The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  Elite parents do not let up advantaging their babies when they arrive. To the contrary, rich parents exploit the extravagant groundwork that they have laid by making exceptional direct investments in their children from the moment of birth. These investments continue and compound through early childhood, beginning in the home and eventually extending into the outside world.

  The rich increasingly invest more of their own time than the rest in developing the human capital of their babies, infants, and toddlers (and the class gap in parental time spent with children is greatest among the youngest children). In the 1960s and 1970s, educated and uneducated parents devoted about equal amounts of time to activities that encouraged their children’s development. Over the roughly four decades since, all parents have begun to invest more time in educating their children, but college-educated parents—both mothers and fathers—have increased their investments more rapidly, indeed, twice as rapidly, according to one study. Today, college-educated parents, taken together, spend more than an hour per day longer educating their children than do high-school-only parents.

  For super-elite parents, and especially mothers, the trend is more dramatic still. Roughly half of female Harvard and Chicago MBAs with two or more children, for example, leave the workforce or work part-time in order to care for their children. And motherhood drives elite women lawyers out of the workforce at rates so high that top firms refer to a “flight risk.” Many factors, ranging from gender discrimination in work assignments, pay, and promotions to outright sexual harassment, contribute to this pattern and especially to the fact that so many more mothers than fathers leave the workforce. But the enormous demands of elite parenting, combined with the meritocratic imperative to build human capital in the next generation, make it socially and economically rational for one parent to leave an elite job in order to help train a couple’s children.

  Meritocratic norms accommodate this logic: a mother who did not possess an elite education to begin with would be embarrassing to an elite family, but it is socially acceptable among meritocrats for a hypereducated wife and mother to leave her job in order to raise children. Indeed, she honors rather than abandons the inner logic of meritocratic production, by funding her children’s meritocratic inheritance and investing in dynastic succession.

  Rich parents, moreover, distinguish themselves through not just the quantity but also the quality of the investments that they make in their children. The meritocratic elite adopts a deliberate program of “concerted cultivation,” specifically designed to promote its children’s adult achievement. Elite parents bring both their vast incomes and their life experiences to developing their children’s human capital, which parents build up by mimicking their own training. Parenting in this elite style deploys methods and demands skills that parents outside the elite cannot always identify, much less match.

  For example, parents with a BA are more than twice as likely to read to their children every day as parents with a high school education or less (and one and a half times as likely as parents with some college but no degree). They are roughly twice as likely to take their children to art galleries, museums, and historical sites and to enroll them in arts classes.

  Indeed, the rich quite generally speak to their children more, and much more interactively, than do the rest: a three-year-old child born to professional parents will have heard nearly twenty million more words than a three-year-old born to parents who hold nonprofessional jobs and over thirty million more words than a three-year-old born to parents on welfare. The rich also speak much more effectively: the words professional parents choose, the rituals and symbols with which they invest their words, and even the tone of voice that they deploy are all qualitatively more educative than their counterparts among the working class. Some of the words sink in. Three-year-old children of professional parents know 49 percent more words than children of nonprofessionals, and those children know a further 43 percent more words than children whose parents are on welfare. (A natural experiment tragically but vividly confirms the effect: when children who are born deaf have their hearing restored through cochlear implants, the rich ones learn to speak more quickly than the poor ones.)

  Even the moral psychology of parenting varies with parents’ educations. Parents with postgraduate degrees are about half as likely to spank their children as parents with only a BA and about a third as likely as parents with only a high school degree or less. And widespread research shows that rich, educated parents quite generally provide their children with more open affection, greater participatory engagement, and more consistent discipline than their middle-class and especially poor counterparts.

  These distinctive investments increasingly give elite children emotional skills—openness, self-confidence, self-discipline, and grit—that poor and also middle-class children cannot match. Recent systematic work on noncognitive skills and life success suggests that these emotional differences between early childhoods in elite versus ordinary households likely have still greater effects on success than the cognitive ones, including even with respect to long-term academic achievement.

  Similar differences separate the early years of elite and ordinary childhood outside the home—in preschools and kindergartens. Three-year-olds from households whose annual incomes exceed $100,000 attend preschool at twice the rate of three-year-olds from households whose annual incomes fall below $60,000. Systematic data reporting preschool enrollment rates for truly elite households do not exist, but every one-percenter knows from direct experience that effectively all really rich three-year-olds attend preschool. (For the rare few who do not, this is because their parents have concluded, after careful thought, that a different deliberately constructed childcare regime is better for their children.)

  Moreover, ordinary and elite preschools are almost unrecognizably different. A middle-class preschool will have reading and craft corners and (if it is good) a loving and caring if overstretched staff. An elite preschool—such as the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City—may have a fully staffed and stocked library, and separate art, music, foreign language, science, and social studies departments, all staffed by teachers and even assistant teachers who hold bachelor’s and even master’s degrees from elite colleges and universities. The school might well have one teacher for every seven students.

