One of the glories of the emergence of modernity is that it offered the possibility and even the ideal that social position could be earned rather than inherited. Instead of being destined to become a king or a peasant by dictate of paternity, for the first time in history individuals had the opportunity to attain their roles in society on the basis of merit. And in this new world, public education became both the avenue for opportunity and the arbiter of merit. But one of the anomalies of modernity is that school-based meritocracy, while increasing the fluidity of status attainment, has had little effect on the degree of inequality in modern societies.

In this paper, I explore how the structure of schooling helped bring about this outcome in the United States, with special focus on the evolution of higher education in the twentieth century. The core issue driving the evolution of this structure is that the possibility for social mobility works at both the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy, with one group seeing the chance of rising up and the other facing the threat of falling down. As a result, the former sees school as the way for their children to gain access to higher position while the latter sees it as the way for their children to preserve the social position they were born with. Under pressure from both sides, the structure of schooling needs to find a way to accommodate these two contradictory aims. In practice the system can accomplish this by allowing children from families at the bottom and the top to both increase their educational attainment beyond the level of their parents. In theory this means that both groups can gain academic credentials that allow them to qualify for higher level occupational roles than the previous generation. They can therefore both move up in parallel, gaining upward mobility without reducing the social distance between them. Thus you end up with more opportunity without more equality.

Theoretically, it would be possible for the system to reduce or eliminate the degree to which elites manage to preserve their advantage through education simply by imposing a ceiling on the educational attainment allowed for their children. That way, when the bottom group rises they get closer to the top group. As a matter of practice, that option is not available in the U.S. As the most liberal of liberal democracies, the U.S. sees any such limits on the choices of the upper group as a gross violation of individual liberty. The result is a peculiar dynamic that has governed the evolution of the structure of American education over the years. The pattern is this. The out-group exerts political pressure in order to gain greater educational credentials for their children while the in-group responds by increasing the credentials of their own children. The result is that both groups move up in educational qualifications at the same time. Schooling goes up but social gaps remain the same. It’s an elevator effect. Every time the floor rises, so does the ceiling.

In the last 200 years of the history of schooling in the United States, the dynamic has played out like this. At the starting point, one group has access to a level of education that is denied to another group. The outsiders exert pressure to gain access to this level, which democratic leaders eventually feel compelled to grant. But the insiders feel threatened by the loss of social advantage that greater access would bring, so they press to preserve that advantage. How does the system accomplish this? Through two simple mechanisms. First, at the level where access is expanding, it stratifies schooling into curricular tracks or streams. This means that the newcomers fill the lower tracks while the old-timers occupy the upper tracks. Second, for the previously advantaged group it expands access to schooling at the next higher level. So the system expands access to one level of schooling while simultaneously stratifying that level and opening up the next level.

This process has gone through three cycles in the history of U.S. schooling. When the common school movement created a system of universal elementary schooling in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, it also created a selective public high school at the top of the system. The purpose of the latter was to draw upper-class children from private schools into the public system by offering access to the high school only to graduates of the public grammar schools. Without the elite high school as inducement, public schooling would have been left the domain for paupers. Then at the end of the nineteenth century, elementary grades filled up and demand increased for wider access to high school, so the system opened the doors to this institution. But at the same it introduced curriculum tracks and set off a surge of college enrollments by the former high school students. And when high schools themselves filled by the middle of the twentieth century, the system opened access to higher education by creating a range of new nonselective colleges and universities to absorb the influx. This preserved the exclusivity of the older institutions, whose graduates in large numbers then started pursuing postgraduate degrees.

Result: A Very Stratified System of Higher Education

By the middle of the twentieth century, higher education was the zone of advantage for any American trying to get ahead or stay ahead. And as a result of the process by which the tertiary system managed to incorporate both functions, it became extraordinarily stratified. This was a system that emerged without a plan, based not on government fiat but the competing interests of educational consumers seeking to use it to their own advantage. A market-oriented system of higher education such as this one has a special dynamic that leads to a high degree of stratification. Each educational enterprise competes with the others to establish a position in the market that will allow it to draw students, generate a comfortable surplus, and maintain this situation over time. The problem is that, given the lack of effective state limits on the establishment and expansion of colleges, these schools find themselves in a buyer’s market. Individual buyers may want one kind of program over another, which gives colleges an incentive to differentiate the market horizontally to accommodate these various demands. At the same time, however, buyers want a college diploma that will help them get ahead socially. This means that consumers don’t just want a college education that is different; they want one that is better – better at providing access to good jobs. In response to this consumer demand, the U.S. has developed a multi-tiered hierarchy of higher education, ranging from open-access institutions at the bottom to highly exclusive institutions at the top, with each of the upper tier institutions offering graduates a degree that provides invidious distinction over graduates from schools in the lower tiers.

This stratified structure of higher education arose in the nineteenth century in a dynamic market system, where the institutional actors had to operate according to four basic rules. Rule One: Age trumps youth. It’s no accident that the oldest American colleges are overrepresented in the top tier. Of the top 20 U.S. universities,[1] 19 were founded before 1900 and 7 before 1776, even though more than half of all American universities were founded in the twentieth century. Before competitors had entered the field, the oldest schools had already established a pattern of training the country’s leaders, locked up access to the wealthiest families, accumulated substantial endowments, and hired the most capable faculty.

Rule Two: The strongest rewards go to those at the top of the system. This means that every college below the top has a strong incentive to move up the ladder, and that top colleges have a strong incentive to preserve their advantage. Even though it is very difficult for lower-level schools to move up, this doesn’t keep them from trying. Despite long odds, the possible payoff is big enough that everyone stays focused on the tier above. A few major success stories allow institutions to keep their hopes alive. University presidents lie awake at night dreaming of replicating the route to the top followed by social climbers like Berkeley, Hopkins, Chicago, and Stanford.

Rule Three: It pays to imitate your betters. As the research university emerged as the model for the top tier in American higher education in the twentieth century, it became the ideal toward which all other schools sought to move. To get ahead you needed to offer a full array of undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs, selective admissions and professors who publish, a football stadium and Gothic architecture. (David Riesman called this structure of imitation “the academic procession.”)^[2] Of course, given the advantages enjoyed by the top tier, imitation has rarely produced the desired results. But it’s the only game in town. Even if you don’t move up in the rankings, you at least help reassure your school’s various constituencies that they are associated with something that looks like and feels like a real university.

Rule Four: It’s best to expand the system by creating new colleges rather than increasing enrollments at existing colleges. Periodically new waves of educational consumers push for access to higher education. Initially, existing schools expanded to meet the demand, which meant that as late as 1900 Harvard was the largest U.S. university, public or private.^[3] But beyond this point in the growth process, it was not in the interest of existing institutions to provide wider access. Concerned about protecting their institutional advantage, they had no desire to sully their hard-won distinction by admitting the unwashed. Better to have this kind of thing done by additional colleges created for that purpose. The new colleges emerged, then, as a clearly designated lower tier in the system, defined as such by both their newness and their accessibility.

Think about how these rules have shaped the historical process that produced the present stratified structure of higher education. This structure has four tiers. In line with Rule One, these tiers from top to bottom emerged in roughly chronological order. The Ivy League colleges emerged in the colonial period, followed by a series of flagship state colleges in the early and mid-nineteenth century. These institutions, along with a few social climbers that emerged later, grew to form the core of the elite research universities that make up the top tier of the system. Schools in this tier are the most influential, prestigious, well-funded, exclusive, research-productive, and graduate-oriented – in the U.S. and in the world.

