US has been held in some esteem across the world (and masters degrees probably deserve that), it may not be a bad idea to borrow a few things from some developing countries for undergraduate intake. So the remedy may lie in relying upon examinations more for admissions, but only after making the examinations challenging enough to reflect true merit.
5
@Naomi Your SAT preparation paid off. However, I doubt that your college admission people relied wholly on the SAT--for the very reasons you mentioned. Naturally, your essay and GPA reflect your socio-economic advantages, particularly your aptitude. Is it your argument that aptitudes supported by family advantages have less merit--the aptitudes, I mean--than hard-won aptitudes? Don't we want the best and the brightest however achieved? My main point, however, is that colleges might best get out of the admissions business and instead accept the best measures of aptitude, intelligence, etc. provided by high schools and testing services and focus on curricula. In my own case, I benefitted from a college that accepted students who graduation high school, period.
The biggest business disaster that I personally know has an MBA from Harvard. She failed at three businesses, drove her family into bankruptcy, tried teaching at a community college, and finally quit even that job because she discovered, much to her chagrin, that a Harvard degree didn’t just automatically rain success down upon her in the real world - she was actually supposed to work at it.
She’s now in her 50s, unemployed, sitting at home spending her husband’s money while dreaming up projects that she never completes, because they require more effort than she’s willing to devote to them. She’s the reason I became VERY skeptical of these “elite” schools - not about the cachet of that MBA, but about the effectiveness of what the Harvard business school is teaching its students.
23
"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."
I agree. Let's start valuing empathy skills, creative skills, imagination skills, community building skills. Where is the SAT that ranks these skills?
14
@PE
How will that pollyannaish pablum improve daily life?
How will that lead to developments in science and engineering that make literally a world of difference in daily life -- in electricity, in medicine, in mechanics, etc. that give us all the things that make life today so much better than 200 -- or even 100 -- years ago -- and that make life in places like the USA so much better than in vast swaths of the globe even today --
seemingly simple things like running water in houses, refrigerators, electric lighting -- even seemingly mundane things like indoor toilets and public sewer systems so people do not need to step side and do their business on the ground outside where people end up stepping in it. How will "empathy" and "community building" achieve those kinds of things? Things that most people appreciate and value and strive to obtain -- even those -- or rather especially those -- without the "education" of the supposedly erudite chattering classes -- especially those in the Fourth Estate.
And if SAT is not among the best ways to measure abilities and practices to achieve those things, then let's strive to find better ways
-- but vague notions of "empathy" and "community building" are highly unlikely to be the ways to do so.
8
@PE
Aren’t these the things that the essay part of the college application and the personal interview, supposed to determine?
3
@aem
I guess, but they are inaccurate. If mom writes the essay, and the interview is gamed, how is empathy, imagination and creativity measured?
3
Elite schools do not earn their reputations by admitting smart kids on the front end, but rather by sending successful graduates out on the back end. What "merit" should ultimately mean to a college admissions officer is: what traits are predictive of successful graduates?
SAT scores and high school grades and extracurricular activities are pretty imperfect predictors of post-graduation success. But success after graduation from a school like Harvard is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy: future employers will see the coat of arms your degree, and some of them will hire you for that alone. Which means it isn't totally irrational for parents to try to get their kids admitted through fraud and faking it.
Perhaps the real question that needs to be asked here is not what "merit" is, but exactly why a degree from an elite University is valued so much more highly than a degree from somewhere else. Could it be that we all know the system is rigged...and we also know who's rigging it?
7
Yes, that is exactly what the colleges are looking for, a metric of future success (defined in terms of social status and money). Admit the rich and powerful, give them a nice paper after four years: voilà! Success almost guaranteed. That's really the surest and easily identifiable path to future success. And no, it's not because of inherited IQ.
4
This peculiar American fixation, more accurately, obsession with certain “elite” academic institutions is clearly, tragically creating some very big problems with the mental health and character of a generation or more of our children, not only those who crave to enter their sacred halls but even those who develop deep misgivings after experiencing what they actually offer. Lost in all of this sad pandering and genuflection to “elitism” is the basic human reality that there are myriad influences and experiences that contribute to creating a “good life”, most of which occur outside the classroom walls and well after one’ s college years are over.
14
@John Grillo I agree this is a corrosive fixation. In many ways, it stands in for certain aspects of the British class system with their landed gentry and inherited titles. Sadly, this fixation also exists and likely originated in England with the Ox-Bridge stranglehold on various gateways to the upper class. India also suffers from this with IIT - the most selective universities in the world. I also believe that Tokyo University has similar standing.
5
@John Grillo
You know very little about the rest of the world.
America is far less fixated on "elite" institutions than most of the rest of the world.
This is a good opportunity for investigative journalists to look at why tuition keeps going up in higher education. Seems that the educational system has become a business
12
Try getting into medical school in the mid 90s as a white male from suburban NYC. Do you know how much higher I had to score on my MCATs than people from other zip codes? It’s not only about gender and ethnicity - it’s a quota system based on locale too which is also unfair. Say what you want - but meritocracy should be exactly what the defitnion is - the best student gets in.
13
@Jason
And how does one define the "best" student? MCAT scores are only one measure, and they do not indicate who will become the "best" physicians. I put best in quotes because doctors who are good with patients may not be good researchers and vice-versa, and we need both skill sets.
We also need physicians from various demographics. When it comes to treating STDs, reproductive issues, addiction, mental illness and other sensitive issues patients need physicians that they can feel comfortable with and trust. This paper has covered how women and minorities get poorer treatment by biased physicians.
There is no single measure of "best," and I would hope that medical schools realize then when admitting students.
