Sometimes a single publication captures my full attention. It's been a while since I devoted a single post to commentary on a single article but this one has already generated many offshoots, including videos on the theme by its author. It comes from
The Atlantic, written by David Brooks whose day job pays him as columnist for the
NY Times. He also has authored a few books, mostly non-fiction commentary.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritocracy-college-admissions-social-economic-segregation/680392/
The piece took me several sessions to read in its entirety, then a couple more evenings to ponder its components. David, which is probably what I would call him if we met in person, as we are contemporaries of age though of unequal legacies, takes great pride in his classical political Conservatism. He cites Edmund Burke of Tory England as a defining figure, one focused on individual and collective freedom, which enables individual and collective achievements. And he recognizes its flaws and its misapplications to America's contemporary political landscape. Basically when people of talent, like him, protbably to a lesser degree like me, are permitted to perform, they will rise to the occasion. This article explores one form of American entitlement shifting to another form. He focuses on what becomes of students who enter prestige schools. In one era, money and legacy was the entry ticket. And those elites generated a mixed legacy with the collapse of Wall Street but very successful FDR recovery programs, WW2 victory, and post-War economic expansion. Key academics surmised that America could do even better if it sought out innate talent from wherever it emerged, irrespective of pedigree. A post-war expansion with educational benefits to soldier survivors generated a new talent pool that the finest educational institutions could tap, with the end point being America leading the world in any activity that depends on universithy training. He and I are both beneficiaries of that shift, Jewish kids once limited by quotas that gave way to high grades and test scores. We entered top universities. He became a journalist of international influence. I became a worthy physician to appreciative patients but did not really advance the medical field. He cites surveys to indicate that most of the grads of these schools are like me, solid performers. The stars come from someplace else, but they still emerge. The Nobels may not go to Harvard alums, but they do go to faculty at these places who often attended college elsewhere. Same with our cultural advancements, technological transformations, social agencies, and diplomats. Talent eventually emerges, but the Ivy admissions officers are not all that adept at identifying the exceptional as they are at ranking numerical data. Moreover, while these graduates have done many worthy things to move our collective life experience forward, an undue number devote themselves to manipulating financial markets or using math abilties to take profitable guesses on where markets might trend without improving the companies themselves or the people they employ. In effect, solid reliable talent producing less that the optimal public outcome that the admissions reformers of the middle 20th century envisioned. This generation produced cell phones, medicines, diagnostics, sensitivity to once marginalized groups, opportunities for women. But these Best and Brightest also generated market fiascos, ill-advised international gambits, undue value on people who can hurdle exams and join things at a young age, and eventually a divide between winners and losers that invites a strongman with dubious alliances to hit the reset button as resentment grows.
David divides his criticism into six categories which I copied. He answered each of them quite extensively. I will offer my observations while critiquing his.
1. The system overrates intelligence.
Securing admission to a top school was competitive in my day, even more so in my children's era, as we all attended the same university. An Admissions staff will receive maybe ten times as many applications as they can accommodate. Most of those hopefuls could navigate the curriculum requirements. So they need to distinguish one person from another. From my HS class I knew the few who got into the Big 3 Ivies. They all had stronger academic transcripts and scores than me, except for our football quarterback, a wonderful young man of color in a school where the Jews dominated the classrooms. Still, being a QB, taking challenging courses with decent performance, and having a father who served on the faculty of our regional Ivy made him successful. But for the most part, the classmates with the best transcripts got into the most selective schools. Those on the second tier, like me, attended the next tier school. One from my tier became a superstar. Everyone else still got to go to college someplace. We produced doctors, lawyers, engineers.
Might my own school have been better with a different collection of kids? Or might I have achieved more were I not up against kids who hurdled the requirements with the same proficiency as me? No way to know. However, fifty years have passed since commencement. We know how everyone did. That's not true the Millenial classes my children attended or the current Gen Z. But people turned down by the admissions committees, as I was, still had an adult future to attain someplace else.