The second tier emerged from the land grant colleges that began appearing in the mid to late nineteenth century. They were created to fill a need not met by existing institutions, expanding access for a broader array of students and offering programs with practical application in areas like agriculture and engineering. They were often distinguished from the flagship research university by the word “state” in their title (as with University of Michigan vs. Michigan State University) or the label “A & M” (for Agricultural and Mechanical, as with University of Texas vs. Texas A & M). But, in line with Rules Two and Three, they responded to consumer demand by quickly evolving into full service colleges and universities; and in the twentieth century they adopted the form and function of the research university, albeit in a more modest manner.

The third tier arose from the normal schools, established in the late nineteenth century to prepare teachers. Like the land grant schools that preceded them, these narrowly vocational institutions evolved quickly under pressure from consumers, who wanted them to model themselves after the schools in the top tiers by offering a more valuable set of credentials that would provide access to a wider array of social opportunities. Under these market pressures, normal schools evolved into teachers colleges, general-purpose state colleges, and finally, by the 1960s, comprehensive regional state universities.

The fourth tier emerged in part from the junior colleges that first arose in the early twentieth century and eventually evolved into an extensive system of community colleges. Like the land grant college and normal school, these institutions offered access to a new set of students at a lower level of the system. Unlike their predecessors, for the most part they have not been allowed by state governments to imitate the university model, remaining primarily as two-year schools. But through the transfer option, many students use them as a more accessible route into institutions in the upper tiers.

What This Means for Educational Consumers

This highly stratified system is very difficult for consumers to navigate. Instead of allocating access to the top level of the system using the mechanism employed by most of the rest of the world – a state-administered university matriculation exam – the highly decentralized American system allocates access by means of informal mechanisms that in comparison seem anarchic. In the absence of one access route, there are many; and in the absence of clear rules for prospective students, there are multiple and conflicting rules of thumb. Also, the rules of thumb vary radically according to which tier of the system you are seeking to enter.

First, let’s look at the admissions process for families (primarily the upper-middle class) who are trying to get their children entrée to the elite category of highly selective liberal arts colleges and research universities. They have to take into account the wide array of factors that enter into the complex and opaque process that American colleges use to select students at this level: quality of high school; quality of a student’s program of study; high school grades; test scores in the SAT or ACT college aptitude tests; interests and passions expressed in an application essay; parents’ alumni status; whether the student needs financial aid; athletic skills; service activities; diversity factors such as race, ethnicity, class, national origin, sex, and sexual orientation; and extracurricular contributions a student might make to the college community. There is no centralized review process; instead every college carries out its own admissions review and employs its own criteria.

This open and indeterminate process provides a huge advantage for upper-middle-class families. If you are a parent who is a college graduate and who works at a professional or managerial job, where the payoff of going to a good college is readily apparent, you have the cultural and social capital to negotiate this system effectively and read its coded messages. For you, going to college is not the issue; it’s a matter of which college your children can get into that would provide them with the greatest competitive advantage in the workplace. You want for them the college that might turn them down rather than the one that would welcome them with open arms. So you enroll your children in test prep; hire a college advisor; plan out a strategic plan for high school course-taking and extracurriculars; craft a service resume that makes them look appropriately public-spirited; take them on the obligatory college tour; and come up with just the right mix of applications to the stretch schools, the safety schools, and those in between. And all this pays off handsomely: 77 percent of children from families in the top quintile by income gain a bachelor’s degree.^[4]

If you are a parent farther down the class scale, who didn’t attend college and whose own work environment is not well stocked with college graduates, you have a lot more trouble negotiating the system. The odds are not good: for students from the fourth income quintile, only 17 percent earn a BA, and for the lowest quintile the rate is only 9 percent.^[5] Under these circumstances, having your child go to a college, any college, is a big deal; and one college is hard to distinguish from another. But you are faced by a system that offers an extraordinary diversity of choices for prospective students: public, not-for-profit, or for-profit; secular or religious; two-year or four-year; college or university; teaching or research oriented; massive or tiny student body; vocational or liberal; division 1, 2, or 3 intercollegiate athletics, or no sports at all; party school or nerd haven; high rank or low rank; full-time or part-time enrollment; urban or pastoral; gritty or serene; residential, commuter, or “suitcase college” (where students go home on weekends). In this complex setting both consumers and providers somehow have to make choices that are in their own best interest. Families from the upper-middle class are experts at negotiating this system, trimming the complexity down to a few essentials: a four-year institution that is highly selective and preferably private (not-for-profit). Everything else is optional.

If you’re a working-class family, however – lacking deep knowledge of the system and without access to the wide array of support systems that money can buy – you are more likely to take the system at face value. Having your children go to a community college is the most obvious and attractive option. It’s close to home, inexpensive, and easy to get into. It’s where your children’s friends will be going, it allows them to work and go to school part time, and it doesn’t seem as forbiddingly alien as the state university (much less the Ivies). You don’t need anything to gain admission except a high school diploma or GED. No tests, counselors, tours, or resume-burnishing is required. Of you could try the next step up, the local comprehensive state university. To apply for admission, all you need is a high school transcript. You might get turned down, but the odds are in your favor. The cost is higher but can usually be paid with federal grants and loans. An alternative is a for-profit institution, which is extremely accessible, flexible, and often online. It’s not cheap, but federal grants and loans can pay the cost. What you don’t have any way of knowing is that the most accessible colleges at the bottom of the system are also the ones where students are least likely to graduate. (Only 29 percent of students entering two-year colleges earn an associate degree in three years;^[6] only 39 percent earn a degree from a two-year or four-year institution in six years.^[7]) You also may not be aware that the economic payoff for these colleges is lower; or that the colleges higher up the system may not only provide stronger support toward graduation and but might even be less expensive because of greater scholarship funding.

In this way, the complexity and opacity of this market-based and informally-structured system helps reinforce the social advantages of those at the top of the social ladder and limit the opportunities for those at the bottom. It’s a system that rewards the insider knowledge of old hands and punishes newcomers. To work it effectively, you need reject the fiction that a college is a college is a college and learn how seek advantage in the system’s upper tiers.

On the other hand, the system’s fluidity is real. The absence of state-sanctioned and formally structured tracks means that the barriers between the system’s tiers are permeable. Your children’s future is not predetermined by their high school curriculum or their score on the matriculation exam. They can apply to any college they want and see what happens. Of course, if their grades and scores are not great, their chances of admission to upper level institutions are poor. But their chances of getting into a teaching-oriented state university are pretty good, and their chances of getting into a community college are virtually assured. And if they take the latter option, as is most often the case for children from socially disadvantaged families, there is a real (if modest) possibility that they might be able to prove their academic chops, earn an AA degree, and transfer to a university, even a research university. The probabilities of moving up in the system are low: most community college students never earn an AA degree; and transfers have a harder time succeeding in the university than students who enroll there as freshmen. But the possibilities are nonetheless genuine.

American higher education offers something for everyone. It helps those at the bottom to get ahead and those at the top to stay ahead. It provides socially useful educational services for every ability level and every consumer preference. This gives it an astonishingly broad base of political support across the entire population, since everyone needs it and everyone can potentially benefit from it. And this kind of legitimacy is not possible if the opportunity the system offers to the lower classes is a simple fraud. First generation college students, even if they struggled in high school, can attend community college, transfer to San Jose State, and end up working at Apple. It’s not very likely, but it assuredly is possible. True, the more advantages you bring to the system – cultural capital, connections, family wealth – the higher the probability that you will succeed in it. But even if you are lacking in these attributes, there is still an outside chance that you just might make it through the system and emerge with a good middle class job.

