The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  Finally, these inequalities in public school investments, mirroring broader economic trends, increasingly reflect gaps not between the middle class and the poor but rather between the rich and the middle class. The rich/middle-class gap (between Scarsdale and the median district) is nearly four times the middle-class/poor expenditure gap (between the median district and Barbourville): roughly $15,000 versus roughly $4,000 per pupil per year.

  This is no accident. While Barbourville receives 81 percent of its budget from nonlocal sources (which is why its expenditures can approach the budgets of middle-class schools), local funding accounts for much of the expenditure gap at the top. Scarsdale’s schools owe 89 percent of their budgets to local taxes, raised on houses whose median value is nearly $1 million and that cost (between mortgage interest and real estate taxes) nearly $100,000 per year to own. Nonlocal funds are simply not sufficient to match the school spending that this tax base sustains. For the middle class, Scarsdale remains a distant and different world, far out of reach and almost out of sight. Its schools, like other schools in the richest parts of the country, are public only in the thinnest, most nominal sense of the word.

  All in all, then, a poor child in a poor district in a poor state might receive about $8,000 worth of schooling per year, a middle-class child in a middle-income district and state might receive $12,000, a middle-class child in a rich state might receive $18,000, a rich child in a rich state might receive $27,000, and a very rich child in an elite private school might receive $75,000 worth of schooling per year.

  These differences—and especially the massive meritocratic inheritance at the top—are not normal. They depart dramatically from past American practice and also from international standards. A recent survey of thirty-four advanced economies, conducted by the OECD, reveals that the United States is one of only three nations in which public schools that serve rich students spend more per pupil and have lower student/teacher ratios than public schools that serve poor students. The skew in American school expenditures toward rich—and specifically very rich—children is simply astonishing.

  The American elite’s extraordinary investment in its school-aged children is not limited to formal schooling, moreover. To the contrary, the rich today invest much more heavily than the rest in extracurricular enrichment activities for their school-aged children, and the difference has again grown sharply over recent decades.

  Many enrichment expenditures focus directly on the core academic subjects taught at school: science and math camps, coding and robotics clubs, and so on. Rich parents also, unsurprisingly, pay for academic tutoring and test preparation programs. The test preparation business alone, which trains students to take exams that influence college admissions, including most notably the SAT and ACT, has grown from virtually nothing in 1970 to a multibillion-dollar industry today.

  Once again, the families that hire tutors skew overwhelmingly toward wealth. The poor and even the middle class cannot afford extensive tutoring, while it is difficult to find a child of elite professionals who has not spent substantial time in the care of a tutor, and usually of multiple specialist tutors. At the very high tail of the income distribution—among the top 1 percent of households—the sums spent on tutors can become staggering.

  Veritas Tutors Agency, run by a Princeton graduate based in Manhattan but serving clients nationwide, charges $600 an hour for tuition in basic academic subjects; a typical tutee’s family spends between $5,000 and $15,000 on Veritas services, and some families have spent as much as $100,000. Amazingly, Veritas is not even the top of the market. One test preparation tutoring company that caters to students in New York City charges $1,500 for a ninety-minute Skype tutoring session, requiring a minimum of fourteen such sessions in order to enroll. Another charges $1,250 per hour. And a third recruits Ivy League professors to give individual tuition, offering to pay the professors nearly $1,000 an hour and charging the students substantially more. (Some professors, unsurprisingly, have accepted the arrangement.) Other rich families hire full-time private tutors. In addition to earning six-figure salaries, these tutors are often provided with generous benefits, including transportation, meals, accommodation, and sometimes even personal assistants.

  Rich parents are eager to sign up their children. Veritas now employs over fifty tutors, and despite their price tags, these services are so popular that some parents have booked them for their children years in advance. As the Veritas founder observes, “If you’ve invested half a million dollars in your child’s private school education,” and are “going to spend another quarter of a million dollars on their four years of college . . . whether you send them to some no-name college or you send them to Yale,” then “you’d be an idiot not to spend whatever additional money to get them into a better university . . . where they’ll be in a great cohort and do very well.” This logic explains the explosive growth of tutoring and test preparation. The industry, moreover, still has room to grow—in South Korea, for example, private tuition accounts for 12 percent of total household expenditure, and millionaire after-school tutors have become national celebrities. One study projects that the rapidly growing global market for private tutors will soon surpass $100 billion. Harvard University’s annual budget, by comparison, is roughly $5 billion.

  Other forms of enrichment—in the arts, or in athletics—complement rather than directly mimic the school curriculum. Children from rich families, and especially families with highly educated mothers, are again significantly more likely than their poorer peers to join these activities in the first place. Moreover, the gap between even these extracurricular investments among elite and ordinary children has again been growing steadily over the past few decades and is now enormous. The amounts by which parents from the top income quintile outspend parents from the bottom quintile roughly tripled between 1972 and 2005, to $7,500 annually.

