The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  No wonder, therefore, that Kingman Brewster—attacked as a traitor by the midcentury’s moneyed leisure class—is today hailed as Yale’s greatest president. He is a hero to the new meritocratic elite that his reforms created and now sustain, with no end in sight.

  No wonder, but an irony, as the regime that Brewster helped to inaugurate now oppresses the elite that it also powerfully favors.

  AN EXCLUSIVE ORDEAL

  Hunter College High School, in Manhattan, is one of the most elite and competitive public schools in the country. Attendance at Hunter College High immensely increases a New York City public school student’s chances of academic success in college admissions and economic success in life: 25 percent of the school’s graduates are admitted to Ivy League colleges. Hunter High is therefore badly oversubscribed, with ten times more applicants than spaces. The school, moreover, has for decades admitted its students exclusively on account of their performance on a rigorous entrance examination—so through a pure meritocracy.

  The exam system, like every meritocracy, favors prepared candidates, and a majority of admitted students now engage test preparation services to help improve their scores on the school’s entrance exam. Preparation, for its part, is expensive and therefore favors the wealthy. And indeed, the student body that Hunter High composes in this way has over recent decades skewed increasingly toward children from rich families: only 10 percent of Hunter’s students come from households poor enough (household income below roughly $45,000 annually) to receive subsidized school lunches, compared to 75 percent in the New York City public schools generally. In addition, the racial composition of the school changed: between 1995 and 2010, the percentages of black and Hispanic students in the entering seventh-grade class fell by factors of four and six.

  As New Yorkers began to realize that meritocracy thwarted equal opportunity, Hunter High found itself at the center of a political whirlwind. Many of the school’s students and teachers, as well as its sitting principal, concluded that the health of the school depended on relaxing the entrance competition, to take into account factors besides performance on the examination. The president of Hunter College, who oversees the high school, disagreed. And so just weeks before Hunter High graduate Elena Kagan’s confirmation as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the school’s principal resigned in controversy, leaving Hunter to search for its fourth new head in five years.

  The conflict at Hunter High also had a second dimension that was perhaps thornier, but no less consequential. Even the elite children whom the school’s meritocratic practices seem to serve started to complain, as the school’s workload, pressure, and stratification became oppressive. The school would begin in the next year to experiment with “homework holidays” in order to relieve student stress. But elite discontent inside the school had stripped the meritocrats of some of their enthusiasm and self-confidence in the conflict over admissions. And the accommodations that Hunter High made on behalf of its students undermined the meritocrats’ position in principle. How could the school justify excluding outsiders simply because they do not measure up according to a principle that the school is prepared to relax when insiders need shelter from its harsh effects?

  The local squabble over Hunter High played out a dark dynamic that applies to meritocratic education quite generally. “The value to me of my education,” a well-known economist once observed, “depends not only on how much I have but also on how much the man ahead of me in the job line has.” This remains so, moreover, regardless of how much education (absolutely) the person ahead of me and I both possess. Meritocratic education—at Hunter High and across the country—plays out the consequences of the peculiar logic, to devastating effects.

  On the one hand, and in contrast to ordinary goods, when elites buy extravagant education, they directly diminish the educations that everyone else has. When the rich buy expensive chocolate, this does not make the middle class’s cheap chocolate taste worse. But when the rich make exceptional investments in schooling, this does reduce the value of ordinary, middle-class training and degrees. The parents who buy test preparation for their children reduce everyone else’s chance of getting into Hunter High, and the intensive education that Hunter High provides to its students reduces everyone else’s chances of getting into Harvard. Every meritocratic success necessarily breeds a flip side of failure.

  On the other hand, educational competition within the elite removes an important brake on consumption that restrains demand for ordinary goods in the face of rising incomes. The rich become sated on chocolate, but they do not become sated on schooling. Instead, they invest more, and more, and more in educating their children, in an effort to outdo one another. The maximum is set only by physical and psychological constraints on the children’s capacity to absorb training—in the crassest limit, the fact that schools and the parents who pay for them can hire only one teacher to engage their students at a time and that children, for their part, can study only so many hours in a day. Meritocratic education inexorably engenders a wasteful and destructive educational arms race, which ultimately benefits no one, not even the victors.

  Meritocratic education in America is in both respects approaching its outer limits. The most elite schools and universities serve almost only students from families rich enough to pay the cost of limit-case schooling; and they serve them, in human terms, increasingly badly.

  The students at Hunter High (as at Phillips Exeter Academy, and as at Harvard and Yale) approach their schooling with a compulsive fixation on the competition that they are in and the prizes that they seek. Not just languid play and decadent amusements, but also deep reflection and an intrinsic love of learning are becoming historical curiosities—memories of life outside the meritocracy trap. The young rich today diligently study and doggedly train, with a constant eye on tests and admissions competitions, intent on acquiring and then demonstrating the human capital needed to sustain them as superordinate workers in adulthood. Their parents, moreover, organize much of adult life around the competition to preserve caste: they read, study, train, worry, and even marry and stay married alongside their children, and on account of ambitions for their children. Helicopter parenting is just superordinate labor applied to the project of reproducing status in a meritocratic regime.

