Meritocracy’s Discontents

Anyone paying attention the past few years will have heard the news that the United States is now an aristocracy. That is what critics of meritocracy, left and right, have concluded. The supposedly merit-based social sorting mechanisms of the past half-century — higher education chief among them — have created an intransigent class divide. Far from elevating the best from all walks of life, meritocracy “exists chiefly to replicate the elite, privileged class of society,” as Jason England wrote in The Chronicle Review, and to engender a “brutal caste system,” as Thomas B. Edsall put it recently in The New York Times.

Until recently, most critics of higher education wanted only to make meritocracy more fair — to “level the playing field,” as the ubiquitous metaphor went — by, for example, ending legacy preferences or offering more financial aid or tweaking the application to be friendlier to the poor and minorities. But in a panic over economic inequality and social mobility, many critics are now ready to demolish it outright.

You don’t have to like the college-admissions system to wonder if meritocracy really is to blame for America’s alleged turn to aristocracy. Is it really the case that status is passed down by law through family lines, and newcomers cannot break through, no matter how hard they work or how talented they are?

Clearly we are not that kind of aristocracy. Americans tend to applaud the enterprising bootstrapper. That doesn’t mean that there are no barriers to advancement (if so, no bootstrapping would be required) or that high attainment is equal or equally distributed. But it does mean that laws and mores — following the trajectory of the electoral franchise — have grown more inclusive over time. We see nothing inappropriate or unjust about the child of a housecleaner, a taxi driver, or even a convicted felon rising to the highest ranks in politics, business, or culture. Such examples are inspirations.

Moreover, an actual aristocracy would diminish competition at the top, since positions of prestige would be limited by birth and closed off to most people. But elite universities receive more applications each year, even as the number of college-age students in the country levels off. For a society in which the few born on top are allegedly guaranteed to stay there and those below have little hope of ascent, competition for honors and positions has never been more intense. Statistics tell us that mobility has ground to a halt, yet most people continue to behave as though they haven’t heard the news — studying, practicing, grinding away. Why bother?

Almost 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville offered an answer to this puzzle. Observing the frenzied efforts of Americans to advance their fortunes, he realized that what was driving their intense competitiveness was their very equality with one another. “There are only a certain number of great fortunes to make; and because the careers that lead to them are open to each citizen without distinction, the progress of all must indeed slow down.” As the old aristocratic obstacles to mobility fell away, so did the old aristocratic ways of selecting candidates (by lineage), and the problem of fair selection necessarily became more complex.

If we actually became an aristocracy, the problem would be solved by parentage, and we would no longer permit, no less cheer, upward mobility. If we lived in an oligarchy — sometimes conflated with aristocracy — and wealth alone ruled, then, too, there would be little competition for desirable positions. The wealthy would purchase them all, and Felicity Huffman would not be facing jail time.

Our inability to distribute positions in any of those ways is precisely why, as Tocqueville saw, we can’t dispense with meritocracy. The real problem with meritocracy is not, as critics claim, that it’s anti-democratic, but that it’s inseparable from democracy. Modern democracy has meritocracy built into its foundation. It is representative, and elections require us to make judgments about who is most qualified, or meritorious. Increased competition for desirable positions indicates that the ranks have been opened to more people and that the difficulty in choosing among them has grown. As Tocqueville put it, “Since the candidates appear more or less the same, and since it is difficult to make a choice from among them without violating the principle of equality … the first idea that presents itself is to make all march with the same step and to subject them all to the same tests.” The painful paradox of our regime is that it is precisely when the highest positions are open to all that competition becomes most arduous and America most democratic.

Criticism of meritocracy tends to settle on two complaints: that the current system excludes or discriminates against minorities and the poor and that it puts morally and educationally damaging pressure on students to mold themselves into the uniform image of an “achiever.” The problem, as Tocqueville showed, is that rectifying the first wrong tends to exacerbate the second, and vice versa. The centralization and standardization that make for societal fairness also make for individual misery.

Any direction we democrats turn, meritocracy mocks us. We can neither defeat it by reconceiving ourselves as an aristocracy nor improve it by “democratizing” it — that is, coaxing more entrants into the competition. None of the major proposals for reform in college admissions advanced in the past 20 years liberate us from meritocracy: Admissions lotteries still require meritocratic standards to determine who is admitted into the lottery pools. Efforts at racial and socioeconomic diversification may separate competition for each category of student, but the competition will remain meritocratic as colleges seek the best poor or minority students. Changing the definition of merit to emphasize qualities like persistence, empathy, authenticity, or even the ability to relax and stop worrying will spur a competition to be the most relaxed and worry-free. Lowering or abolishing tuition will encourage more applicants for the same number of places and raise the competitive pressure on each one. Abolishing the Ivy League as we know it would merely elevate other colleges to the positions vacated by their former rivals.