This helps explain how the system gets away with preserving social advantage for those at the top without stirring a revolt from those at the bottom. Students from working-class and lower-class families are much less likely to be admitted to the upper reaches of the higher education system that provides the greatest social rewards; but the opportunity to attend some form of college is high, and attending a college at the lower levels of the system may provide access to a good job. The combination of high access to the lower levels of the system and high attrition on the way to attaining a bachelor’s degree creates a situation where the system gets credit for openness and the student bears the burden for failing to capitalize on it. The system gave you a chance but you just couldn’t make the grade. The ready-made explanations for personal failure accumulate quickly as students try to move through the system. You didn’t study hard enough, you didn’t get good grades in high school, you didn’t get good test scores, so you couldn’t get into a selective college. Instead you went to a community college, where you got distracted from your studies by work, family, and friends, and you didn’t have the necessary academic ability; so you failed to complete your AA degree. Or maybe you did complete the degree and transferred to a university, but you had trouble competing with students who were more able and better prepared than you. Along with the majority of students who don’t make it all the way to a BA, you bear the burden for your failure – a conclusion that is reinforced by the occasional but highly visible successes of a few of your peers. The system is well defended against charges of unfairness.

So we can understand why people at the bottom don’t cry foul. It gave you a chance. And there is one more reason for keeping up your hope that education will pay off for you. A degree from an institution in a lower tier may pay lower benefits, but for some purposes one degree really is as good as another. Often the question in getting a job or a promotion is not whether you have a classy credential but whether you have whatever credential is listed as the minimum requirement in the job description. Bureaucracies operate on a level where form often matters more than substance. As long as you can check off the box confirming that you have a bachelor’s degree, the BA from University of Phoenix and the BA from University of Pennsylvania can serve the same function, by allowing you to be considered for the job. And if, say, you’re a public school teacher, an MA from Capella University, under the district contract, is as effective as one from Stanford University, because either will qualify you for a $5,000 bump in pay.

At the same time, however, we can see why the system generates so much anxiety among students who are trying to use the system to move up the social ladder for the good life. It’s really the only game in town for getting a good job in twenty-first century America. Without higher education, you are closed off from the white collar jobs that provide the most security and pay. Yes, you could try to start a business, or you could try to work your way up the ladder in an organization without a college degree; but the first approach is highly risky and the second is highly unlikely, since most jobs come with minimum education requirements regardless of experience. So you have to put all of your hopes in the higher-ed basket while knowing – because of your own difficult experiences in high school and because of what you see happening with family and friends – that your chances for success are not good. You either you choose to pursue higher ed against the odds or you simply give up. It’s a situation fraught with anxiety.

What is less obvious, however, is why the American system of higher education – which is so clearly skewed in favor of people at the top of the social order – fosters so much anxiety in them. Upper-middle-class families in the U.S. are obsessed with education and especially with getting their children into the right college. Why? They live in the communities that have the best public schools; their children have cultural and social skills that schools value and reward; and they can afford the direct cost and opportunity cost of sending their high school grads to a residential college, even one of the pricey privates. So why are there only a few colleges that seem to matter to this group? Why does it matter so much to have your child not only get into the University of California but into Berkeley or UCLA? What’s wrong with having them attend Santa Cruz or even one of the Cal State campuses? And why the overwhelming passion for pursuing admission to Harvard or Yale?

The urgency behind all such frantic concern about admission to the most elite level of the system is this: As parents of privilege, you can pass on your wealth to your children, but you can’t give them a profession. Education is built into the core of modern societies, where occupations are no longer inherited but more or less earned. If you’re a successful doctor or lawyer, you can provide a lot of advantages for your children; but in order for them to gain a position such as yours, they must succeed in school, get into a good college, and then into a good graduate school. Unless they own the company, even business executives can’t pass on position to their children, and even then it’s increasingly rare that they would actually do so. (Like most shareholders, they would profit more by having the company led by a competent executive than by the boss’s son.) Under these circumstances of modern life, providing social advantage to your children means providing them with educational advantage. Parents who have been through the process of climbing the educational hierarchy in order to gain prominent position in the occupational hierarchy know full well what it takes to make the grade.

They also know something else: When you’re at the top of the social system, there is little opportunity to rise higher but plenty of opportunity to fall farther down. Consider data on intergenerational mobility in the U.S. For children of parents in the top quintile by household income, 60 percent end up at least one quintile lower than their parents and 37 fall at least two quintiles.^[8] That’s a substantial decline in social position. So there’s good reason for these parents to fear downward mobility for their children and to use all their powers to marshal educational resources to head it off. The problem is this: Even though your own children have a wealth of advantages in negotiating the educational system, there are still enough bright and ambitious students from the lower classes who manage to make it through the educational gauntlet to pose them a serious threat. So you need to make sure that your children attend the best schools, get into the high reading group and the program for the gifted, take plenty of advanced placement classes, and then get into a highly selective college and graduate school. Leave nothing to chance, since some of your heirs are likely to be less talented and ambitious than those children who prove themselves against all odds by climbing the educational ladder. When the higher education system opened up access after World War II, it made competition for the top tier of the system sharply higher, and the degree of competitiveness continued to increase as the proportion of students going to college grew to a sizeable majority. As Jerome Karabel has noted in his study of elite college admissions, the American system of higher education does not equalize opportunity but it does equalize anxiety.^[9] It makes families at all levels of American society nervous about their ability to negotiate the system effectively, because it provides the only highway to the good life.

The American Meritocracy

The American system of education is formally meritocratic, but one of its social effects is to naturalize privilege. This starts when a student’s academic merit is so central and so pervasive in schooling that it embeds itself within the individual person. You start saying things like: I’m smart. I’m dumb. I’m a good student. I’m a bad student. I’m good at reading but bad at math. I’m lousy at sports. The construction of merit is coextensive with the entire experience of growing up, and therefore it comes to constitute the emergent you. It no longer seems to be something imposed by a teacher or a school but instead comes to be an essential part of your identity. It’s now less what you do and increasingly who you are. In this way, the systemic construction of merit begins to disappear and what’s left is a permanent trait of the individual. You are your grade and your grade is your destiny.

The problem, however – as an enormous amount of research shows – is that the formal measures of merit that schools use are subject to powerful influence from a student’s social origins. No matter how you measure merit, it affects your score. It shapes your educational attainment. It also shows up in measures that rank educational institutions by quality and selectivity. Across the board, your parents’ social class has an enormous impact on the level of merit you are likely to acquire in school. Students with higher social position end up accumulating a disproportionately large number of academic merit badges.

The correlations between socioeconomic status and school measures of merit are strong and consistent, and the causation is easy to determine. Being born well has an enormously positive impact on the education merit you acquire across your life. Let us count the ways. Economic capital is one obvious factor. Wealthy communities can support better schools. Social capital is another factor. Families from the upper middle classes have a much broader network of relationships with the larger society than those form the working class, which provides a big advantage for their schooling prospects. For them, the educational system is not foreign territory but feels like home.

Cultural capital is a third factor, and the most important of all. School is a place that teaches students the cognitive skills, cultural norms, and forms of knowledge that are required for competent performance in positions of power. Schools demonstrate a strong disposition toward these capacities over others: mental over manual skills, theoretical over practical knowledge, decontextualized over contextualized perspectives, mind over body, Gesellschaft over Gemeinschaft. Parents in the upper middle class are already highly skilled in these cultural capacities, which they deploy in their professional and managerial work on a daily basis. Their children have grown up in the world of cultural capital. It’s a language they learn to speak at home. For working-class children, school is an introduction to a foreign culture and a new language, which unaccountably other students seem to already know. They’re playing catchup from day one. Also, it turns out that schools are better at rewarding cultural capital than they are at teaching it. So kids from the upper middle class can glide through school with little effort while others continually struggle to keep up. The longer they remain in school, the larger the achievement gap between the two groups.