19
@Medusa you’re correct. Standardized test scores and a GPA are not a measure of who makes the best doctor. But you also seem to have no idea how the process works to gain admission to medical school. Sadly it’s just ones GPA and MCAT along with a short essay that gets one an interview or gets one rejected. While I don’t disagree with your statement - it is wholly unfair that my scores had to be MUCH higher than a minority female from Arkansas to get the same interviews. That’s not PC to say - but it’s the very reason Harvard is now being sued.
8
@Medusa
Nonsense.
The MCAT no doubt has faults.
But, if so, it can -- and ought to -- be analyzed and improved.
And there may be other methods to try to find candidates for medical training for producing physicians who will bring better medicine to patients.
But, in all likelihood, those other methods are in addition to -- not in substitution for -- the MCAT.
And, those other methods are very unlikely to develop from vague notions of "demographics".
There may be more than one way to do things well, but there are 10,000 times as many ways to do things poorly. "Demographics" is not one of the good ways.
2
The best education I ever received was at a Community College. I learned about myself and how to be a better student.
14
it is difficult to make any judgement about the scandals without having some sort of DATA. How many kids get in to Harvard, for example, based on family ties, athletes, fraudsters, and how many are in due to some sort of financial scholarship? There may actually be meritocratic thing happening but based on what I'm reading, It is well nigh impossible to make an educated comment.
PS sports after HS or comm college should be out of the question if you go to place like Harvard. If it is elite education, how many really great professors teach at these places.
1
@dve commenter
My question is how many great professors (i.e., those who publish prodigiously in peer reviewed magazines and conferences and write textbooks) at elite institutions actually teach undergraduates. My guess, if they are anything like most research universities, is that few of those professors that get the university its high ranking among elite universities actually teach in undergraduate classrooms.
5
If you get a PhD and want to teach, you need to work at a high school. Or a small college. Universities in my experience want fewer teachers and will pay them less. I was lucky enough to find a brand-new independent K-12 school for very bright students which thought it was OK if I wrote scholarly books and papers on the side.
6
I welcome Douthat's entry into the research and opinion that proves there is no relationship between merit and success.
As for the conservative model based on race as described by Douthat, the problem with that canard is no one has ever complained of an under representation of white students on elite college campuses.
10
Here's the secret that those of us who work in education know, but rarely let on:
The great value of an "Ivy League education" isn't that it's superior to that of other schools, but rather than someone attending those schools has the opportunity to build a social network and safety net that can be leveraged into a high-paying or high-status job.
Removing legacies and those who bought their way into those schools sounds wonderful, until you realize that doing so would negate the advantages that attending those schools conveys.
Harvard without rich students is just a good state school with nicer buildings.
131
Bingo! People seem to assume that alumni will keep recruiting at the Ivy even if their kids don’t attend. Yeah right. The top schools are more like a club. Meritocracy is not their raison d’etre.
45
@Jean As a UNLV graduate (when it was called Nevada Southern), I can attest that its buildings and campus surpass Harvard's. Furthermore, I've never heard of a bribe to gain admittance to UNLV (although, oddly, students have been bribed to attend UNLV). My enrollment was one of the happiest days of my life.
2
@Michael-in-Vegas
Yes, mostly correct. But another among the myths of elite colleges is that the students from a pubic high school in Kansas or a charter school in the Bronx have the elitist magic rubbed on them in some social network and go on to riches and fame.
The "elite" colleges have a social hierarchy that is as rigid as society's stratification. A few socially ambitious kids of color or farmer's children make the leap, but the fabulous networks of privilege and opportunity are comprised of the students who already have privilege and opportunity.
10
The problem isn't the "merit," it's the "ocracy."
A democratic society needs scientists, doctors, journalists, teachers, and many many others. And society benefits when these contributors are able to maximize their potential.
And a democratic society needs leaders. But a leader is not a ruler.
Leaders understand that other people are people who choose whether to follow or to turn away, and that successful leadership means persuading people to follow. Rulers believe that "lesser" people should do what they're told, and the successful rulership is about keeping the masses in line.
And leaderership is not an "elite" skill. Every family, every community, every business, every group of any kind benefits from leadership -- even, no especially, the kind of leadership that knows when to step back and let someone else take charge for now. Outside of Disney movies, rulers don't do very often.
So Ross has the problem exactly backwards. The issue isn't that "elite" institutions are picking the wrong people to train as future rollers. It's that anointing the "ruling class" is not the prerogative of any institution whatsoever.
21
Maybe we have been placing too much emphasis on children getting into the top schools when there are many good colleges that offer qualify educations too. Just because a child goes to an Ivy League does not always guarantee success in life. There are other indicators of achievement such as character, decency and kindness. Not all brilliant people are nice as I have found out and sometimes those less brilliant folks are more fun to be around. I know everyone wants to go to the best schools but there are not enough slots for everyone. People should just be happy to get a college degree no matter the college they select. It is still a feather in their cap to have that piece of paper.
12
Lost in this discussion is the purpose of education. Is it to select leaders from a dubious meritocracy (there is no level playing field from which to determine a true meritocracy) or to provide the best possible education for the greatest number of individuals? A democracy needs the latter, and when we make competition and selectivity the goal, we are not going to achieve it. Maybe the measure of a great educational institution is the difference between the knowledge, understanding, skills and critical abilities of its students when the enter and leave the institution.
3
What is a university education?
It is experiences! Access to the top thinkers in the world. Those thinkers include the professors and the students. Many students take their opportunity for university experiences seriously. Partying is part of those experiences, but is normally a limited part. Those who seek partying as the majority of their experiences will not make the most out of their university education.
People come out of the top universities with special experiences. They meet the top thinkers in the country on a class and social level. They have practiced and learned to communicate. They have looked into the experiences of others in the world, both in class and out of class.