2. Success in school is not the same thing as success in life.
My class in HS and university generated some very productive people, rewarded financially and with symbols of prestige in the form of titles and admiration. The HS classmate who became an international CEO went to a small division of a state school. A few very undistinguished students built very profitable small businesses. We are economically and culturally successful. That is not the same as being personally successful. My marriage has endured an adult lifetime. My children are worthy successors. I knew to retire when I could no longer excel. I have no idea how others fared. Divorces are common as are blended families. No doubt some had personal misadventures. I never generated a lot of friends and chafed at working as part of a team where I would have to cede autonomy. Some would regard this as failure. Did I reach my potential? Did my place on the Admissions committee hierarchy squeeze out another applicant who might have benefited more? No way to know. Since we make ample incomes, did we save prudently or announce Look at Me through our purchases? Improper pretense existed. People less generous with their treasure that their educations enabled also likely prevalent. I think I have been successful at what mattered, my marriage, descendants, economic security, and a modicum of generosity in excess of what my less well-off parents were able to offer.
3. The game is rigged.
Rigged isn't the right term. Understanding the revised rules, acquiring experience with outcome, and setting strategies that achieve the outcome describe the process better. It is not conceptually that different from prevailing at anything else from a football game to a retirement nest egg. If the experience that graduates of prestige schools have lucrative, personally satisfying careers, preparing to attend one becomes a priority. We know how Admissions Officers assess applications. We know what they ask on the applications. If they seek the Best and Brightest, those with credentials, then get the credentials. And as in golf or bowling, there are handicaps to make up the difference.
Do some people have advantages? For sure. Tall people have an advantage being on the school's basketball team. People with certain capacities create better art. And both can be coached to surpass their inherent advantages. My family could not afford to have me experience a summer in Europe or a tutor to get me over some calculus obstacles, or private music lessons. I and many others made the best of what we had. My classmates in the 1970s seemed of similar background. We were people who took the challenging curriculum, had been successful with standardized testing since the Iowa tests of early grade school, knew how to write a coherent composition though less well than our future professors thought we should. Within those classes, we had HS jocks who excelled at sports, a few physics nerds. We also had kids less academically capable admitted to the class as it benefited the university in some way. Some were scions of large donors that the school would need to offer its programs to everyone. Others brought special talents, and some were kids of social disadvantage who excelled in their city or rural HS environment but would struggle in their new classrooms.
Rather than rigged, or offering unfair advantage to one group over another, I think the better criteria would be whether the classes that they ulimately assemble bring credit to the university that selected them among the excess of applicants. For the most part they do. And as they move on, becoming fifty-year alumini as I did and David will soon be, did we derive benefit from what our elite schools with its array of opportunities made available? I think the vast majority did. And do we accept people who fell at a different stratum in the college scramble in a dignified way when they become our colleagues or neighbors later? I think we did.
4. The meritocracy has created an American caste system.
Social strata in America and globally predate contemporary times. Across history, a certain amount of social mobility, upward and downward, existed. Slavery was a global reality for much of history. So were people who left the farm to seek fortune as soldiers or merchants. There were physical conquests of warfare or colonialism that defined who people were and the opportunities they might have as individuals or as groups. History also has its rebellions and its remodeling. Rather than a caste system, which we think of as the model of India which is an immutable legacy, what contemporary America seems to show is loss of economic and social advancement opportunities that were once accepted. That may be true but blaming it on the decisions of a few elite institutions probably isn't.
Social mobility in American history, as taught to me by some pretty astute teachers, came in waves. Just crossing the ocean on a one-way ticket shut some doors and opened others. The Africans brought here in chains had no freedom and the natives pushed aside by settlers lost stature from their starting points. Over time, though, the consequences of doing this had a mixture of benefits and harm. Policies by those in authority largely expanded economic upgrades to those of European ancestry, whether land for ownership, educational mandates for children, absorption of immigrants into an already established economy, or projects of philanthropy for public benefit. After economic fiascos from monopolies to depressions, corrective protections were also put into place by those given rightful authority, with a blend of favorable and unfavorable consequences.
The Meritocracy era as David describes came in my father's generation. The big state universities already existed, authorized and supported since the time of the Civil War. Transportation already existed. Manufacturing capacity sufficient to prevail in two world wars already existed. So did financial institutions and taxation in its various forms. What changed was expansion of who could access them. The government committed funds to help my father go to college on their dime in appreciation of bodily risk he and many others experienced. And home ownership benefited the new owners like my father as well as the American economy.