In the wonderful world of academic merit, therefore, the fix is in. Upper income students have a built-in advantage in acquiring the grades, credits, and degrees that constitute the primary prizes of the school meritocracy. But – and this is the true magic of the educational process – the merits that these students accumulate at school come in a purified academic form that is independent of their social origins. They may have entered schooling as people of privilege, but they leave it as people of merit. They’re good students. They’re smart. They’re well educated. As a result, they’re totally deserving of special access to the best jobs. They arrived with inherited privilege but they leave with earned privilege. So now they fully deserve what they get with their new educational credentials.

In this way, the merit structure of schooling performs a kind of alchemy. It turns class position into academic merit. It turns ascribed status into achieved status. You may have gotten into Harvard by growing up in a rich neighborhood with great schools and by being a legacy. But when you graduate, you bear the label of a person of merit, whose future accomplishments arise alone from your superior abilities. You’ve been given a second nature.

Consequences of Naturalized Privilege: The New Aristocracy

The process by which schools naturalize academic merit brings major consequences to the larger society. The most important of these is that it legitimizes social inequality. People who were born on third base get credit for hitting a triple, and people who have to start in the batter’s box face the real possibility of striking out. According to the educational system, divergent social outcomes are the result of differences in individual merit, so, one way or the other, people get what they deserve. The fact that a fraction of students from the lower classes manage against the odds to prove themselves in school and move up the social scale only adds further credibility to the existence of a real meritocracy.

In the United States in the last 40 years, we have come to see the broader implications of this system of status attainment through institutional merit. It has created a new kind of aristocracy. This is not Jefferson’s natural aristocracy, grounded in public accomplishments, but a caste of meritocratic privilege, grounded in the formalized and naturalized merit signaled by educational credentials. As with aristocracies of old, the new meritocracy is a system of rule by your betters – no longer defined as those who are better born or more accomplished but now as those who are better educated. Michael Young saw this coming back in 1958, as he predicted in his fable, The Rise of the Meritocracy.[10] But now we can see that it has truly taken hold.

The core expertise of this new aristocracy is skill in working the system. You have to know how to play the game of educational merit-getting and pass this on to your children. The secret is in knowing that the achievements that get awarded merit points through the process of schooling are not substantive but formal. Schooling is not about learning the subject matter; it’s about getting good grades, accumulating course credits, and collecting the diploma on the way out the door. Degrees pay off, not what you learned in school or even the number of years of schooling you have acquired. What you need to know is what’s going to be on the test and nothing else. So you need to study strategically and spend of lot of effort working the refs. Give teacher what she wants and be sure to get on her good side. Give the college admissions officers the things they are looking for in your application. Pump up your test scores with coaching and learning how to game the questions.

Members of the new aristocracy are particularly aggressive about carrying out a strategy known as opportunity hoarding. There is no academic advantage too trivial to pursue, and the number of advantages you accumulate can never be enough. In order to get your children into the right selective college you need send them to the right school, get them into the gifted program in elementary school and the right track in high school, hire a tutor, carry out test prep, do the college tour, pursue prizes, develop a well-rounded resume for the student (sport, student leadership, musical instrument, service), pull strings as a legacy and a donor, and on and on and on.

As we saw earlier, such behavior by upper-middle-class parents is not a crazy as it seems. The problem with being at the top is that there’s nowhere to go but down. The system is just meritocratic enough to keep the most privileged families on edge, worried about having their child bested by a smart poor kid. Again, as Karabel put it, the only thing U.S. education equalizes is anxiety.

As with earlier aristocracies, the new aristocrats of merit cluster together in the same communities, where the schools are like no other. Their children attend the same elite colleges, where they meet their future mates and then transmit their combined cultural, social, and economic capital in concentrated form to their children, a process sociologists call assortative mating. And one consequence of this increase concentration of educational resources is that the achievement gap between low and high income students has been rising; Sean Reardon’s study shows the gap growing 40 percent in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This is how educational and social inequality grows larger over time.

By assuming the form of meritocracy, schools have come to play a central role in defining the character of modern society. In the process they have served to increase social opportunity while also increasing social inequality. At the same time, they have established a solid educational basis for the legitimacy of this new inequality, and they have fostered the development of a new aristocracy of educational merit whose economic power, social privilege, and cultural cohesion would be the envy of the high nobility in early modern England or France. Now, as then, the aristocracy assumes its outsized social role as a matter of natural right.

References

Community College Research Center. (2015). Community College FAQs. Teachers College, Columbia University. http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Community-College-FAQs.html (accessed 8-3-15).

Geiger, Roger L. (2004). To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American research Universities, 1900-1940. New Brunswick: Transaction.

Karabel, Jerome. (2005). The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. New York: Mariner Books.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2014). Digest of Education Statistics, 2013. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.

Pell Institute and PennAHEAD. (2015). Indicators of Higher Education Equity in the United States (2015 revised edition). Philadelphia: The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education and the University of Pennsylvania Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy (PennAHEAD). http://www.pellinstitute.org/publications-Indicators_of_Higher_Education_Equity_in_the_United_States_45_Year_Report.shtml (accessed 8-10-15).

Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project. (2012). Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations. Washington, DC: Pew Charitable Trusts. http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/0001/01/01/pursuing-the-american-dream (accessed 8-10-15).

Riesman, David. (1958). The Academic Procession. In Constraint and variety in American education. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

U.S. News and World Report. (2015). National Universities Rankings. http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities (accessed 4-28-15).

Young, Michael D. (1958). The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2023. New York: Random House.

[1] U.S. News (2015).

[2] Riesman, (1958).

[3] Geiger (2004), 270.

[4] Pell (2015), p. 31.

[5] Pell (2015), p. 31.

[6] NCES (2014), table 326.20.

[7] CCRC (2015).

[8] Pew (2012), figure 3.

[9] Karabel (2005), p. 547.

[10] Young (1958).

Higher Education, Meritocracy, Uncategorized

Daniel Markovits on “The Meritocracy Trap”

Posted on September 30, 2019September 19, 2019 by David Labaree

In this post, which I just wrote, I look at the arguments in the new book by Daniel Markovits. It crystallizes a lot of the issues in the current debate about meritocracy and advances the argument in ways I hadn’t considered before. This is not a review of the book but a teaser to get you to read it for yourself. In it I single out some of his key points and give you some of my favorite quotes from the book. Enjoy.

Daniel Markovits on The Meritocracy Trap

In the last year or two, the media have been filled with critiques of the American meritocracy (e.g., here, here, and here). It’s about time this issue got the critical attention it deserves, since the standard account has long been that the only problem with the meritocracy is that it’s not meritocratic enough. Thus the Varsity Blues college admissions soap opera that has been playing in the press for months now, another case of rich people buying privileged access to credentials they haven’t earned the hard way. That’s an old story of jumping the line and cutting in front of the truly worthy.

But in his new book, The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits makes a more complex, more interesting, and ultimately more damning critique. The problem with meritocracy, he ways, lies at its very core and not just in its slipshod implementation. It’s a destructive force in modern society, which puts people in the lower 99 percent at a severe disadvantage in the pursuit of social mobility and a good life. But – and this is the less familiar part – it is also damaging to the people in the top group who gain the most financial and social benefits from it. It’s a trap for both groups, and both would be better off without it.