The measure of a university is the results for the graduating students. How well do they do in their fields? How well can they give back to the university from their successes? Harvard and Yale and Stanford place their graduates in great numbers among the top thinkers and doers in the world. If they didn't, noone would be fighting to get in to the schools.
Is anybody asking how well the children of the admission cheaters are doing? Are they performing well in school? Are they performing well after graduation?
4
Anerica is not a meritocracy. There are probably 50 or more universities which provide as good an education as Harvard or Yale. The so-called “elite” universities provide an admission ticket into the circle of people who have proclaimed their eliteness and wear their status like the Tin Man wore his heart or the Lion wore his medal.
97
I remember being in Calculus 2A (introductory calculus at UC Irvine) some years ago. The class was more than full. Students in all the seats, halls filled, and the back of the room standing room only. After the first few exams, there were plenty of seats available. The students who could not “cut the mustard” dropped out, and dropped out quickly. In other words, if you are accepted, you still need to pass the classes. Each academic university makes sure that if you are not qualified, you will find out soon enough. I got an “A” by the way. Top academic institutions make sure to cast the widest net, so that as many students get a chance to get in. Staying in, means that you need to meet the rigorous requirements of academia. There is no way to hide from that.
18
@Dan -- Likely they transferred to other classes that were an "easier A." They still needed the GPA for their next applications after their bachelor's degrees.
10
@Dan That’s how a top public school works. The top private schools don’t wash students out of tough courses. They ensure their students attain stratospheric GPAs so they get into med and B school sonrhey make a ton of money and contribute back to the school. Rinse and repeat.
6
"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." I'd be interested in an entire Douthat column which expanded upon this last sentence of his, because I have no idea what evidence he would cite to prove this statement. Where exactly in our world are institutions where only intelligence has power?
54
"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."
Democratic societies shouldn't have ruling classes. If the function of elite universities is to produce them, then the appropriate response should be to abolish them, or rather turn them into public institutions.
All of theses institutions are chartered in one manner or another by the government and all share some putative public mission that justifies their chartering. There is no good reason their charters can't be revoked and their administration transferred to more publicly accountable bodies. Similarly there is no reason that they can't maintain high standards of admission while also pursuing affirmative action goals. Give all the slots previously reserved for legacy admissions and for upper-class athletics like sailing and crew to the best Black, Latino and low-income students.
21
Of course the recent “side door admission” is rather odious to learn about.
I guess it would have been wonderful to have gone to an elite school, but alas there wasn’t any money for it in our house. So I made do and it turned out wonderful ... I guess. By now among my classmates are retired Admirals and 747 pilots, doctors, volunteers, policemen and musicians.
We muddled thru and did our time. I’ve heard it said it’s what we contribute as a whole to society that counts, not what we take from it.
That “giving” comes from within, and from here it seems one’s GPA or class rank or the place you went to university has little to do with it.
College got me out of my small town spiral and launched a career of adventure and brought everything I have now (family, friends, skills, memories) my way ...
To cheat someone out of a chance in life in favor of vapid video dilettantes just seems so unjust.
22
Dothan writes: "This is all admittedly fanciful, because to be open about racial quotas would require private schools to sacrifice federal funds . . . ."
I just wanted to go back and highlight that vile sentence so that we can ponder a bit the world Douthat likes to daydream about: one in which major universities like Yale that draw heavily on public funding and support (infrastructure, services, etc.) can be misconstrued as truly "private" and thus exempted from the requirements of that pesky document, the U.S. Constitution.
Equal protection of the laws? Not at his alma mater, not if he had his druthers.
24
@UI
Douthat writes:
Middle aged vision.
1
Thank you for pointing that out.
1
There are elites and there are "elites". Elites in my view are those who attained that status by exceptional achievements (and by that I don't include high public office but what was done while in public office). "Elites" are those who have that pretension from birth, mainly from very wealthy family but also from prestigious parents. Society needs elites, it does not need "elites".
17
Why we need is less reliance on “merit”. Between the antics of the rich and famous and the various programs to aid legacy students, athletes, and other targets, the middle groups are basically excluded. And an elite college is a necessary step to the royal road to an elite grad school and then to an elite job.
How about a compulsory two year national service obligation at age 18. Followed by two years of free community college or trade school. Then, and only then, would come the opportunity for further college education. And choices for those institutions should be based on performance over the prior two years - period.
8
@John Graybeard
I like it, but the let’s have it start a time age twenty, and extend public high school to cover what is currently the first two years of college.
2
@John Graybeard, I also find this a meritorious idea. It would give young people exposure to people of all kinds, regions and points of view, which ought to make them see that all Americans have more in common than separating them. In addition it would get them away from parents who may, even with the sincere desire to help their children, are preventing them from developing independent lives. Also, by starting later in making long-term choices about their lives, they may have developed a better understanding of their talents, abilities, and preferences, leading to better choices.
There are plenty of successful people who started out at community colleges then made the leap to universities, at various levels.
I personally think we put waaaaay too much emphasis on the hoity-toity "top tier" universities. Sure, there are folks in the top echelons of government, business and non-profits from the Ivies and public "Ivies" but guess what?
We never hear about the losers who went to these schools and wound up dwelling in some life-crushing, mid-level management job for 30 years.
Too much over-generalizing for my taste.
These folks started out at community colleges:
Steve Jobs – De Anza College.
Gwendolyn Brooks – Wilson Junior College.
Ross Perot – Texarkana Junior College.
James Dean – Santa Monica College.
Jim Lehrer – Victoria College.
Clint Eastwood – Los Angeles City College.
Tom Hanks – Chabot College
Sometimes it's about personal drive, innate intelligence, talent and thinking outside the box.
27
Anecdotal evidence doesn't make up for the statistically proven fact that people earn much more on average if they go to a "top-tier" university as opposed to a community college.
