finishingmycoffee.com

On the myth of academic meritocracy

Jerome Karabel in his NY Times op-ed The New College Try:

The paucity of students from poor and working-class backgrounds at the nation’s selective colleges should be a national scandal. Yet the problem resides not so much in discrimination in the admissions process . . . as in the definition of merit used by the elite colleges. For by the conventional definition, which relies heavily on scores on the SAT, the privileged are the meritorious; of all students nationwide who score more than 1300 on the SAT, two-thirds come from the top socioeconomic quartile and just 3 percent from the bottom quartile.

Only a vigorous policy of class-based affirmative action that accounts for the huge class differences in educational opportunity has a chance of altering this pattern. This change should be accompanied by a fundamental re-examination of the very meaning of “merit.”

Is resilience in the face of deprivation a form of achievement? Should universities expect — and even demand — higher levels of achievement from applicants who have enjoyed every social and educational advantage? Does the emphasis on outstanding extracurricular accomplishments privilege already privileged students who have the time, the resources and the opportunities to display such accomplishments?

This field is Karabell's area of expertise. Says Slate, of his book The Chosen:

Karabel's ultimate goal in deconstructing merit is not, however, to vindicate affirmative action but to expose the hollowness of the central American myth of equal opportunity. The selection process at elite universities is widely understood as the outward symbol, and in many ways the foundation, of our society's distribution of opportunities and rewards. It thus "legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability and hard work over the prerogatives of birth." But the truth, Karabel argues, is very nearly the opposite: Social mobility is diminishing, privilege is increasingly reproducing itself, and the system of higher education has become the chief means whereby well-situated parents pass on the "cultural capital" indispensable to success. "Merit" is always a political tool, always "bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society." When merit was defined according to character attributes associated with the upper class, that imprint was plain for all to see, and to attack, but now that elite universities reward academic skills theoretically attainable by all, but in practice concentrated among the children of the well-to-do and the well-educated, the mark of power is, like the admissions process itself, "veiled." And it is precisely this appearance of equal opportunity that makes current-day admissions systems so effective a legitimating device.

In his 2005 New Yorker article Getting In, Malcom Gladwell cites to The Chosen and expounds on how admissions directors at elite schools are primarily concerned, long term, with creating and maintaining a brand:

Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesn't have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It's confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modeling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don't become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you're beautiful.

At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training—that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide. Fuelling the treatment-effect idea are studies showing that if you take two students with the same S.A.T. scores and grades, one of whom goes to a school like Harvard and one of whom goes to a less selective college, the Ivy Leaguer will make far more money ten or twenty years down the road.

The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modeling agency than like the Marine Corps[.]
Ivy League admissions directors are in the luxury-brand-management business, and "The Chosen," in the end, is a testament to just how well the brand managers in Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton have done their job in the past seventy-five years. . . . No good brand manager would sacrifice reputation for short-term gain. The admissions directors at Harvard have always, similarly, been diligent about rewarding the children of graduates, or, as they are quaintly called, "legacies." . . . Karabel calls the practice [of legacy admissions] "unmeritocratic at best and profoundly corrupt at worst," but rewarding customer loyalty is what luxury brands do. Harvard wants good graduates, and part of their definition of a good graduate is someone who is a generous and loyal alumnus. And if you want generous and loyal alumni you have to reward them.

Regarding law schools, Gladwell notes:

Most élite law schools, to cite another example, follow a best-students model. That's why they rely so heavily on the L.S.A.T. Yet there's no reason to believe that a person's L.S.A.T. scores have much relation to how good a lawyer he will be. In a recent research project funded by the Law School Admission Council, the Berkeley researchers Sheldon Zedeck and Marjorie Shultz identified twenty-six "competencies" that they think effective lawyering demands—among them practical judgment, passion and engagement, legal-research skills, questioning and interviewing skills, negotiation skills, stress management, and so on—and the L.S.A.T. picks up only a handful of them. A law school that wants to select the best possible lawyers has to use a very different admissions process from a law school that wants to select the best possible law students. And wouldn't we prefer that at least some law schools try to select good lawyers instead of good law students?

This search for good lawyers, furthermore, is necessarily going to be subjective, because things like passion and engagement can't be measured as precisely as academic proficiency. Subjectivity in the admissions process is not just an occasion for discrimination; it is also, in better times, the only means available for giving us the social outcome we want.

And discrimination is what I see every day when I look around at law school. My school clings to our tenuous position as one of the top-100 law schools in the nation. At the same time, we're also one of the most diverse law schools in the nation. While I commend our administration for being more inclusive than administrations at peer institutions, I still feel, everyday, that I'm surrounded by the wealthy and the privileged.

Most of my classmates have parents who, at minimum, have college educations, if not advanced degrees. A huge percentage - if not a majority
then close to it - have parents who are lawyers and/or doctors. On balance, all of my classmates work hard, but very few know just how lucky they are, just how few get the opportunity to attend law school, how few would even deign to consider college an option for them. Even fewer of my classmates can imagine or would dare try to place themselves in the shoes of someone who has lived their whole life without the safety nets, the time, the opportunity, the support, the balance, the lack of stress that they, themselves have enjoyed.

Meritocracy is preached from start to finish in law school. "Work hard and you'll succeed" is the mantra. By inference, those who don't succeed fail because they're not working hard enough. If only the school/teachers/students/profession would recognize that mantra is only true in a protected space, on a balanced field. All too often, for the vast majority, hard work alone isn't enough.