In this post, I want to walk through key parts of the book’s argument and present some of my favorite quotes. Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, is a very effective writer and the story he tells in not only largely compelling but it’s also compulsively quotable. I hope this teaser will convince you to read the book, which is available in the usual places and also in pirated editions online.

Here’s how he sets up the argument:

Common usage often conflates meritocracy with equality of opportunity. But although meritocracy was embraced as the handmaiden of equality of opportunity, and did open up the elite in its early years, it now more nearly stifles than fosters social mobility. The avenues that once carried people from modest circumstances into the American elite are narrowing dramatically. Middle-class families cannot afford the elaborate schooling that rich families buy, and ordinary schools lag farther and farther behind elite ones, commanding fewer resources and delivering inferior educations. Even as top universities emphasize achievement rather than breeding, they run admissions competitions that students from middle-class backgrounds cannot win, and their student bodies skew dramatically toward wealth. Meritocratic education now predominantly serves an elite caste rather than the general public.

Meritocracy similarly transforms jobs to favor the super-educated graduates that elite universities produce, so that work extends and compounds inequalities produced in school. Competence and an honest work ethic no longer assure a good job. Middle-class workers, without elite degrees, face discrimination all across a labor market that increasingly privileges elaborate education and extravagant training.

The meritocracy thus works at two levels, a hyper-intense winner-take-all competition to get the very best education in an extremely stratified system of schooling coupled with a similarly intense competition in the elite sector of the workforce for the positions at the very top with the most extraordinary financial and social rewards.

This system obviously gives a huge advantage to students who bring the cultural, social, and economic capital that comes from being the children of those who are already in the elite sector. That, as I said, is an old story; no surprise there. But he also shows the price paid by the group at the top. As he puts it,

the rich and the rest are entangled in a single, shared, and mutually destructive economic and social logic. Their seemingly opposite burdens are in fact two symptoms of a shared meritocratic disease. Meritocratic elites acquire their caste through processes that ruthlessly exclude most Americans and, at the same time, mercilessly assault those who do go through them. The powerfully felt but unexplained frustrations that mar both classes—unprecedented resentment among the middle class and inscrutable anxiety among the elite—are eddies in a shared stream, drawing their energies from a single current.

Markovits notes that “For virtually all of human history, income and industry have charted opposite courses.” The rich were idle, living off the land and off the labor of others. The poor were the workhorses of the economy. But today,

High society has reversed course. Now it valorizes industry and despises leisure. As every rich person knows, when an acquaintance asks “How are you?” the correct answer is “So busy.” The old leisure class would have thought this a humiliating admission. The working rich boast that they are in demand.

The result is that, in a dramatic historical reversal, meritocrats at the top of the workforce now work longer hours than the middle or working classes.

In 1940, a typical worker in the bottom 60 percent worked nearly four (or 10 percent) more weekly hours than a typical worker in the top 1 percent. By 2010, the low-income worker devoted roughly twelve (or 30 percent) fewer hours to work than the high-income worker. Taken together, these trends shift the balance of ordinary to elite labor by nearly sixteen hours—or two regulation workdays—per week.

What’s going on here is that in the new meritocracy, top positions go to people who prove their worth not only by accumulating the most highly credentialed skills in school but by demonstrating the greatest dedication to the job. The days of bankers’ hours and white-shoe law firms, with genteel professionals working at a relaxed aristocratic rate, are gone. Take the case of lawyers, which Markovits knows best:

In 1962 (when elite lawyers earned a third of what they do today), the American Bar Association could confidently declare that “there are . . . approximately 1300 fee-earning hours per year” available to the normal lawyer. Today, by contrast, a major law firm pronounces with equal confidence that a quota of 2,400 billable hours “if properly managed” is “not unreasonable,” which is a euphemism for “necessary for having a hope of making partner.” Billing 2,400 hours requires working from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., six days a week, without vacation or sick days, every week of the year. Graduates of elite law schools join law firms that commonly require associates and even partners to work sixty-, eighty-, and even hundred-hour weeks.

The issue is that the meritocrats are claiming the top rewards not as owners of property but as workers using their own human capital. “Unlike land or factories, human capital can produce income—at least using current technologies—only by being mixed with its owners’ own contemporaneous labor.” In order to win the competition, they need to exploit their own labor.

People who are required to measure up from preschool through retirement become submerged in the effort. They become constituted by their achievements, so that eliteness goes from being something that a person enjoys to being everything that he is. In a mature meritocracy, schools and jobs dominate elite life so immersively that they leave no self over apart from status. An investment banker, enrolled as a two-year-old in the Episcopal School and then passed on to Dalton, Princeton, Morgan Stanley, Harvard Business School, and finally to Goldman Sachs (where he spends his income on sending his children to the schools that he once attended), becomes this résumé, in the minds of others and even in his own imagination.

As a result,

Meritocratic inequality might free the rich in consumption, but it enslaves them in production…. A person who lives like this places himself, quite literally, at the disposal of others—he uses himself up…. The elite, acting now as rentiers of their own human capital, exploit themselves, becoming not just victims but also agents of their own alienation.

Of course, it’s hard to feel sorry for the people who win this competition, since their rewards are so over the top.

David Rockefeller received a salary of about $1.6 million (in 2015 dollars) when he became chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1969, which amounted to roughly fifty times a typical bank teller’s income. Last year Jamie Dimon, who runs JPMorgan Chase today, received a total compensation of $29.5 million, which is over a thousand times as much as today’s banks pay typical tellers.

So no one says, “Poor Jamie Dimon.” But one fundamental consequence of the long work hours of the new elite is that it helps justify their high rewards. Not only are they better educated than you are, they also work harder than you do. So how are you supposed to cry foul about where you ended up in life? By not simply cashing in on their credentials but also by exploiting their own human capital, they provide the meritocracy with iron-clad legitimacy.

To make matters worse, meritocracy—precisely because it justifies economic inequalities and disguises class—denies ordinary Americans any high-minded language through which to explain and articulate the harms and wrongs of their increasing…. They become “victims without a language of victimhood.”

Markovits also connects the rise of meritocracy and the anxieties in foments to the politics of the Trump era.

Meritocracy is therefore far from innocent in the recent rise of nativism and populism. Instead, nativism and populism represent a backlash against meritocratic inequality brought on by advanced meritocracy. Nativism and populism express the same ideological and psychological forces behind the epidemic of addiction, overdose, and suicide that has lowered life expectancy in the white working and middle class.

The contrast with Obama is instructive: “Obama—a superordinate product of elite education—embodied meritocracy’s triumph. Trump—‘a blue-collar billionaire’ who announces ‘I love the poorly educated’ and openly opposes the meritocratic elite—exploits meritocracy’s enduring discontents.” As he observes, “False prophets gain a foothold…because deeply discontented people care—often most and always first—about being heard and not just being helped. They will cling to the only ship that acknowledges the storm.”

Credentialing, Higher Education, History, Meritocracy

Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege

Posted on May 13, 2019May 2, 2019 by David Labaree

This a new piece I recently wrote, based on a paper I presented last fall at the ISCHE conference in Berlin. It’s part of a larger project that focuses on the construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy of credentials.

Schooling the Meritocracy:

How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege

David F. Labaree

Merit is much in the news these days. Controversy swirls around the central role that education plays in establishing who has the most merit and thus who gets the best job. Parents are suing Harvard, for purportedly admitting students based on ethnicity rather than academic achievement. Federal prosecutors are indicting wealthy parents for trying to bribe their children’s way into the most selective colleges. At the core of these debates is a concern about fairness. To what extent does the social structure allow people to get what they deserve, based on individual merit rather than social power and privilege? There’s nothing new about our obsession with establishing merit. The ancient Greeks and Romans were as concerned with this issue as much as we are. What is new, however, is that all the attention now is focused on schools as the great merit dispensers.