  Elite schools’ academic programs represent only a small part of the advantage that they confer on their students. Quite apart from teaching cognitive skills, elite preschools focus intensively on their students’ emotional development and character. They give students individualized attention with the aim—expressly chosen and diligently pursued—of producing children who will become self-disciplined, self-motivated, and self-directed learners, able to face and surmount the challenges that school proper will inevitably bring.

  All this attention costs money, of course. Pre-kindergarten tuition at Fieldston exceeds $50,000 per year, roughly 80 percent of parents pay the full price, and the highest number of financial aid packages are awarded to families that are really quite rich, with annual incomes between $100,000 and $149,000. Indeed, elite parents fight tooth and nail to pay—the most competitive preschools admit just 5 percent of applicants (making them harder to get into than Harvard and Yale). These admissions rates have created a market for “educational consultants” to help rich four-year-olds get in. The consultants are themselves not cheap (a fee might reach $6,000), and following their advice costs parents time as well as money. A typical plan of action calls for applying to ten kindergartens, writing “love letters” (over and above the required application essays) to the top three, and studying the idiosyncrasies of each school in order to impress on school visits.

  The elite embrace this seemingly absurd competition for a reason. Early education pays immense dividends: dollar for dollar, the preschool years represent the most consequential investments in a person’s human capital. The leading schools of psychological thought agree that ear
ly childhood development exerts a dominant influence over the personality; there exists evidence that cognitive capacity, for example, general intelligence as measured by IQ (although not, of course, education in more particular knowledge and skills), is largely fixed by age ten; and the most substantial income-based differences in school achievement already become visible in school readiness tests administered when children enter kindergarten. Elite preschools and kindergartens know and exploit these associations, including through informal or even formal links to elite middle and high schools (in the case of Ethical Culture Fieldston, there is a formal link to the Fieldston Upper School). The websites of the pre-kindergarten programs advertise the elite colleges that their alumni eventually attend.

  Quantity and quality both matter for education: practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect. As every elite parent knows, early childhood training on the meritocratic model is immensely intensive and immersively personal. The upshot of the vastly unequal investments in the human capital of young children by the rich and the rest is equally clear: elite children enter school proper with tremendous emotional and academic advantages already in place. By the time they are five, children from the top tenth of American households by socioeconomic status outstrip children from the bottom tenth by roughly thirty-seven, twenty-five, and thirty-nine months of schooling on the PISA tests of mathematics, reading, and science skills, and the most elite tenth outstrip the median by roughly twenty-one, nineteen, and twenty-three months.

  These are enormous differences. Moreover, the elite/middle-class gap exceeds the middle-class/bottom gap, a pattern that will persist and intensify deep into adulthood.

  THE SCHOOL-AGED YEARS

  Elite kindergarteners enter formal schooling with an immense advantage over both poor and middle-class peers already locked in. Even if extraordinary investments in human capital ended at the schoolhouse door, the rich would massively out-educate the rest. In fact, however, the structural advantages and exceptionally effective parenting practices of the rich do not dissolve or become inert on an elite child’s fifth birthday. To the contrary, rich parents continue and indeed redouble their distinctive, methodical, and disciplined pursuit of their children’s educations. The school-aged years add to rich children’s meritocratic inheritance.

  Some elite habits are so basic that they pass beneath notice: rich parents, for example, spend three more hours per week than poor parents just talking to their school-aged children and many more hours still at active leisure. Over the course of a childhood, these choices cumulate into a massive direct investment in rich children’s education. By the time she is eighteen, a rich child will have had over five thousand more hours than a poor child of being talked to, read to, attending cultural events, seeing museums, being coached in a sport, and so on. This amounts to nearly an hour in each day of the child’s life, or the equivalent of the time that an adult devotes over two and a half years at a full-time job. Her poorer counterparts, needless to say, will not spend their free hours anything like as profitably: by the time they reach eighteen, middle-class children will have spent nearly five thousand more hours watching television or playing video games than rich children, and poor children will have spent nearly eight thousand more hours of screen time.

  Moreover, as children grow older, elite parents increasingly supplement their extraordinary direct, personal investments in their children with equally extraordinary investments delivered by others, through enrichment classes and especially schools. These activities might occasionally descend into farce—as in the story of rich Manhattanites who responded to their thirteen-year-old son’s liking to cook by hiring professional chefs to tutor him. But once again they are in the main (indeed overwhelmingly) neither casual nor frivolous, but rather reflect a purposive, resolute, and effective program of cognitive and noncognitive training. Even a farce can quickly turn into serious training and yield real returns to a child: the teenage chef won an episode of a televised cooking tournament and opened his own catering business, two achievements that help to build skills and a CV that will eventually appeal to colleges and adult employers.