3
@slim1921
Oh, and hard work.
“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.”
3
Well, this attack on the very idea of meritocracy confirms something I've always suspected:
When elitist conservatives like Douthat complain about "the elites," what they mean is people who've earned their way through work and talent.
Elitist conservatives still want there to be a ruling class, but they want it to be comprised of those they regard as "naturally" elite: aristocratic heirs and (but of course!) white men.
136
@Adam this is precisely the feeling I got from reading this piece. I think Ross often reveals his true positions by forcing you to wade through dense prose in the hopes of presenting himself as nonpolitical actor in matters of national importance. But this specific column really reinforced for me that as a opinion writer, Douthat remains a highly conservative, pro-wealth and pro-elite thinker.
9
Don't obsess about the criteria for admission to the Ivies. Focus on widening your view of the "ruling class." We have about as many elite schools now, and they're about as big, as was true c. 1970. But US population has increased by 50% since then. GNP has tripled so many more families can afford college. Asian countries are hundreds of times more prosperous, and many families there value education with intense fervor. The point is that many students at formerly weak universities are FAR better than Ivy students in the past. Stop obsessing about a handful of old schools, recognize the talent now spread far and wide, and these scandals will fade.
12
These Ivy League students of privilege might benefit from some foreign travel. Spend a semester abroad at a place foreign to them.
Western Kentucky, University of Arkansas, etc., would be good places to start.
80
@Jim S.
Love this comment. I grew up in a small town a half hour's drive from Western Kentucky University and parlayed a non-elite undergraduate education into a relatively elite grad school education. Now I teach at a large state school.
One time I had occasion to interact, over email, with a member of the faculty at my current institution, someone whom I had never met. We later had reason to speak in person, and after a while he blurted out that he just could not reconcile the real life me with the person he had encountered on email.
In other words, he couldn't reconcile my (reasonably "articulate") prose style with my lingering rural KY accent.
That is just a particularly vivid example of a dynamic I've experienced more times than I can count.
If the NYT were to force commenters to post oral recordings of our comments, I'd be really interested to hear--though I'm sure I myself would never submit anything again.
16
@Jim S. I wish students and their counterparts, employers/ colleges, etc., would give just as much weight to domestic as foreign experiences. I chose to rotate through several rural areas while training in medicine. We have problems in this country that need solving but most people would opt for a trip to exotic-sounding locales before they consider volunteering in rural Washington state or among Alaskan natives, where the needs are just as great.
7
@UI
When I moved here over 40 years ago, I heard over and over again "You are brilliant, but your accent sounds like you came from the Noo Yawk slums..."
I did come from there. And folks here did not find it charming--it held me back professionally. But being a stubborn engineer, my attitude was "to heck with them;" I trained myself to speak slower (once I verified with the UW Speech and Hearing Sciences department that I enunciated clearly and was understandable) and just did the best I could professionally. Fifteen years after I arrived here, people stopped making rude comments about how I spoke (even though I still have an accent). Now some people will ask about it but with our international population (who have no idea I speak with an accent), native North Americans are the only ones that place me as a Middle Atlantic native.
No matter how I speak, I am the best engineer in my group.
5
Douthat's mild enthusiasm for allowing legacies to make the Ivies more efficient progenitors of a ruling class is nauseating as the comment below suggests, but it's also coherent.
He is a misogynist and supporter of traditional social and religious arrangements. We are learning that this viewpoint is on the spectrum that runs on to authoritarianism, so it's not surprising that he likes a nice, stable, self-maintaining ruling class.
The admissions scandal feeds the growing realization of how the rich and privileged operate, abusing important political and social systems for their own benefit.
It is a piece with the burden of income inequality that drags down the economy.
The only thing that keeps these profound class issues from being linked across the front page is all the journalists and editors, bureaucrats, school teachers, and others trying to figure out how to get their kids into the 'best' schools.
10
The idea that the score on a coachable test is merit is absurd.
28
So now we have the wealthy elite desperately trying to get into these havens for the best and the brightest, rather than, not that long ago, the best and the brightest desperately trying to get into what were havens for the wealthy and elite. I'd call that progress.
13
The biggest scandal is that these places have no curriculum thus offer/provide nothing that can be fairly described as an "education."
3
@MKR
One basic component of the curriculum is learning to ask, "Can you please offer us some objective evidence to back up your claim? What experience or expertise makes you an authoritative source on this topic?"
I await your answers.
I sure want a doctor who is the best at what he/she does. likewise, I want engineers and generals who really know what they are doing. Ross, you can take your chances with the rest.
4
@Amy Maybe you misunderstand the path to "really know what they are doing." I too want competent generals, but I never forget that the greatest general in American history (Ulysses S Grant) was actually in the bottom half of his graduating class at West Point. Points and scores and ranks have their proper place, but perhaps they have gotten to be a little too highly regarded.
11
@Amy
There are crucial non-technical aspects of those professions. A doctor's technical skills are of little value to me if the doctor doesn't listen to or care about what I say.
It just happened to me. I got a surgical complication that nearly cost me my career. The complication was bad luck, not the surgeon's fault, but his post-surgical indifference, failure to diagnose or refer me, and condescension were appalling. It was the paraprofessional who paid attention and figured it out.
The doctor is a top surgeon, great reputation, great technical skills, he teaches...but I cannot consider him "the best at what he does" and I do not plan to go back to him.
7
Grant was especially gifted in mathematics and showed that at West Point. His ability to plan a campaign with all the logistics, anticipations and quick decisions came from his early military experience in quartermastering and demonstrate a similar intellectual giftedness. He also proved to be a brilliant writer both in battle reports and in his memoirs long after. Grant did have a defect in judging the character of his political appointees, but this was no dummy. I note that there was no admissions exam to West Point. I note also that Grant’s successful effort to stamp out the first KuKluxKlan made him very few friends in the defeated Confederacy and led to a generations-long effort to discredit him.