Modern systems of public schooling have transformed the concept of merit. The premodern form of this quality was what Joseph Kett calls essential merit. This represented a person’s public accomplishments, which were seen as a measure of character. Such merit was hard won through good works and had to be defended vigorously, even if that meant engaging in duels. The new kind of merit, which arose in the mid nineteenth century after the emergence of universal public schooling in the U.S., was what Kett calls institutional merit. This you earned by attending school and advancing through the levels of academic attainment. It became your personal property, which could not be challenged by others and which granted you privileges in accordance with the level of merit you acquired.

Here I examine three consequences of this shift from essential to institutional merit in the American setting. First, this change democratized merit by making it, at least theoretically, accessible to anyone and not just the gentry, who in the premodern period had prime access to this reputational good. Second, it formalized the idea of merit by turning it from a series of publicly visible and substantive accomplishments into the accumulation of the forms that schooling had to offer – grades, credits, and degrees. Third, following from the first two, it served the social function of naturalizing the privileges of birth by transposing them into academic accomplishments. The well born, through the medium of schooling, acquired a second nature that transformed ascribed status into achieved status.

Essential Merit

From the very start, the country’s Founding Fathers were obsessed with essential merit. To twenty-first century ears, the way they used the term sounds like what we might call character or honor or reputation. Individuals enacted this kind of merit through public performances, and it referred not just to achievements in general but especially those that were considered most admirable for public figures. This put a premium on taking on roles of public service more than private accomplishment and on contributing to the public good. Such merit might come from demonstrating courage on the battlefield, sacrifice for the community in a position of public leadership, scientific or literary eminence. Think Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Franklin. It extended well beyond simple self-aggrandizement, although it often spurred that among its most ardent suitors. It was grounded in depth of achievement, but it also relied heavily on symbolism to underscore its virtue.

Merit was both an enactment and a display. The most accomplished practitioner of essential merit in the revolutionary period was George Washington. From his earliest days he sought to craft the iconic persona that has persisted to the present day. His copybook in school was filled with 110 rules of civility that should govern public behavior. He constructed a resume of public service that led inevitably from an officer in the colonial militia, to a representative to the continental congress, to commander in chief of the revolutionary army, and then to president. A tall man in an era of short men, he would tower over a room of ordinary people, and he liked to demonstrate his physical strength and his prowess as an accomplished horseman. This was a man with a strong sense of his reputation and of how to maintain it. And he scored the ultimate triumph of essential merit in his last performance in public life, when he chose to step down from the presidency after two terms and return to Mount Vernon – Cincinnatus laying down his awesome powers and going back to the farm.

This kind of merit is what Jefferson meant when he referred to a “natural aristocracy,” arising in the fertile fields of the new world that were uncorrupted by the inheritance of office. It represents the kinds of traits that made aristocracy a viable form of governance for so many years: educating men of privilege to take on positions of public leadership, imbued with noblesse oblige, and armed with the skills to be effective in the role. Merit was a powerful motivator for the Founding Fathers, a spur to emulation for the benefit of the community, a self-generating dynamic for a hyper-accomplishment. And it was a key source of their broad legitimacy as public leaders.

But essential merit also had its problems. Although it left room for self-made men to demonstrate their merit – like Franklin and Hamilton – it was largely open to men of leisure, born into the gentry, supported by a plantation full of slaves, and free to serve the public without having to worry about making a living; think Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. When politics began the transition in the 1820s from the Federalist to the Jacksonian era, the air of aristocracy fit uncomfortably into the emerging democratic ethos that Tocqueville so expertly captured in Democracy in America.

Another problem was that essential merit brought with it unruly competition. How much essential merit can crowd into a room before a fight breaks out? How can everyone be a leader? What happens if you don’t get the respect you think you earned? One response, quite common at the time, was to engage in a duel. If your reputation was maligned by someone and that person refused to retract the slur, then your honor compelled you to defend your reputation with your life. Alexander Hamilton was but one casualty of this lethal side effect of essential merit. Benedict Arnold is another case in point. An accomplished military officer and Washington protégé, Arnold was doing everything right on the battlefield to demonstrate his merit. But when he sought appointment as a major general, politics blocked his path. This was a slight too much for him to bear. Instead of a duel (who would he challenge, his mentor Washington?), he opted for treason, plotting to pass along to the British his command of the fort at West Point. So the dynamic behind essential merit was a powerful driver for behavior that was both socially functional and socially destructive.

The Rise of Institutional Merit

By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a new form of merit was arising in the new republic. In contrast to the high-flown notion of essential merit, grounded in high accomplishment in public life and defended with your life, the new merit was singularly pedestrian. It mean grades on a report card at school. Hardly the stuff of stirring biographies. These grades were originally labeled as measures of merit and demerit in academic work, recording what you did well and what you did badly. Ironically, ground zero for this new system was Benedict Arnold’s old fort at West Point, which was now the location of the U.S. Military Academy. The sum of your merits and demerits constituted your academic worth. Soon the emerging common school system adopted the same mode of evaluation.

The sheer banality of the new merit offered real advantages. Unlike its predecessor, it did not signal membership in an exclusive club accessible primarily to the well-born but instead arose from a system that governed an entire population within a school. As a result, it was well suited to a more democratic political culture. Also, it provided a stimulus sufficiently strong to promote productive competition among students for academic standing, but these marks on a report card were not really worth fighting over.

So institutional merit emerged as a highly functional construct for meeting the organizational needs of the new systems of public schooling that arose in the middle of nineteenth century America. What started out as a mechanism for motivating students in a classroom grew into a model for structuring an entire system of education. Once the principle of ranking by individual achievement was established, it developed into a way of ranking groups of students within schools and then groups of schools with school systems. The first innovation, as schools became larger and more heterogeneous in both age and ability, was to organize groups of students into homogeneous classrooms with others of the same age and ability. If you performed with sufficient merit in one grade, you would be promoted with your peers at the end of the year into the next grade up the ladder. If your merit was not up to standard, you would be held back to repeat the grade. This allowed teachers to pitch instruction toward a group of students who were at roughly the same level of achievement and development. It also created a more level playing field that allowed teachers to compare and rank the relative performance of students within the class, which they couldn’t do in a one-room schoolhouse with a wide array of ages and abilities. So the invention of the grade also led to the invention of the metric that defines some students as above grade-level and others as below. Graded schooling was thus the foundation of the modern meritocracy.

The next step in the development of institutional merit was the erection of a graded system of schooling. Students would start out in an elementary school for the lower grades, then gain promotion to a grammar school, and (by the end of the nineteenth century) move up to a high school for the final grades. Entry at one level was dependent on successful completion of the level below. A clear hierarchy of schooling emerged based on the new merit metric. And it didn’t stop there. High school graduation became the criterion for entry into college, and the completion of college became the requirement for entry into graduate school. A single graded structure guided student progress through each individual school and across the entire hierarchy of schooling, serving as a rationalized and incremental ladder of meritocratic attainment leading from first grade through the most elevated levels of the system.

Consider some of the consequences of the emergence of this finely tuned machinery for arranging students by institutional merit. When you have a measure of what average progress should look like – annual promotion to the next grade, and periodic promotion to the school at the next level – then you also have a clear measure of failure. There were three ways for students to demonstrate failure within the system: to be held back from promotion to the next grade; to be denied the diploma that demonstrated completion of particular school level; to leave the system altogether as a particular point in the graded hierarchy. Thus emerged the chronic problems of the new system – retardation and elimination.