  Schools constitute probably the single most important site of the American elite’s exceptional investment in its children. The gap between the annual sum spent on formal schooling for a typical rich child and a typical child from the middle class has exploded in recent decades, rising effectively in lockstep with the expanding gap between top and median incomes.

  Economically elite private schools loom increasingly large in the educational landscape of rich families and give extraordinary investment in elite children’s formal educations its most obvious and open face. Enrollment in nonsectarian private schools has nearly quadrupled, from 341,300 students in 1965 to 1.4 million today. (Even homeschooling, long anathema to the rich, has begun to develop an elite track, and there now exist businesses that construct bespoke home schools for rich parents: the average annual cost, according to the owner of one, is $50,000 per child.)

  While fully a quarter of children whose parents make over $200,000 a year attend private schools, the rate is only about one in twenty for children whose parents make less than $50,000. Moreover, the students who do attend such schools are overwhelmingly rich. Overall, 76 percent come from the top quarter of the income distribution and only 7 percent from the bottom half. The very most prestigious schools in this group have richer student bodies still. According to the president of the National Association of Independent Schools, 70 percent of the students at the top private schools come from the top 4 percent of the income distribution.

  These elite private schools spend spectacular sums on teaching their students. Small student/teacher ratios—7:1 compared to 16:1 in public schools—support intense and highly personalized teaching utterly unknown in public schools. A student tour guide at one such school recently explained to a visitor that when a track meet required him to miss a math class, his teacher simply retaught the class during a free hour, exclusively to him. The teachers, moreover, are not just plentiful and attentive, but also themselves elite and extensively educated: fully three-quarters of the teachers at the prep schools that Forbes ranks as the twenty best in America hold advanced, which is to say post-BA, degrees.

  The large, well-educated faculties also deploy vast physical resources in their teaching practices. Professional-grade laboratories, theaters, arts rooms, gymnasiums and athletic fields, and libraries are common at top private schools. The library at Phillips Exeter Academy (designed by Louis Kahn) is the largest secondary school library in the world, holding 160,000 books on nine levels, with room for 90,000 more.

  Louis Kahn libraries do not come cheap, and education provided on this model costs a lot of money. The enormous tuition at Fieldston is not outlandish but rather entirely normal. Average annual tuition exceeds $50,000 at top-ranked boarding schools and $40,000 at top-ranked private day schools. Moreover, elite schools spend substantially more than this per pupil per year. Private schools possess endowments that generate further income to spend, especially on infrastructure. Many of the endowments are massive: the average endowment of the boarding schools in the Forbes list exceeds $500 million, or $700,000 per student. Income from these huge endowments, combined with additional annual fund drives, produces a subsidy of between $15,000 and $25,000 per student. All told, then, a student at an elite private high school gets as much as $75,000 invested in every year of her education.

  Moreover, expressly private schools represent only one face of the contemporary American elite’s exceptional investment in its children’s schooling. The national average expenditure per student per year in public schools is just over $12,000, but this average masks a great deal of variation across states and districts. State and local governments contribute 90 percent of total public school funding in the United States, and rising economic segregation therefore allows the elite to concentrate its private resources in the education of its own children, even i
n nominally public schools.

  Unequal investments in public school students begin at the state level. Connecticut, a rich state, spends nearly $18,000 per pupil per year, while Mississippi, a poor one, spends barely $8,000. Inequality in public school expenditures continues within states, as rich cities and towns spend substantially more per student than others do. The cumulative consequences of these effects are enormous, especially at the extremes: in a recent year, the Scarsdale Union Free School District in New York (median household income, $238,000) spent nearly $27,000 per student; the Barbourville Independent School District in Kentucky (median household income, $16,607) spent only about $8,000.

  Nominally public schools in elite districts, moreover, increasingly receive substantial additional funding from private sources. Poor and even middle-class parent-teacher associations are social networks and advocacy groups, with budgets that might amount to a few dollars per pupil. But in the richest districts and schools, PTAs, local school foundations, and school booster clubs are financing vehicles, with enough clout to figure prominently in school funding overall. In Hillsborough, California, for example, the Schools Foundation expressly asks all parents to contribute at least $2,300 per child, and a Chicago elementary school recently raised $400,000 in a single night. These sums, moreover, have become commonplace rather than exceptional among wealthy public schools. In New York City, the phenomenon is so common that it has been given a colloquial name: public schools that raise more than $1 million annually are known as “public privates.”

  The name is apt in many ways. The very richest public schools in the country now educate in the resource-intensive style of private schools, with more and better teachers (the Grattan Elementary School PTA in San Francisco paid all or part of the salaries of six school staff members in one recent year) and extravagant facilities (recall the high-tech weather station in Newton, Massachusetts, and the 3-D printers in Coronado, California).