  Families at the very top of the income distribution spend much, much more than this. Ballet lessons alone can cost up to $6,000 per child per year at top-tier schools, and raising a ballerina can cost a family $100,000 through the end of high school. A rich family whose child becomes “serious” about playing an instrument can easily spend $15,000 per year in lessons alone. Instruments themselves can cost much more. One parent reported spending a half million dollars developing her son’s piano skills between the ages of six and ten. And the implicit cost of providing the support, stability, and even just the quiet physical space needed in order for a child to practice regularly and well can be greatest of all.

  In all these ways, rich parents spend ever-greater sums on training their children, so that no facet of consumption inequality is increasing more rapidly than expenditure on education.* These investments are not frivolous nor even just marginal—instead, they go to the core of rich children’s human capital accumulation. Better-equipped schools, staffed by more plentiful, better-educated, more experienced, and better-performing teachers, and backed by more extensive and better-designed enrichment programs, produce higher-achieving students. Enrichment expenditures similarly promote achievement. Veritas provides real education rather than gimmicks or trickery: its founder emphasizes that instead of teaching “gaming the test,” he makes his students “better at what the test measures—[the] ability to read and think, process numbers and use [their] head[s] effectively.” And richer children—who spend summer months with tutors or in camps that include academic components—continue to learn over the summers, even as poorer children who get no enrichment halt progress or actually retreat in reading and math. (This is especially so in the United States, where children spend less time in school than do children in other rich countries—only about 180 days per year in class, compared to as many as 240, for example, in Japan.) Other, more traditionally “extracurricular” enrichment activities—sports, for example, or music and art—also improve life chances long after they are over and therefore involve not just consumption but investment. Children consistently involved i
n extracurricular activities are 70 percent more likely to go to college than children who are only occasionally involved and 400 percent more likely than children who do no such activities at all.

  Sober-minded, systematic, and skilled investments in human capital pay off—education and training work. When groups of high-performing students congregate in extravagantly funded schools, each individual student adds the most value to her human capital. The cumulative differences between elite and ordinary schooling conspire, across contexts and over time, to produce vast differences in students’ academic performance, depending on family income, with the greatest inequalities coming at the top.

  Educational inequality has therefore increased markedly alongside rising income inequality. The gap between the test scores of high- and low-income students has grown by between 40 and 50 percent over the past twenty-five years, so that by the eighth grade, students from rich families are four grade levels ahead of those from poor ones. The achievement gap between rich and poor students in the United States today exceeds the present-day white/black achievement gap, which is three grade levels, and even exceeds the white/black gap that racially segregated schools produced at midcentury. International comparisons are equally shocking: the rich/poor achievement gap within the United States is now roughly the same as the gap between average academic performance in the United States and in Tunisia (whose GDP per capita is one-twelfth as great).

  Another development is no less important, and perhaps even more. From the end of the Second World War through roughly 1970, economic inequality produced education differences primarily between the middle class and the poor. Rich students at midcentury performed little differently in school from middle-class ones. This began to change in the mid-1970s, and the change has gathered steam since. Today, the rich outperform the middle class by more than the middle class outperform the poor—indeed, by significantly more. According to the most careful and systematic study, the achievement gap between rich and middle-class middle school children began rising in the early 1970s, matched the middle-class/poor gap by the mid-1990s, and is now almost 25 percent greater than the gap between the middle class and the poor.*

  These differences in academic achievement—including, critically, the difference between rich and middle-class children—further reveal themselves in the SAT, which, on account of its central role in college admissions, is almost certainly the single most consequential test an American school student takes. The income/achievement gaps on the SAT are enormous. Students from families earning over $200,000 per year (roughly the top 5 percent) score 388 points higher than students from families earning less than $20,000 per year (roughly the bottom 20 percent); and students whose parents hold graduate degrees (roughly the top 10 percent) score 395 points higher than students whose parents have not completed high school (roughly the bottom 15 percent). In each case, these gaps in raw scores place the average elite student in roughly the top quarter of all test takers and the average disadvantaged student in the bottom quarter.

  The most striking differences once again concern comparisons not directly between the extremes but rather between the middle and each extreme. As recently as the late 1990s, the gap between the SAT scores of middle-class and poor test takers still exceeded the gap between the rich and the middle class. But the elite’s meritocratic inheritance has now reversed this pattern.

  Today, students whose families fall in the rough middle of the American income distribution score only about 135 points more than poor students, even as they score fully 250 points less than rich students. And students whose parents fall in the rough middle of the American education distribution (with an associate’s degree, which is to say some education past high school but not a BA) score only about 150 points more than students whose parents are high school dropouts, even as they score fully 250 points less than students whose parents have completed graduate school. As with caste and academic achievement in school, so yet again on college admissions tests the elite are leaving the middle class rapidly behind even as the middle class and the poor slowly converge.