All people who become newly prosperous have to decide what to do with the money they have but never expected to have. Andrew Carnegie wrote of this as the Gospel of Wealth, but for most it was more personal prosperity. And the people who are now well-paid, wearing ties to work, consumed some and invested some, including in their children. So as David and I of the same generation learned, our expectations were rooted in economic security which becomes part opportunity, part safety net for when we fail. We could access the top educational facilities, but also our state universities. We could then take those degrees and the abilities to which they attest and offer them to employers needing people like us.
Our generation that benefited from expanded access did not create the institutions that now welcomed us, though with some strings attached and rules that we needed to follow. The Ivies had already achieved their acclaim, the corporations that bought us aboard were largely established, even the emerging broadcast industry, our federal and local governments needed civil service talent to serve the public. We filled those needs, but with few exceptions did not create them. And while Trickle Down Economics has been discredited for good reason, as we became economically secure, we did not abandon or undermine those who did not get the same economic attainment. Instead, we traveled on highways designed by civil engineers but built by construction workers, purchased cars initially from Detroit but accepted a variant meritocracy when Toyota built more reliable vehicles, bought products transported to our stores by teamsters, and admired public parks maintained by less educated landscapers. We wished none ill will. Rather the mindset was more share our abundance.
Along the way, that social mobility and also interaction between economic strata got interrupted, though we were not the ones to do that. What changed, in quantum steps methinks, are the interactions. Starting with the draft, the ultimate in forced social mingling, at least for men, WW2 drafted Kennedys and ranch hands. Vietnam did not. And then for defensible reasons, a professional voluntary army requiring a certain literacy attainment to function excluded the school dropouts. The universities became the next mixture point, one that has shifted from rousing success to troublesome as David outlines for most of his essay. We have neighborhoods. They have always been segregated by levels of prosperity along with ethnicity. We have in more recent decades the decline of intergenerational hometowns, where at least everyone who lived there went to the same HS. And we have decline of the churches, another place where people of different backgrounds met in the same place. More recently, we have our devices, the ultimate in customized ME with grudging interaction with anyone else and disregard for who might take offense. Those are the institutional failures that create strata, if not actually castes. The evolution of who gets into what school over two generations reflects that. I don't think it caused it.
5. The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite.
David and I progressed through our universities unscathed. I think my kids did too. The need to divert from your natural interests to jump through the various admissions hoops is worth it for some, but damaging to others. Despite this childhood deprivation, a very real circumstance, David also acknowledges the long-term payoff. Economic security that endures for most, with the opportunities for professional and personal growth that go with it, offsets the sacrifice of parts of one's childhood. Better health, less divorce, less substance abuse, esteem from others. All big long-term gains that are hard to attain by alternate paths. Those seem to enhance the psyche. Since to hurdle Admissions, childhood becomes more regimented than it might otherwise be, adapting to campus regimentation should be no harder or easier than is for other kids who enter young adulthood in different regulated environments like the military or many workplaces. The campus experience has changed since my time there two generations ago. I think political correctness is more enforced. We certainly had our pressured conformities, be it Vietnam opposition or support for Candidate McGovern, though we retained our respect for professors who preferred Nixon like the rest of adult America. I think that respect element has evaporated for a lot of reasons. The professors outside the sciences are more ideological. In my era, George Wallace was a much sought-after campus speaker. We held up signs but did not interfere with his lecture. People are too quick to cancel or even punish certain ideologies. Some of what we absorbed as Derech Eretz, the Hebrew term for good interpersonal relations, has given way to shouting ME and playing Wack-a-Mole with you. People of the Instagram era seem too focused on their flaws, but I don't think the upper levels of Academy caused that. More likely that smartphone-internet driven blend of vanity and insecurity was created before the first college application got submitted and was imported to the campus with all its linkages.
Did the quest to attain that Fat Letter from the Admissions office, or now the congratulatory email, cause the fretful, often intolerant emerging adults who populate the campus? No, it was imported to the campus. And since these are the kids of needed talent, they will export more to our workplaces, civil service, and beyond in the form of litmus tests for what is acceptable thought, training programs that everyone has to take to make them as sensitive as everyone else in those workplaces. Conformity has its place. Our military might would vanish without it. But harmful standards have a way of being propagated until reformed, which eventually they seem to be.