A parallel challenge to the legitimacy of the merit structure occurred at the level of the school. By the early twentieth century, level of school became increasingly important in determining access to the best jobs. As a particular level of schooling began to fill up, as happened to the high school in the first half of the twentieth century, then that level of diploma became less able to provide invidious distinction. For a high school graduate, this meant that the perceived quality of the school became an important factor in determining the relative merit of your degree compared with other high school graduates. When college enrollments took off in the mid twentieth century and this level of the system emerged as the new zone of universal education, the value of a college degree likewise became dependent on the imputed merit of the institution granting it. The result is a two-layered hierarchy of merit in the American educational system. One was the formal graded system from first grade to graduate school. Another was the informal ranking of institutions at the same formal level. Both became critical in determining graduates’ level of institutional merit and their position in the queue for the best jobs. Consider some of the consequences of the dominance of this new form of merit.

Democratizing Merit

As we saw, essential merit had a bias toward privilege. The founding fathers who displayed the most merit were to the manor born. They were free to exercise public service because of birth and wealth. Yes, it was possible as well for an outsider to demonstrate essential merit, but it wasn’t easy. Benjamin Franklin was sui generis, and even he acted less as a leader and more as a sage and diplomat. Alexander Hamilton fought his way to the top, but he never lost his outsider status and ended up dying to defend his honor, which was hard-won but never fully secure.

What gives essential merit face validity is that it is based on what you have actually accomplished. Your merit is your accomplishments. That’s hard to beat as a basis for respect, but it’s also hard to attain. Washington could prove himself as a military officer because his gentry status automatically qualified him to become an officer in the first place. Jefferson became a political figure because that’s what men of his status did with themselves and his election would be assured. As a result, what made this kind of merit so compelling is what also made it so difficult for anyone but the gentry to demonstrate.

So the move toward institutional merit radically opened up the possibility of attaining it. It’s a system that applied to everyone – not just the people with special access but everyone in the common school classroom. All students in the class could demonstrate their worth and earn the appropriate merits that measured that worth. And everyone was measured on the same scale. If essential merit was the measure of the member of the natural aristocracy, institutional merit was the measure of the citizen in a democracy. You’ve got to love that part about it.

Another characteristic of institutional merit also made it distinctly democratic. What it measured was neither intrinsically important nor deeply admirable. It didn’t measure your valor in battle or your willingness to sacrifice for the public good; instead it reflected how many right answers you got on a weekly spelling test. No big deal.

But what makes this measure of merit so powerful for the average person was its implication. It measured a trivial accomplishment in the confined academic world of the classroom, but it implied a bright future. If essential merit measured your real accomplishment in the world, institutional merit offered a prediction of your future accomplishment. It said, look out for this guy – he’s going to be somebody. This is a major benefit that derives from the new measure. Measuring how well you did a job is relatively easy, but predicting in advance how well you will do that job is a very big deal.

Does institutional merit really predict future accomplishment? Do academic grades, credits, and degrees tell us how people will perform on the job? Human capital theorists say yes: the skills acquired in school translate into greater productivity in the workforce. Credentialing theorists say no: the workforce rewards degrees by demanding them as prerequisites for getting a job, but this doesn’t demonstrate that what is learned in school helps a person in doing the job. I lean toward the latter group, but for our purposes this debate doesn’t really matter. As long as the job market treats academic merit as a predictor of job performance, then this form of merit serves as such. Whether academic learning is useful on the job is irrelevant as long as the measures of academic merit are used to allocate people to jobs. And a system that offers everyone in a community access to schools that will award them tokens of institutional merit gives everyone a chance to gain any social position. That’s a very democratic measure indeed.

Formalizing Merit

Part of what makes institutional merit so democratic is that the measure itself is so abstract. What it’s measuring is not concrete accomplishment – winning a battle or passing a law – but generic accomplishment on a standardized and decontextualized scale. It’s a score from A to F or 1 to 100 or 0 to 4. All of these scales are in use in American schools, but which you use doesn’t matter. They’re all interchangeable. All they tell us is how high or low an individual was rated on some academic task. Then these individual scores are averaged together across a heterogeneous array of such tasks to compute a composite score that tells us – what? The score says that overall, at the end of the class, you met academic expectations (for that class in that grade) at a high, medium, or low level, or that you failed to meet the minimum expectation at all. And, if compared to the grades that fellow students received in the same class, it shows where your performance ranked with that of your peers.

It’s the sheer abstraction of this measure of merit that gives it so much power. A verbal description of a student’s performance in the class would be a much richer way of understanding what she learned there: In her biology class, Joanie demonstrated a strong understanding of heredity and photosynthesis but she had some trouble with the vascular system. The problem is that this doesn’t tell you how she compares with her classmates or whether she will qualify to become a banker. What helps with the latter is that she received a grade of B+ (3.3 on a 4.0 scale) and the class average was B. The grade tells you much less but it means a lot more for her and her future. Especially when it is combined with all of her other grades in classes across her whole career in high school, culminating in her final grade point average and a diploma. It says, she’ll get into college, but it won’t be very selective one. She’ll end up in a middle class job, but she won’t be a top manager. In terms of her future, this is what really matters, not her mastery of photosynthesis.

In this way, institutional merit is part of the broad process of rationalization that arose with modernity. It filters out all of the noise that comes from context and content and qualitative judgments and comes up with a quantitative measure that locates the individual as a point on a normal curve representing everyone in the cohort. It shows where you rank and predicts where you’re headed. It becomes a central part of the machinery of disciplinary power.

Naturalizing Privilege

Once merit became democratized and formalized, it also became naturalized. The process of naturalization works like this. Your merit is so central and so pervasive in a system of universal schooling that it embeds itself within the individual person. You start saying things like: I’m smart. I’m dumb. I’m a good student. I’m a bad student. I’m good at reading but bad at math. I’m lousy at sports. The construction of merit is coextensive with the entire experience of growing up, and therefore it comes to constitute the emergent you. It no longer seems to be something imposed by a teacher or a school but instead comes to be an essential part of your identity. It’s now less what you do and increasingly who you are. In this way, the systemic construction of merit begins to disappear and what’s left is a permanent trait of the individual. You are your grade and your grade is your destiny.

The problem, however – as an enormous amount of research shows – is that the formal measures of merit that schools use are subject to powerful influence from a student’s social origins. No matter how your measure merit, it affects your score. It shapes your educational attainment. It also shows up in measures that rank educational institutions by quality and selectivity. Across the board, your parents’ social class has an enormous impact on the level of merit you are likely to acquire in school. Students with higher social position end up accumulating a disproportionately large number of academic merit badges.

So, in the wonderful world of academic merit, the fix is in. Upper income students have a built-in advantage in acquiring the grades, credits, and degrees that constitute the primary prizes of the school meritocracy. But – and this is the true magic of the educational process – the merits that these students accumulate at school come in a purified academic form that is independent of their social origins. They may have entered schooling as people of privilege, but they leave it as people of merit. They’re good students. They’re smart. They’re well educated. As a result, they’re totally deserving of special access to the best jobs. They arrived with inherited privilege but they leave with earned privilege. So now they fully deserve what they get with their new educational credentials.