  The meritocratic inheritance makes these patterns inevitable: as top incomes skyrocket, rich parents out-train middle-class parents by more and more. The training works so well that although the figures just rehearsed report averages, shockingly few students beat the expectations associated with their family circumstances. In 2010, for example, 87 percent of students who scored over 700 in the critical reading and math sections of the test (the top 5–7 percent of scores) had a parent with a college degree, and 56 percent had a parent with a graduate degree.

  All these exceptional investments—in basic cognitive and noncognitive skills, in long-running enrichment activities, in grades and test scores—combine to construct a qualitative difference between elite high school graduates and their counterparts from poor and also middle-class families. And as always, the differences cumulate and concentrate right at the very top of the income distribution, as can be seen by looking at the results achieved by identifiably super-elite schools with familiar names. An elite public school, such as Scarsdale High School, might send 97 percent of its graduates to college. Elite private schools produce more rarefied results still. The top twenty private high schools in the country, as ranked by Forbes, on average send 30 percent of their graduates to the Ivy League, Stanford, and MIT alone. These schools send perhaps two-thirds of their graduates to colleges and universities ranked in the top twenty-five in their categories by U.S. News & World Report.

  The extraordinary investments that children from rich families receive beginning at birth therefore do not end at high school graduation. Instead, the meritocratic inheritance prepares and qualifies rich high school graduates to receive yet more exceptional education and training, in college and beyond. In this way, childhood extends its reach directly and deep into adult life.

  COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY

  Colleges overall are not harder to get into today than they were in 1960. Indeed, the admissions competition among the bottom 90 percent of colleges (by selectivity) has remained steady or even eased over the past half century. But elite colleges have become more competitive. The extent of the increase in admissions competition, moreover, grows in direct proportion to a college’s selectivity in the early 1960s, with the very greatest increases coming at the very top schools—the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and a few others—where admissions are many times more competitive today than they were two generations ago. The competition that dominates the lives of elite parents and children is narrowly focused on these hyper-elite colleges and universities.

  The competition is also dominated by the very top high schools. When the twenty private high schools atop the Forbes ranking send 30 percent of their graduates to the Ivy League, Stanford, and MIT, they claim about a tenth of all the available places at these elite colleges. These schools, moreover, are virtually indistinguishable from a small group of others, which offer equally intensive and elite educations, to very similar student bodies, with equivalent results. (Fieldston, for example, did not make the Forbes top twenty, at least for the year reported, and Scarsdale High will never make the list, being nominally public.)

  Simply tallying the colleges attended by graduates of one hundred or perhaps two hundred well-known and named elite high schools accounts for a third of the student bodies at the most prestigious colleges in the country. These high schools, again, overwhelmingly graduate children of very rich parents—perhaps two-thirds of their graduates come from households in the top 5 percent of the income distribution. Even casual reflection, therefore, at once suggests that the richest children, from the best high schools, dominate the student bodies at elite colleges and universities. College expands the meritocratic inheritance, extending and exacerbating the inequality between the education and training received by children of rich parents and by middle-class children.

  Systematic study confirms this intuition. The percentage of Americans who earn a BA
of any sort by age twenty-nine has grown dramatically since the end of the Second World War—from 6 percent in 1947, to 24 percent in 1977, to 32 percent in 2011. But almost all of this increase has come from the top half of the income distribution, and the gap between the shares of rich and poor Americans to earn a BA grew by half between 1980 and 2010. Today, each additional increment in parents’ income substantially increases the chances that a child will attend college, all the way up the income distribution. The effect of parental income on the odds of graduating rather than just attending college is greater still. Conditional on beginning college, the rich complete BAs at enormously and increasingly greater rates—between two and a half and four times higher—than the rest.

  Taken together, these effects entail that as of 2016, 58 percent of Americans raised in households from the top quarter of the income distribution earned BAs by age twenty-four, compared with only about 41 percent from the next quarter, 20 percent from the second, and 11 percent from the bottom. These differences matter not just for being absolutely so big but also for their relative sizes. As with the distribution of educational investment through high school, so also in college graduation rates, the gap between rich and middle-class students substantially exceeds the gap between middle-class students and poor ones. The rich/middle-class gap is also nearly double what it was in 1970.

  The rich enjoy a still greater relative advantage over the rest in attending and graduating from selective colleges or universities and an especially great advantage at the most highly competitive and elite schools (although the absolute shares of students to attend are of course lower across all income classes). Even when poor students make it to college, they attend schools whose average quality lies at about the 35th percentile of all colleges, middle-class students attend schools whose average quality falls just below the 50th percentile, and students from households in the richest 1 percent of the income distribution attend schools whose average quality approaches the 80th percentile. As usual, the rich/middle-class gap exceeds—it doubles—the gap between average quality of college attended by middle-class students and poor ones.