5
I would add to the op-ed this, dishonesty is the root problem. It's not the system by itself, it's the people who administer it, and the parents who game it, then you have a scandal.
Fortunately the vast majority of colleges, parents, students and faculty are honest, it's the few dishonest ones that make it look bad.
1
This episode reveals several more flaws in an educational system already full of flaws. . Why should Stanford be recruiting for rowers? Why should the football coach at University of Michigan be paid $9 million/year? Why should Michigan State University have covered up a sports medicine scandal for so log? Why does student debt now exceed credit card debt? Lots to think about. Somehow, we have lost sight of what education is supposed to be there for. Like politics, the entry is often more closely associated with money than with talent or ability.
71
Mr. Douthat,
Scandals are rarely 'entertaining', and somebody usually gets hurt.
We have a lot of fine colleges in the rural regions of New York, and some of the students arrive from another state to attend the above on scholarship, while their parents continue to work in overdrive.
When a conservative neighbor points out some of these schools, where the name is familiar to this ear, I ask what does it specialize in. 'It's for rich kids', as we continue on our journey.
The Nation just saw, not long ago, quite a display from a supreme court nominee about how hard he worked at college to get where he was. It ended in tears. Dr. Ford, of course, got lost in the fray.
Ask yourself if you have ever been impressed when someone tells you of their Ivy League degree and their performance at college. Now that really is not 'entertaining'.
Let us focus more on this 'White Supremacy Ruler Movement' that is in vogue at the moment. The first person I met, associated with the above, had never been to college but he had the right look and appearance. He managed to convince the young and the beautiful to part with their jewelry. On occasion I think of him, a self-proclaimed alien on a planet elsewhere.
'The Rich' are not our enemy, and let us cease telling them that they are superior to the rest of us, while we play the violin with notes that suit their ear. Planning to ask my brother, Seymour, if his robber baron grandfather bribed the institution he attended. Righto!
2
I have been saying this since the 90s, that our concentration of wealth is giving us monopoly of mediocrity. People on the top lock everyone else out and they don’t have to be extraordinary to achieve “success.” With fewer reasons to try hard, the ones at the top, in time, may be a lot duller than those who struggle beneath them.
It’s refreshing at least to hear from others who have had every door open for them to confirm I’m not insane. We’re at the point where they’re saying, “so what — what can you do about it anyway?”
6
A winner-take-all society in which the winners are chosen by age 18 is an unjust society. It is unjust for people's lot in life to be determined either by accident of birth or by choices they make as children. It is unjust for a wealthy society like ours to have so many people living in poverty or in fear of falling into poverty.
We need an economy that works for everybody, not just the people who make it into elite schools.
28
People seem to be forgetting that the story is about cheaters getting caught, many of whom will go to jail.
So there is a deterrent in place for buying you way into Yale.
Is there a deterrent for unjustified quotas applied against Asians or others?
11
@SG
Oh please, those people aren’t going to jail. Likewise, there is no penalty for quotas.
Ross says that in a democratic society elite institutions “exist to shape a ruling class.”
I cannot tell you how that turns my stomach. I know conservatives, Trumpists, Republicans and Evangelicals are into “ruling” people, but the rest of us prefer that the people we elect don’t fancy themselves a ruling class (which is the opposite of what America stands for) but rather legislative employees of ours. King Donald, we know, has delusions of being monarch for all times, but frankly, a normal person from a great small college or storied public university, who has a bit of empathy, intelligence, self control, focus, stamina, honesty and character along with an understanding of our institutions, a respect for the rule of law, an appreciation of our loyal alliances, unwavering devotion to the Constitution and an aversion to Twitter would suit me just fine.
Keep talking “ruling class” and the AOCs of the world just might take over!
213
@Joanna Stasia If "the AOCs of the world" take over then there is simply a new and different ruling class. All functioning and stable societies must find some method other than names-out-of-a-hat by which some young people grow up into positions of great adult influence but most don't. It is not the case that all people in a democratic republic ought to wield equal influence.
15
There is a difference between governing and ruling.
35
@Joanna Stasia
Agreed. Since when did "ruling class" enter the American rhetoric? What happened to "all men are created equal" and "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? Might as well return to the monarchy if we start engaging that kind of thinking.
20
What if college admissions were based more on evidence of overcoming obstacles, failure and adversity and based less on being born on third base? Not Hunger Games but more day to day headwinds and problem solving that most face.
Some organizations value that kind of trait, because they value resiliency when problems emerge. More will in the future as the global economy becomes ever more disruptive.
But what if admissions to the most elite educational institutions was not selective at all, only the ability to complete the requirements. Then you might see 8 year old homeless chess champions with incredible drive graduating well before their time.
That seems to be where we are heading. But resistance always comes from those who benefit from the existing system.
7
@Look Ahead so if I give my kid a good life with only the normal challenges of adulthood then his peer with divorced parents gets into a better school? So we should basically incentivize parents to give their kids bad lives?
8
@Walker
He didn't say family or financial troubles were the only kind of adversity. Any serious endeavor, with real challenges, real obstacles, requiring real responsibility, self -direction and persistence could serve to show that. For some kids, it would be life survival. Those not facing existential threats would simply have to reach higher and look harder for such a challenge.
1
There is no such thing as "elite superselective colleges" in Australia, yet the country somehow survives without them. Sure there are university rankings and different levels of prestige and the Group of Eight and all that, but when chosing a uni most (probably more than 95%) students will still chose the one closest to home. Because they are not so different in quality and there is no stigma attached to going to a "lesser" school. Of course, there are less than 40 of them in the whole country. There is sometimes something very right about not having a thousand different choices.