As long as it continues to be hoped or believed that success comes mainly through admission to elite colleges, every reform that expands the competition will tend to make it more intense, while every reform that makes the competition less intense will do so by excluding some from the competition.

Is there no way out of this vortex of ever-increasing equality and competition? An escape would require us to work against our own instincts. Because we believe that everyone is equal and thereby deserves an equal shot at every position, we want everyone to be able to compete on fair terms. Fairness requires a clear and uniform standard of merit, and the uniformity of standards leads to centralization. The fairest thing is to have everyone compete in a single contest. Otherwise arbitrariness creeps in, and we rage against the injustice of the system.

But we should keep in mind the difference between meritocracy as an abstract principle of selection, and the meritocracy, our meritocracy, which is an increasingly centralized credentialing machine run out of American universities. It is the meritocracy that most critics rage against, and in their fury, they have conflated it with meritocracy generally. Consignment to the former doesn’t necessarily require subjecting ourselves to the latter.

Political and cultural decentralization used to make meritocratic competition more tolerable. College degrees of any kind were rare before the mid-20th century, so it was impossible to centralize all competition through higher education. Advancement in most endeavors was still competitive, but competition was more local and regional, and its winners were dispersed and evaded easy arrangement into a single, national hierarchy.

Even after college attendance expanded, many fields remained impervious to its influence. Success in the arts, in electoral politics, and often in business rarely rested on anything like SAT scores or prestigious degrees. It is ironic that many of the parents implicated in the recent admissions scandal were tied to the entertainment industry, since that is one of the few remaining industries where an elite degree — or any degree at all — remains unnecessary. If there’s anyone in America who should know that you don’t need to attend a fancy college to be a famous millionaire, surely it’s a Hollywood actor. But this sphere, too, has apparently been colonized by elite higher education.

Conscious resistance to the centralization of meritocracy through higher education — by, say, opting to attend a nonelite college, or no college at all — can have only a limited effect if all the incentives point the other way. If it really becomes the case that there are no good jobs for anyone but elite-degree holders, it would be useless to ask students to stop competing for elite degrees. All we could hope for then is meticulously fair regulation of the ensuing race to the death — more tests, more oversight, more-aggressive efforts to ensure impartiality — all overseen by a more-invasive bureaucracy. A more-expansive social safety net for the increasing number of losers of this competition may ensure their physical survival, but it is unlikely to assuage their pride or uphold their dignity.

That is not yet the case, and there is some cause for optimism in the growing doubt on all sides that a college degree is the best or only route to security and success. Wariness of student debt and reminders of high-paying but unfilled jobs in the trades are increasing. Even the trendy tirades against elite colleges — leveled, to be sure, largely by their own graduates — combined with repeated revelations of malfeasance at many of those colleges, may eventually erode their cachet and subdue the competition to attend them. If that were to happen, we would have cause to thank the critics of meritocracy, for improving the very thing they sought to dismantle.

Little good would come of destroying universities, but great good might come from checking higher education’s role as the primary dispenser of qualifications for every desirable position. Decentralizing and dispersing the means and sources of recognition and qualification would allow for the simultaneous pursuit of aims otherwise opposed: expanding opportunity and keeping the moral and economic ill effects of increased competition at bay. As Wilfred M. McClay has argued, “We need to find ways to restore and preserve a less regimented, less class- and status-stratified, less school-sorted, more open-ended America.”

Whatever we do, it ought to be understood that dismantling meritocracy would require dismantling democracy. As long as “there are only a certain number of great fortunes to make,” as Tocqueville put it, competition for them will remain and will be subject to the same tendencies toward standardization and centralization that plague our current meritocracy. The best way to moderate democracy’s drive toward this stultifying end is not to suppress or distort our instinctive belief that positions should go to the best-qualified, but to keep the judges of merit dispersed so that we never come to a point at which the futures of more than a very small portion of the country’s young fall into the hands of college-admissions officers.

Rita Koganzon is a lecturer in the department of politics at the University of Virginia.