The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  Midcentury reformers, with both economic and democratic motives, adopted meritocracy and its accoutrements—including especially achievement tests and competitive admissions—deliberately to break up this unproductive and complacent elite. Harvard University president James Bryant Conant initiated the use of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in American college admissions to help screen scholarship applicants as part of a conscious effort to introduce new groups to education at the country’s most prestigious university. The Nobel Prize–winning progressive economist James Tobin, who reached Harvard’s class of 1939 from a modest background in Champaign, Illinois, was one of the test’s first great successes. After World War II, Harvard expanded its testing strategy, with rapid and deep consequences: by the late 1940s, Harvard’s class contained as many public school graduates as prep school graduates, and the SAT scores of the average Harvard freshman from 1952 would have placed him in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class in 1960. This represented, according to Harvard’s longtime dean of admissions Wilbur J. Bender, “the greatest change in Harvard admissions . . . in . . . recorded history.” Princeton followed suit, so that its student body achieved parity between high school and prep school graduates by 1955.

  The revolution reached Yale last. Between 1951 and 1956, Yale admitted only seven students from the Bronx High School of Science, probably the most academically competitive high school in the United States at the time, even as it took in 275 graduates from the decidedly nonmeritocratic Phillips Academy Andover. But when change came, it came with a vengeance, and in a form that expressly embraced the meritocratic ideal of an elite built on human capital and designed to yield superordinate labor.

  Griswold died in 1963, and Yale acquired, in Kingman Brewster, a new and very different president. Brewster regarded the aristocratic elite as sclerotic, and, declaring that he did “not intend to preside over a finishing school on Long Island Sound,” set out to reform Yale. Meritocracy gave Brewster, who called himself “an intellectual investment banker,” the blueprint for reform. By choosing students based on ability and achievement, Yale would invest its educational resources wisely and maximize their return.

  In 1965, Brewster appointed R. Inslee “Inky” Clark Jr. dean of admissions, with a mandate to redesign Yale’s student body on a meritocratic model. Clark, whose patrician-sounding name belied a public school education and egalitarian mentality, fired nearly the entire admissions staff and built a new team committed to recruiting students aggressively based on achievement rather than breeding. The Yale Corporation, for its part, adopted need-blind admissions in 1966, becoming the first university formally to sever the right to attend from the ability to pay.

  Clark’s admissions team expressly rejected the hereditary elite even as it pursued the new meritocrats. Clark refocused admissions on what he called “talent searching” and understood talent as receptivity to investments in human capital, asking “who will benefit most from studying at Yale.” He called prep schools that clung to the traditional hereditary model “ingrown” and turned their graduates away: in 1968, for example, Harvard still accepted 46 percent of applicants from Choate, and Princeton 57 percent, but Yale accepted only 18 percent.

  Dramatic results followed at once. In its first year, Clark’s admissions office drastically reduced the share of admittees who hailed from alumni families and rejected the son of Yale’s biggest donor. The new admissions policy, moreover, actively sought to replace complacent insiders with talented outsiders. Yale’s class of 1970 contained 50 percent more public school graduates than did the class of 1969.

  The meritocratic recruits dramatically outperformed the hereditary elite that they displaced. The class of 1970 became by far the most academically distinguished in Yale’s history: its median student’s SATs would have been in the 90th percentile for the class of 1961 and the 75th percentile for the class of 1966, and its average grades at Yale set a school record.

  Clark cast Yale’s new admissions standards as “a statement, really, about what leadership was going to be in the country and where leaders were going to come from.” The old elite understood this and tried to fight back. Yale’s admissions officers received frosty receptions at prep schools that had once embraced them. Alumni grumbled—as in William F. Buckley’s complaint that the new standards would prefer “a Mexican-American from El Paso High . . . [over] . . . Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint Paul’s School.” A rump of Yale’s corporation resisted: when Clark made a presentation to the corporation about constructing a new American elite based on merit rather than birth, one member interjected, “You’re talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table. These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here.”

  But this was a losing battle. The old elite’s sense that admission based on birth was a right had been displaced by the meritocratic elite’s proud conviction that admission earned on account of achievement was an honor. The charismatic center of the culture had shifted to the meritocrats. As Brewster observed, by 1970 need-blind admissions became a selling point even for those who could pay. Even “the privileged took pride in the feeling that they had made it on the merits rather than on the basis of something ambiguously called ‘background.’”