13
Russ - I think that somewhere along the way we've lost track of the whole point of attending college or university, i.e. to get an education. The prestige of an Ivy league degree seems to outweigh the actual experience of learning something for many people. Way back in antediluvian times I went to a rather prestigious university, and spent a lot of time sitting in lecture halls crammed with dozens of students, with a section leader once a week - usually a graduate student paying his dues for the promise of a faculty position in a few years. I dropped out after a couple of years - it was the sixties, after all, and there was a lot happening OUT THERE.
And much later I went back to complete my degree at a state university. Smaller classes, professors who loved what they were doing and actually engaged with the students, and - wonder of wonders! - I actually learned a great deal.
So what are today's students (and their parents) looking for? A piece of paper with 'Veritas' stamped on it, or an actual education? The answer could tell us a lot about our values and priorities.
33
A meritocracy is an elite recruited by competitive examination, what Jefferson called "the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue," in conflict with what he called "the artificial aristocracy of wealth and birth." Douthat would like to see "virtue" defined as more than simply work ethic, as some combination of religious and patriotic obligation beyond self, in the same way that the classical Chinese meritocracy defined it as a thorough indoctrination in Confucian ethics. College is too late to start with that. He is nostalgic for a time he doesn't remember, when primary and secondary schools from Groton down to P.S. 19 and St. Rose of Lima inculcated "memory and obligation, wisdom and service and patriotism?" That combination lost its authority when "ask not what your country can do for you" sent my contemporaries to suffer and die for nothing in 'Nam. That's one reason why, for the past 50 years, we as a society have believed in some combination of "The Virtue of Selfishness" and "if it feels good, do it," combined into the general belief all across the political spectrum that there is no higher value than the individual pursuit of happiness.
31
Speak for yourself Jack. Selfishness is not a virtue and never has been, in my view. I’m a Vietnam-Era veteran.
2
The problem that Mr. Douthat hints as is that we do not know what "merit" really is. Intelligence? What kind--intellectual, artistic, emotional? Talent? How many people show the depth of their talent only after college. Can we compare intelligence, talent or likely future success between graduates of fancy prep schools or inner-city schools in which students have to struggle to get an education? Count me as dubious.
13
As a parent looking at options for my teenage son, I am impressed by the number of high quality schools available to provide him with an excellent education. What is going on here has little to do with any objective measures of quality and everything to do with the scarcity of openings at certain places. This is a matter of status and snobbism-two human characteristics that this country has always been proud to not indulge in excessively. We are in a new Guilded Age, though, so money and status reign supreme. What a shame.
14
@jonr Yes and no. When looking at colleges, it's very important to see how many full, tenured professors there are teaching vs paid-by-the-job adjuncts. Also, who actually teaches undergraduate courses.
I have a friend whose father was a professor at Yale. Two of her brothers went to Yale. Her husband and two of their 5 children went to Harvard. I asked her the difference between the two schools. She said that at Harvard, many courses are taught by grad students - rarely by professors. Harvard's teaching method is that the students teach one another through conversation/debate etc. At Yale, the method is that the school does the teaching, thus professors teach the undergraduate classes.
I'm sure this varies between many colleges. I'm delighted that the Ivy my grandson attends uses professors - at least it does in the engineering school - I can't speak to the other colleges at Cornell.
Just looking at a course syllabus is not enough. One needs to dig deeper and also ask when one tours.
9
What if Harvard decided that it would require a baseline (and rather high) SAT score and GPA before it even looked at your application, but once that hurdle was passed it was a simple lottery system to be admitted?
This would ensure everyone was high caliber, and the incoming class would likely be as diverse as (i.e., reflective of) the high caliber applicant pool.
The graduating class ('diverse' and 'fairly chosen' in the sense described above) would have all the benefits and connections accorded a Harvard degree (and all the innate smarts that their admissions test scores indicated) and would undoubtedly go on to do all the great things we expect of elites.
9
@Spyrelx
I think you miss the point of “elite schools” , the legacy kids are the value, they are the ones with connections that students who befriend and join social clubs with them migrate to circles in society that gain them opportunities and access. Remove the legacies and who needs to go there.
9
You are absolutely right. Those of us who advocate for meritocracy think legacy admissions should be banned altogether. The happenstance of birth should not be a factor, merit should be the driving determinant
2
@Spyrelx For fairness, sure, but it almost instantly ruin their brand value and so don't hold your breath.
5
As usual, Douthat (and Brooks with him) defines 'meritocracy" so narrowly and self-servingly that it becomes a political program in disguise, one insistent that the actual order of things is just, however difficult that may prove for the undeserving.
Instead of asserting, with circular aplomb, that merit is found where there's success, Douthat and his fellow Republicans might have looked at the most successful among us to assess if merit is actually to be found there.
But such a revision is unthinkable for obvious reasons -- it brings discredit upon himself and the authorities to which he wishes the rest of us deferred.
25
The value we place on elite institutions is a social construction. Apart from MIT and Caltech, it's silly to think that any elite school is meritocratic.
Perhaps it is time we as a society place less value on a degree from an elite school and look closely at the merits and demerits of the graduate, no matter where they went to school.
33
@KJ, I agree, but it's not just the book learning that occurs, it's the social connections made. That's a major attraction for the top schools; comes under the heading of who you know rather than what you know.
10
@KJ
For non-state supported schools don't forget:
Carnegie Mellon. Harvey Mudd. Cooper Union. They are merit-based as well.
2
@KJ I'm glad to hear you single out MIT and CalTech. These two schools really are different.