Consequences of Naturalized Privilege: The New Aristocracy

Such behavior by upper-middle-class parents is not a crazy as it seems. The problem with being at the top is that there’s nowhere to go but down. If you look at studies of intergenerational mobility in the US, the top quintile of families have a big advantage, with more than 40 percent of children ending up in the same quintile as their parents, twice the rate that would occur by chance. But that still means that 60 percent are going to be downwardly mobile. The system is just meritocratic enough to keep the most privileged families on edge, worried about having their child bested by a smart poor kid. As Jerry Karabel puts it in The Chosen, the only thing U.S. education equalizes is anxiety.

By democratizing, formalizing, and naturalizing merit, schools have played a central role in defining the character of modern society. In the process they have served to increase social opportunity while also increasing social inequality. At the same time, they have established a solid educational basis for the legitimacy of this new inequality, and they have fostered the development of a new aristocracy of educational merit whose economic power, social privilege, and cultural cohesion would be the envy of the high nobility in early modern England or France. Now, as then, the aristocracy assumes its outsized social role as a matter of natural right.

Credentialing, Higher Education, Meritocracy

Michael Lewis: Don’t Eat Fortune’s Cookie

Posted on March 25, 2019March 27, 2019 by David Labaree

In the last year or so, I’ve been reading and writing about the American meritocracy, and I’m going to be posting some of these pieces here from time to time. But today I want to post a wonderful statement on the subject by Michael Lewis, which I somehow had missed when it first came out. It’s his address at the Princeton commencement in 2012 called, “Don’t Eat Fortune’s Cookie.” The theme for the new Princeton grads is simple and powerful: You shouldn’t assume you deserve to be where you are today.

Princeton University’s 2012 Baccalaureate Remarks

by Staff

June 3, 2012 4:17 p.m.

“Don’t Eat Fortune’s Cookie”
Michael Lewis
June 3, 2012 — As Prepared

(NOTE: The video of Lewis’ speech as delivered is available on the Princeton YouTube channel.)

Thank you. President Tilghman. Trustees and Friends. Parents of the Class of 2012. Above all, Members of the Princeton Class of 2012. Give yourself a round of applause. The next time you look around a church and see everyone dressed in black it’ll be awkward to cheer. Enjoy the moment.

Thirty years ago I sat where you sat. I must have listened to some older person share his life experience. But I don’t remember a word of it. I can’t even tell you who spoke. What I do remember, vividly, is graduation. I’m told you’re meant to be excited, perhaps even relieved, and maybe all of you are. I wasn’t. I was totally outraged. Here I’d gone and given them four of the best years of my life and this is how they thanked me for it. By kicking me out.

At that moment I was sure of only one thing: I was of no possible economic value to the outside world. I’d majored in art history, for a start. Even then this was regarded as an act of insanity. I was almost certainly less prepared for the marketplace than most of you. Yet somehow I have wound up rich and famous. Well, sort of. I’m going to explain, briefly, how that happened. I want you to understand just how mysterious careers can be, before you go out and have one yourself.

I graduated from Princeton without ever having published a word of anything, anywhere. I didn’t write for the Prince, or for anyone else. But at Princeton, studying art history, I felt the first twinge of literary ambition. It happened while working on my senior thesis. My adviser was a truly gifted professor, an archaeologist named William Childs. The thesis tried to explain how the Italian sculptor Donatello used Greek and Roman sculpture — which is actually totally beside the point, but I’ve always wanted to tell someone. God knows what Professor Childs actually thought of it, but he helped me to become engrossed. More than engrossed: obsessed. When I handed it in I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: to write senior theses. Or, to put it differently: to write books.

Then I went to my thesis defense. It was just a few yards from here, in McCormick Hall. I listened and waited for Professor Childs to say how well written my thesis was. He didn’t. And so after about 45 minutes I finally said, “So. What did you think of the writing?”

“Put it this way” he said. “Never try to make a living at it.”

And I didn’t — not really. I did what everyone does who has no idea what to do with themselves: I went to graduate school. I wrote at nights, without much effect, mainly because I hadn’t the first clue what I should write about. One night I was invited to a dinner, where I sat next to the wife of a big shot at a giant Wall Street investment bank, called Salomon Brothers. She more or less forced her husband to give me a job. I knew next to nothing about Salomon Brothers. But Salomon Brothers happened to be where Wall Street was being reinvented—into the place we have all come to know and love. When I got there I was assigned, almost arbitrarily, to the very best job in which to observe the growing madness: they turned me into the house expert on derivatives. A year and a half later Salomon Brothers was handing me a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to give advice about derivatives to professional investors.

Now I had something to write about: Salomon Brothers. Wall Street had become so unhinged that it was paying recent Princeton graduates who knew nothing about money small fortunes to pretend to be experts about money. I’d stumbled into my next senior thesis.

I called up my father. I told him I was going to quit this job that now promised me millions of dollars to write a book for an advance of 40 grand. There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “You might just want to think about that,” he said.

“Why?”

“Stay at Salomon Brothers 10 years, make your fortune, and then write your books,” he said.

I didn’t need to think about it. I knew what intellectual passion felt like — because I’d felt it here, at Princeton — and I wanted to feel it again. I was 26 years old. Had I waited until I was 36, I would never have done it. I would have forgotten the feeling.

The book I wrote was called “Liar’s Poker.” It sold a million copies. I was 28 years old. I had a career, a little fame, a small fortune and a new life narrative. All of a sudden people were telling me I was born to be a writer. This was absurd. Even I could see there was another, truer narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm from which to write the story of an age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business? Of having parents who didn’t disinherit me but instead sighed and said “do it if you must?” Of having had that sense of must kindled inside me by a professor of art history at Princeton? Of having been let into Princeton in the first place?

This isn’t just false humility. It’s false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.

I wrote a book about this, called “Moneyball.” It was ostensibly about baseball but was in fact about something else. There are poor teams and rich teams in professional baseball, and they spend radically different sums of money on their players. When I wrote my book the richest team in professional baseball, the New York Yankees, was then spending about $120 million on its 25 players. The poorest team, the Oakland A’s, was spending about $30 million. And yet the Oakland team was winning as many games as the Yankees — and more than all the other richer teams.

This isn’t supposed to happen. In theory, the rich teams should buy the best players and win all the time. But the Oakland team had figured something out: the rich teams didn’t really understand who the best baseball players were. The players were misvalued. And the biggest single reason they were misvalued was that the experts did not pay sufficient attention to the role of luck in baseball success. Players got given credit for things they did that depended on the performance of others: pitchers got paid for winning games, hitters got paid for knocking in runners on base. Players got blamed and credited for events beyond their control. Where balls that got hit happened to land on the field, for example.

Forget baseball, forget sports. Here you had these corporate employees, paid millions of dollars a year. They were doing exactly the same job that people in their business had been doing forever. In front of millions of people, who evaluate their every move. They had statistics attached to everything they did. And yet they were misvalued — because the wider world was blind to their luck.

This had been going on for a century. Right under all of our noses. And no one noticed — until it paid a poor team so well to notice that they could not afford not to notice. And you have to ask: if a professional athlete paid millions of dollars can be misvalued who can’t be? If the supposedly pure meritocracy of professional sports can’t distinguish between lucky and good, who can?

The “Moneyball” story has practical implications. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don’t be deceived by life’s outcomes. Life’s outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

I make this point because — along with this speech — it is something that will be easy for you to forget.

I now live in Berkeley, California. A few years ago, just a few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus.

Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn’t. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader’s shirt.

This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He’d been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.

This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay, and I’m sure lots of other human behavior. But it also is relevant to new graduates of Princeton University. In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.

All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you’ll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don’t.

Never forget: In the nation’s service. In the service of all nations.

Thank you.

And good luck.

November 2019
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