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May 10, 2020 07:34 am

Should Colleges Preserve the Idea of Meritocracy?

"Is Meritocracy an Idea Worth Saving?" asks The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting on a special forum held recently at the University of North Carolina's Program for Public Discourse. "This discussion took place before Covid-19 changed everything. But the topics — the definition of meritocracy, the role of universities in a just society, the composition of socioeconomic class, and the real purpose of education — are as relevant as ever."Moral philosopher Anastasia Berg, a junior research fellow at the University of Cambridge:Obviously certain roles in society and certain honors should be going to someone who is most competent for them: the Nobel Prize, or a teaching award, or who should perform eye surgery on us. The question is whether this is the right measure for determining who should be entering universities. There are objections from the left and from the right. I find the left ones persuasive, which is to say, in effect, that the pretensions to meritocracy are not borne out, if we actually look at who gets into colleges. We find out that there's huge correlation between the kind of material support that people have, and their ability to perform on the kind of exams that allow people to get into colleges. But what I also find problematic has to do with what has formerly been thought of as a conservative critique, although I think that leftists and liberals and progressives should be as concerned about it as anyone else: The current way of running college admissions concentrates talent, ambition, and competence in very few areas — on the coasts, in a very few universities — and draws potential leaders from communities elsewhere. Moreover, the current system leaves people blind to all the ways in which they owe gratitude to a community, for all the help that allowed them to achieve. New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat: It's useful to remember that the term "meritocracy" was coined as a description of a dystopia, in a book by a British civil servant written in the late '50s called The Rise of the Meritocracy. It was a tongue-in-cheek evocation of some pompous civil servant from somewhere around our own era, looking back on what he saw as the self-selection of the cognitive elite to rule over a society that was drained of talent, drained of ambition, and had all power centers outside the elite deprived of leadership and talent from within. It's reasonable to look at class divisions in the United States and much of the West and say that at least a partial version of that dystopia has come to pass. College-educated and more-than-college-educated Americans cluster together in geographic hubs in ways that they did not 50 or 60 years ago. It's a fascinating discussion, in which writer Thomas Chatterton Williams argues "it takes a kind of privilege to sneer at meritocratic measures that allow people to advance." But Berg also makes the observation that at least half of Americans won't ever have a college degree. "If that's the way to make citizens, what do we do with the rest? We have to make room for the dignity of other paths."

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