As an MIT alum and donor whose son was rejected by MIT with perfect SAT scores, I know of what I speak. While it stung at the time, in retrospect it makes me proud of my school; legacy status means nothing at MIT. Caltech, to whom I had never given the time of day, did accept him, entirely on his own merits.
2
“Elite” really means “connections “ . It is a means for the American aristocracy to develop a common and shared experience. While many instructors are good, it is stll an undergraduate degree, not much different in quality from state institutions. Parents who do whatever it takes to get in are not interested in the education, just the status of the degree and the folks their children get to rub elbows with. Meritocracy indeed!
70
@Thomas Nelson If you're comparing a college degree from U Maine - Gorham to one from Yale, you're living in a fool's paradise! My husband spent 10 years teaching in Maine and they sent the majority of their graduates to Maine Gorham. They were very different students from those who went to Bowdoin or an Ivy.
It's to just the courses offered at these schools, it's how bright and engaged the students taking them are. A class filled with very bright, engaged students is going to give any student enrolled a very different educational experience and they will learn more.
Yes, there are very bright students in U of Maine universities, but they are few and far between. Most are just average and will go on to lead very average lives. Nothing wrong with this - many are very good people. My husband had many of them teaching under him in his department. But they were never going to be Dept Chairman as they were just pretty average. His innate intelligence and Ivy degree brought something else to the equation.
11
I wonder what you mean by “engaged”? At my high school, what distinguished Ivy headed kids from the other smart kids was that they were much more obedient and compliant.
1
Elite schools work best for the hard sciences think MIT. There are brilliant students at these universities working on science issues the general public would be baffled by. That said there needs to be more investing in trade schools and vocational institutions. Some people are academically gifted others manual gifted. Both are needed to build a prosperous society
41
What's really unconscionable is the under-funding of public universities throughout the United States -- what a massive disinvestment there has been in public higher education over the past two decades. At a time when investments in human capital has never been more important, the cutting back of support for public universities is socially self-destructive. The number of slots at the Ivies is a tiny handful of students who can make use of a high quality education. It's because of the starving of great public universities that the top private universities seem more special.
353
@jng
What is unconscionable is the overpayment of administrators of public colleges and the vast growth in their number and their staffs.
Elite senior faculty are paid more and teach fewer students. Adjunct lecturers are paid a pittance and foreign graduate students, whose families can afford to supplement the living expenses are teaching undergraduates, displacing Americas unable to work for less than minimum wage.
And yet, with low teaching costs, tuition has exploded.
States are contributing more to state schools than 40 years ago, but the wealthy aristocracy consumes the excess funds and raises prices for students and their parents. Students borrow more, indenturing themselves..
The problem is the runaway cost of higher education and the failure of administrators to manage. Even if you look at research sectors of higher education, federal grants are devoted 50% to research and 50% to overhead, feeding the beast.
The cost of computers and technology in 2019 is miniscule relative to 1979. The cost of low tech products like a ream of printing paper or toilet paper is 15 to 25% of the 1979 price. The average wages of instructors is 50%. Why is tuition that was $200/semester now $8,000?
The ruling elite pays themselves and throws crumbs to the masses. CUNY is paying Krugman $275,000 per year to NOT teach while lecturers are paid $7,000 per course.
Paying Krugman is not investing. Taxpayers are funding waste, and paying more than 40 years ago for less.
64
When but ~30% of jobs actually REQUIRE a college degree, it is beyond unconscionable to continue to direct any more than ~30% of high school students to college. There’s no reason we cannot accurately and efficiently align students and their education with actual positions and business needs. The military does it quite well through the ASVAB. If we began aptitude testing around the sixth grade, by the eighth we’d have identified the students who could be placed in retail jobs which do not require anything more than an elementary school education. During each year of high school, we could cull out those students who are ready to enter the line of work that testing has assigned them. The savings to the taxpayer works be enormous.
7
@From Where I Sit
Democracy requires an informed citizenry able to question its government. Only a knowledgeable, empowered and vocal citizenry can perform well in democracy. Politics is about the participation and engagement of the wider citizenry - to miss that point would doom us to irrelevance.
I take the side of education, learning critical thinking skills, et al over job training.
One third of the electorate are easy marks for FOX, individual-1, Kochs, Rush, …
In Feb. 28, 1967. Ronald Reagan, then the new Republican governor of California (which boasted the best system of public universities in the country), told reporters that taxpayers shouldn’t be “subsidizing intellectual curiosity".
Since then, in both their attitudes and in their choice of majors, college students have increasingly seen a bachelor’s degree as a means to an end: a job. Freshmen now list getting a better job as the most important reason to go to college. -WaPo
Do we send students to college mainly to grow and learn or strictly to prepare for a future career? The American public is somewhat split, but ultimately comes down in favor of the latter on balance. Just under half of the public (47%) says the main purpose of a college education is to teach work-related skills and knowledge. Another 39%, however, says that college is an opportunity for students to grow personally and intellectually. - Pew Research
12
Without widespread quality high school education, the college issue is almost moot. The unfortunate truth is that that we are at least two generations in on poor high school education. When students show up in college to get remedial reading and math courses because elite colleges are admitting unqualified students, not much else matters.
Although I, like everyone else, am outraged by the latest development in college admissions, I think we need to focus on radically reshaping our public education system. We are now raising another generation unprepared for the world. A democracy can not survive when citizens are poorly educated.
Countries that do better than us, value trade schools. Countries that do better than us, focus on hard sciences. Countries that do better than us, spend less per student. Countries that do better than us, have a culture in which teachers enjoy greater respect. Countries that do better than us do not use their schools systems to try to solve social issues like racism.
We are way off course. The universities are not a root issue. They are a manifestation.