  Meritocracy’s career in education has proceeded from strength to strength in the decades since 1970, as applicant pools grow and admissions rates plummet. As recently as 1990, the top ten undergraduate colleges and universities in America admitted nearly 30 percent of their applicants; today, they admit fewer than 10 percent on average, and some admit fewer than 5 percent. Elite students’ academic qualifications, unsurprisingly, have improved as well. The median SAT scores among students at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale now all lie above the 95th percentile, and perhaps a quarter of the students have SATs above the 99th percentile.

  The meritocratic training revolution has achieved its immediate economic aims. Intense and competitive education produces outstanding—literally exceptional—results. A systematic survey of adult skills in developed countries reveals that the United States has the highest overall gap between its most and least skilled citizens. Moreover, the American skills gap’s origins lie—once again, exceptionally—directly in formal education: in the words of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States “stands out as having a particularly large gap between [adults with tertiary education and those who have not attained upper secondary education] in both literacy and numeracy proficiency.”

  The present American elite, unlike in the past, and more so than in virtually every other nation, possesses exceptional skills and derives these skills from extraordinary training. The meritocratic elite deploys its hard-won skills with intense industry, in the superordinate jobs whose enormous wages make today’s 1 percent so rich. Meritocracy’s outputs, in this narrow sense, validate its inputs. Brewster’s intellectual investment banking has paid off.

  But meritocracy’s narrow economic successes have turned out to undermine its broader democratic ambitions. The old elite quickly succumbed to the meritocratic onslaught, as Brewster and others had expected. But the new elite, made in the crucible of meritocracy, knows better than anything how to turn competition to its children’s advantage. The very same mechanisms that once destroyed aristocratic hierarchies and dynasties now erect meritocratic hierarchies and dynasties in their stead.

  The Gospel of Matthew says that the teachings of Jesus build upon themselves: “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” A similar “Matthew Effect” applies to secular skills under mature meritocracy. The human capital that constitutes the meritocratic elite provides in education a means for its own reproduction, and meritocracy has by embracing this means launched a “revolution in family wealth transmission.” Even as meritocracy a
bolishes the hereditary privilege that sustained aristocratic dynasties, it embraces in education a new dynastic technology of its own. The new elite receives a meritocratic inheritance that transmits privilege, and excludes the middle class from opportunity, as effectively as the old elite’s birthright used to do.

  Dynasties are not all created equal, however, as some exact a price from those whose caste they secure. Aristocrats, being born, could pass their status automatically, and therefore costlessly, down to their children. But meritocrats, being made, must incur enormous costs to secure their wealth and status. Exclusive and exacting education builds human capital only by dominating the lives of those who must absorb it. Meritocracy sustains dynasties by reconstructing the family on the model of the firm, the household on the model of the workplace, and the child on the model of the product.

  The meritocratic inheritance comes with strings attached, which threaten now to tie the meritocratic elite in knots. The Bible lesson is too sparing in its sympathies. Scarcity is indeed burdensome, and meritocracy condemns the middle class to inattention and underinvestment. But abundance is not always a blessing, and the excessive and ruthless training through which meritocracy makes the elite does not elevate the human spirit so much as crush it.

  BEFORE CONCEPTION

  An elite child’s meritocratic inheritance begins even before the child is a twinkle in its parents’ eyes. Rich young adults make two interconnected decisions, concerning whom to marry and whether to stay married, that increasingly give their children advantages that children born outside the elite do not enjoy. Moreover, the rich make these choices not severally but together, embedded in communities of other rich people making similar choices. Children of rich parents are conceived, borne, and born in markedly more auspicious circumstances than middle-class children enjoy.

  The elite increasingly marry each other—a practice that economists have given the ugly name assortative mating. Assortative mating had been common during the last decades of the nineteenth century, among the aristocracy in the Gilded Age, but then declined over the first half of the twentieth century. By 1960 only 3 percent of American marriages were between partners who both possessed college degrees.

  Meritocratic inequality renewed the elite’s preference for elite mates, so that by 2010, fully 25 percent of couples were composed of two college graduates. (Note that since just over 30 percent of American adults possess college degrees, this leaves only a small minority of graduates over to pair with nongraduates.) Moreover, the share of marriages composed of partners who both possess post-college—graduate or professional school—educations has quintupled, growing from under 1 percent in 1960 to over 5 percent in 2005.

  The proximate reasons why are natural and largely innocent: colleges and graduate schools, which were overwhelmingly male in 1960, are today almost evenly balanced by gender. Universities, both individually and as a group, provide an obvious setting for meeting husbands and wives, and the pages of contemporary alumni magazines are filled with notices of marriages celebrated and babies conceived among classmates. But even if innocently brokered, these marriages, taken all together, enormously concentrate the elite, both within a generational cohort and especially down through the generations.