6. The meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.
Little dispute that we have divisions, including some element of backlash, or at least resentment. Real financial capitalists of extreme wealth have largely been forgiven. Knowledge capitalists, those top university grads of more attainable wealth, the very people the ultrawealthy need to run their enterprises, have taken the hit. Voting patterns reflect those alliances and resentments. The coastal states most dependent on college-trained expertise vote one way, an ever-expanding American interior vote another. Swing states were once Tennessee and Missouri, now they are Pennsylvania and Nevada. Yet resentments have been ingrained into American history. Control of the government shifts every few election cycles. Dixie resented Reconstruction disruptions enough to enact Jim Crow Laws, then their Democratic congressmen who had reason for economic alliances with Northern Democrats, found backlash to Civil Rights legislation to flip parties. Workers once depended on the economic benefits of unions, which could protect wages but not keep the plants on American soil. They flipped, but not before seeing their wages of their auto and steel plants becoming the lower wages of retail workers. Neither the Confederate nostalgics nor the displaced union members got what they sought. Acceptance of public access of races to restaurants and state universities is accepted and demeaning references marginalized. The union guys have not brought the jobs back from Asia irrespective of how they vote. They are left to nurse their resentments. Meanwhile, Smart America, those targets of resentment, continue to engage in the creative work that advances technology, makes their doctors more effective, and travel more accessible. They resent the producers of these, but partake of what has been produced.
In some ways educated America functions as the social croupiers. It makes no difference who controls the government. As long as the expertise has value and scarcity, we will prosper.
Over a much longer time frame, useful institutions have been devalued, whether the government agencies, those very elite universities that David now critiques, what we see on our screens, the people we must hire to keep our cars mobile and our homes functional. The respect that expertise or skill once brought has been targeted very successfully in exchange for resentment-driven votes. I think its roots lay a lot deeper than the annual scramble for college acceptance decisions.
Moving past David's Six Elements Meritocracy's Flaws, his question of whether our systems generate the best leaders is a very real one. I will site two offshoots, one a presentation by a Jewish thought leader who I much admire, the other a written reaction to David's column in her student newspaper from one of the elite schools that David bashes.
Bari Weiss graduated one of the Ancient Eight, securing a position at the pinnacle of journalism. She gave it up to become an electronic journalism entrepreneur on Substack, while also writing and speaking extensively about the scourge of Anti-Semitism emerging from social margins to mainstream, particularly on our campuses. Most visibility at the universities of David's essay, my own alma mater among them. Bari gave a speech which I watched on YouTube. She addressed what is called the General Assembly, a collection of the highest youthful Jewish achievers, the recipients of that stardust that displays how wonderful they all are. As her litany of anti-Semitic incidents proceeded over the next few minutes, how they were the ones who had to act to reverse it, my half-century of Jewish immersion, Jewish experience flashed back. Every one of those circumstances on her list occurred with the Best and Brightest of the Jewish community, the highest achievers with titles seeping over the internet, in place. Just like Ivy League parents groom their children to follow them, the Jewish organizations engage in a similar form of institutional incest. They get good people, but choose them as obedient proteges. Those kids listening to Bari at the podium probably never had their Hebrew School teacher complain about them. They made Honor Roll another designation where obedience overrides intellect, went to Ramah, held offices in Hillel. Saluted when told to salute. In the two generations where this constituted the most admired, or at least the most titled, the synagogues that form the core institution of American Judaism have lost membership. Donors to agencies give more money to the treasuries because the ability to give large sums has expanded. However, fewer individuals donate. I could only think like David describing colleges, they picked people less capable than they could have had by setting inferior identification criteria and allowing compliance or affibility to become a surrogate for talent. The price was high.
A student writing for The Princetonian, an African-American woman, focused primarily on David's assertion that meritocracy created a rigged game.
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2024/11/princeton-opinion-column-meritocracy-admissions-david-brooks-ivy-league
Despite her attendance at a school that did not accept my son, she conveys a blend of perpetual victimhood and ingrained unfairness that defies correction. I don't know if she's right, but it's more productive to see oneself as the agent of moving forward in a better direction. The Rebbe, z"l, used to receive people seeking his sage guidance. Often they conveyed to him misfortunes, hoping his wisdom will create a path for more favorable outcomes. Invariably, the Rebbe would respond to the petitioner in distress, that his circumstance was a Gift from God, a chance to hit the reset button, put the thinking cap on, reject inertia. And the Rebbe would then make the first suggestion. Nothing is really doomed. Not our politics, antagonisms, nor our impediments to giving each person their best shot to take.