186
@SG
And just to add: the pressure on teachers to assign "A"s where an A has truly not been earned. This in service of the almighty GPA that students need to get into elite colleges. And if a teacher does not comply, the snowplow parent gets on the phone to the principal. Yikes. Not a good recipe for MAGA.
3
@SG Well said. I could not agree more.
3
A degree from a public university is a debt-marker. There is no sure ticket to the middle-class; rising to the 1% requires a lottery-win. From middle-school on there is panic about the future. SAT scores of 15xx won't help most people. If the Ivy League's purpose is to shape a ruling class they should be sure to assign readings in Gibbon.
13
Cheating aside, the good thing about the pure meritocracy is that we can find fairly "hard data" with which to keep score. At the end of the game, the scores are compared and the winners go to Harvard, or wherever.
I do agree somewhat with Mr. Douthat's concerns about the meritocracy. But I can't quite get my head around his alternative. How do we rank people? Do we judge college applicants based on citizenship essays and psychological tests for empathy? Do we watch them interact with a wide variety of people and observe their willingness to be open-minded and to help others in need?
Rationality has driven us to the meritocracy. It may be excessive, but without that rationality and supporting "hard data," how do we make the selections?
7
By the time someone is 17-18 there should be some clues as to capability of accomplishment. This can't be measured simply by SAT's and requires a lot more effort to grade.
Entrance into the Ivy League schools should favor the students who are most likely to accomplish great things as adults, and these are often not the kids who test well. Whatever projects and skills an adolescent has acquired by the time they are applying to college would be a clearer measure of how much they might benefit from the contacts and, hopefully, superior teaching available from our "finest" schools.
Of course, to be fair and useful, what a junior in HS has done, whether it is to play a musical instrument with high skill, doing creative work on web design or winning an important science competition, it would need to be put in context of the advantages and disadvantages of the homes and neighborhoods the students come from.
The higher the hurdles cleared, the greater the merit of the candidate and the more likely opportunity will lead to great accomplishments.
5
@alan haigh It's a rare to find a really bright, accomplished student who is going to do great things who "doesn't test well". Okay - maybe he doesn't test well enough to make the cut-off to be a National Merit Semi-Finalists, but he tests well enough to be inside the parameters of those accepted by most Ivies. They aren't asking for perfect scores.
8
@alan haigh: Having graduated from an Ivy, albeit some time ago, the difference that I recall was not in the superiority of instruction (same texts), but in the academic drive of the students against whom one had to compete. It was they, not the profs, who set the pace. Most were from the top percentiles of their high school classes, and many were competing to be recognized and chosen later for admission to the top medical and law schools -- the rest to be recruited as "executive trainees" by the cream of the Fortune 500. It was no place for those who were not academic high scorers from high school. They would have been most unhappy there.
1
Oh boy. Mr. Douthat argues that essentially, wealthy whites are taking up all the white people slots at a school, so all the middle-class whites now will suffer because all the white spots are taken and now people of color will have to be accepted into college. The problem with this is that they are no quotas for race in colleges because the Supreme Court ruled that was illegal. Moreover, why even conflate affirmative action with the college admissions scandal? Affirmative action primarily helps underrepresented minorities from poorer areas get into college. Whereas legacy admissions primarily helps white people from already rich areas get accepted into college.
59
@Louis
In name, there are no racial "quotas", but everyone knows that colleges engage in all sorts of legerdemain to get around that proscription. How? By devaluing standardized test results (to the distinct disadvantage of Asians and, to a lesser extent, whites) and elevating a "holistic" approach to admissions that works to benefit principally racial minorities. Curious, that.
10
@Louis-Excellent summation. Sigh.
2
@Louis Affirmative action mostly helps wealthy minorities, often with recent foreign roots.
3
We all just got a crash course in how unlevel the playing field is, how unequal education is, and how many doors are opened with money.
18
Thank you Ross, for pointing out the common threads in these three stories. The beneficiaries of diversity initiatives (Asians excepted, of course) might be a little uncomfortable digging deeper into the question of "so how did you get admitted?'
At one level, whether it's admission by checkbook or admission by skin color, the game is distorted at best, and rigged at worst for those of the wrong race and the wrong income bracket.
But let's be clear that this most recent scandal is very different with respect to outright fraud, whereas in the other cases folks are simply taking advantage of a flawed system.
The cheaters and their parents deserve all the bad things that are coming to them.
14
"But lately my skepticism about meritocracy itself has made me doubt whether we need more of it."
The problem is not whether admission should be based on merit or whether more merit is needed, but rather how can merit be judged objectively re admissions.
I have no solution, although I know merit and intelligence and creativity when I see it in a test paper or seminar paper later on.
14
@Joshua Schwartz
Set a minimum standard, above which all students have a likelihood of graduating and then select at random.
The situation is similar to hiring for jobs. You need to hire 25 workers. You have 100 applicants. Someone ranks the resumes and sends you 30 interviewees and you pick 25.
In all reality, ten of the applicants were not qualified and another ten were underqualified. Any 25 of the remaining 80 had an equal probability of being effective employees. "Interviewer skill" at selecting the best is a vanity.
College is selecting 1000 candidates and has 10,000 applicants. Set a minimum 1300 SAT score, top 10% of high school rank, scores of 4 or 5 on two AP courses. [Establish the criteria and publish it in time for AP English to become a standard high school offering.] Some 5,000 don't meet the requirements. Select 1,000 at random from the remaining 5,000.
An applicant with a 1400 SAT score is not more likely to graduate than someone with a 1350. It is not meritorious to have a higher SAT score. Someone who takes the exam on a really bad day will get a score 50 points lower than on the day he didn't have a cold and had gotten a good night's sleep. If he is coached and takes the exam over, he'll get a score 100 higher, 50 because he's not sick to bring him to his natural level and another 50 coaching bonus.
6