  Assortative mating increases economic inequality within the marrying cohort, operating literally as a multiplier for the already growing inequality produced by rising top labor incomes. If marriage pairings had been random by education in 1960, this would have had no observable effect on household income inequality. But when highly paid superordinate workers pair off, marriage ceases to be neutral. Replacing today’s actual pattern of assortative mating with random pairings, or indeed with the lower level of assortative mating from 1960, would reduce overall inequality by a fifth or more.

  In addition, assortative mating increases educational inequality in the next generation down. Elites do not just increasingly marry each other but also increasingly stay married and raise children within mature, stable marriages. This difference increasingly distinguishes the elite from not just the poor but also the middle class. And the distinction confers a massive advantage on children born into rich families.

  To begin with, elite, educated women increasingly bear children only after marrying, as compared to their less elite, less educated counterparts. In 1970, out-of-marriage births accounted for only about 10 percent of births to women across all education levels. Today, by contrast, education overwhelmingly determines the relationship between marriage and motherhood. Among college- and post-college-educated women, only one in twenty and one in thirty children are born outside of marriage. By contrast, in the least educated two-thirds of the population, comprising women with a high school education or less, nearly 60 percent of all children are born outside of marriage. Overall, the average mother with a high school degree only or some college (but no BA) has children two years before marriage, whereas the average college-educated mother has children two years after marriage.

  Elite marriages also increasingly outlast their less elite counterparts. Between 1960 and 1980, divorce rates roughly tripled for all Americans, but since 1980, marriage has polarized along socioeconomic lines. Divorce rates remained steady, and perhaps even increased slightly, in the bottom three-quarters of the economic distribution, whereas in the top quarter, divorce has declined, indeed back to 1960 levels. Today, women without a college degree experience divorce within ten years of marriage at more than twice the rate of women college graduates: roughly 35 percent versus roughly 15 percent. More broadly, between 1960 and 2010, the share of adults who are currently married fell by twice as much for Americans without a college degree as for those who had earned a BA (and the decline among those with some college but no degree roughly equaled the decline for those with high school educations only).

  In all these ways, marriage has become a rich person’s affair, and children of rich, well-educated parents are now enormously more likely than other children—including not just poor but also middle-class children—to grow up in households with both parents present. Between 1970 and 2010, the share of children to grow up without both parents grew three times as quickly among households in the middle third of the income distribution as among households in the top third. The size of the differences today is astounding. For example, about 55 percent of children in households whose income is roughly $25,000 live with only a single parent, compared to about 25 percent in households whose income is roughly $60,000, and just about 10 percent in households whose income exceeds $100,000. Moreover, 90 percent of children living in the richest and best-educated 5 percent of American zip codes live with both their biological parents.

  These patterns serve meritocracy’s inner economic and especially dynastic logics. When the households become sites of economic production—building the human capital of the next generation—pressures arise to choose partners and structure marriages to optimize production. Elites use wealth and status to support controlled and conservative lifestyles in order to preserve their caste. Elite marriages ensure that the meritocratic inheritance they will build once their children are born will not be squandered but will instead generate exceptional returns.

  CONCEPTION THROUGH KINDERGARTEN

  Children born to rich parents begin collecting their meritocratic inheritances from the moment of conception. The exceptional stability that elite mothers enjoy benefits their children even in the womb. Meritocratic inequality makes personal and economic security into markers of eliteness. Perhaps most notably, meritocratic inequality reaches not just annual incomes but also financial security. (Divorce and financial distress go hand in hand: money troubles strain marriages, and divorce is expensive, especially for women.) As elite wealth increases, it grows more durable. Middle-class incomes, by contrast, have not just stagnated on average but also become, for individual households, more volatile: the annual odds that a middle-class family will suffer a major financial reversal (an income drop of more than
50 percent) doubled between 1970 and 2000.

  These reversals stress the families who suffer them, including not just parents but also children, and stress impedes children’s development. Indeed, maternal stress can harm a child even before birth, through biological pathways in utero, so that a mother’s prenatal stress depresses her child’s educational achievement and IQ score. The effects, moreover, are large: seven-year-olds who were exposed to high levels of maternal stress hormones before birth receive 1.1 fewer years (over half a standard deviation) less schooling and achieve verbal IQ scores five points lower (nearly half a standard deviation) than their unexposed siblings. Finally, research also shows that educated mothers are much more able than uneducated mothers to compensate for the effects of prenatal stress after their babies are born, so that the harms to children from prenatal stress are by far greatest where the stress befalls non-elite mothers. Rich babies are literally better borne than their middle-class counterparts.