  The strain of all this competitive effort builds over time, to produce measurable harms. In wealthy districts of Seoul, where students work harder than anyplace else in the world, the rates of curvature of the spine have more than doubled in the last decade, and doctors have named a new malady—“turtleneck syndrome”—in which a “child’s head hunches forward anxiously.” At Yale Law School, 70 percent of survey respondents—students whose professional and material prospects have never been better—affirmed that they had “experienced mental health challenges” while at Yale. Their principal complaints—anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and recurrent insomnia—all involve one or another form of nervous exhaustion. If an Ivy League education was once a patina that burnished a carefree hereditary elite, it has become an open scramble to acquire or retain an elite status that must be won and may be lost.

  Meritocratic education also produces harms that are less measurable, but no less important. A life subsumed by competition infects students with shallow ambitions and deep and pervasive fears of failure. The infection has grown so severe that an entire genre is now devoted to describing it. Critics variously call elite students “very smart” but “completely confused” with “no idea what to do next,” “zombies,” or, in perhaps the most memorable phrase in the genre, “excellent sheep.” When a group of elite professional school students was recently asked who among them would be willing to spend fifteen hours per week on an intrinsically worthless task in order to gain a career advantage, all said that they would and, moreover, expressed surprise at the question.

  Critics of elite education commonly cast its ills as reflecting weaknesses or even vices among the elite. Some criti
cs frame their complaints in overtly moralizing terms, accusing self-serving, precious, and smothering parents of raising gutless, mercenary children. Others emphasize intellectual failings and charge that the rich lack perspective, self-awareness, or an appropriate concern for their own human development—because, as David Foster Wallace prominently charged, they have been taught and complacently believe “that a self is something you just have.” These complaints resemble the charges, considered earlier, that attribute top incomes to rent seeking or even fraud. Both attacks succumb to meritocracy’s charisma, instinctually assuming that any evil observed in meritocracy’s orbit must reflect a corruption or perversion of the meritocratic order.

  In fact, however, a deeper and darker logic is again at play. The flaws of elite education do not arise because rich parents and children are unusually venal, or stupid, or otherwise callow. Instead, they follow inexorably from meritocratic inequality’s internal dynamics. Where schooling is so competitive and performance in school determines so much, only outliers can afford to ignore education’s instrumental functions and focus on its intrinsic worth. Saints (who are indifferent to income and status) and geniuses (who win the meritocratic race even without competing) might pursue meritocratic education for its own sake. But students of only ordinary virtue and ability must keep their eyes trained steadily on the meritocratic prize.

  Adulthood sets childhood’s agenda, and work remakes family in its image. The mimicry by the school of the workplace that once led radical critics to charge that schooling in capitalist America aimed to train working-class children to accept domination by capital on entering the workforce is alive and well today. Only now, the pattern applies most dramatically within the elite. Elite schooling is carefully calibrated to train students to withstand the distractions of their immediate circumstances and to resist the urge to pursue their own peculiar authentic interests in favor of doggedly shaping themselves to serve ends set externally by the meritocratic system. Far from assuming that a self is something a person simply has, meritocratic education expressly frames elite childhood as a conscious effort to build a self that will warrant success on merit. Elite schooling—exquisitely calibrated to build and measure the self as human capital—trains elite workers in the meritocratic art of instrumentalizing and exploiting themselves.

  Once again, the rich—who after all capture the massive rewards of their own exploitation—are in no position to issue moral complaints. But meritocratic education is nevertheless a costly mechanism for the dynastic transmission of privilege down through the generations (and its effectiveness does not defray its costs). Benign neglect for parents and free play for children have been displaced by constant supervision and intense effort. Parents whose home lives once revolved around adult society now orient their domestic affairs intently toward training their children, and children who once lived carelessly in the present now prepare anxiously to secure their futures. The rich family, long devoted to consumption, has itself become a site of investment and production, aimed at building up the human capital of the next generation.

  The $10 million meritocratic inheritance measures the financial costs of the new regime. The exhausted, anxious inauthenticity that elite students suffer measures its human costs.

  In both respects, the iniquities of the parents are visited upon the children, down through the generations.

  SIX

  GLOOMY AND GLOSSY JOBS

  An article in the Harvard Crimson entitled “The Jobless Class of ’72” casually declared that “by choice or by chance, over half of the Class of 1972 found themselves with nowhere to go and nothing to do after graduation.” This came as no surprise: in 1959, only one in ten Harvard, Yale, and Princeton graduates sought jobs immediately upon finishing school, and not until 1984 did a majority of these elite graduates turn at once to seeking work.

  When they finally did take up work, elite midcentury graduates typically joined firms that effectively guaranteed lifetime employment, where pay “depended more on the number of years with the corporation than individual effort.” Even the “CEO [of a midcentury firm] did not have to be especially clever or even particularly bright. He did not need to be ruthless or compulsively driven to succeed.” Instead, the culture of elite jobs, William Whyte wrote in his midcentury bestseller The Organization Man, remained dominated by collectivism, risk aversion, and a complacent insulation from adversaries. The reason was straightforward—a society and economy led by an aristocratic, leisured elite were not especially competitive: “Rivals did not impinge.”

  Meritocracy upended this aristocratic workplace culture. Now that industry constitutes honor, and labor dominates top incomes, workplace norms emphasize achievement and ruthless competition. Today’s elite workplace fetishizes extreme skill and effort. Super-skills (and hence also the educations and degrees that provide and mark skill) become increasingly essential not just to securing high incomes and high status but also to avoiding low incomes and low status. Frenzied competition now dominates the top jobs. And the broader labor market, once characterized by a continuum of job types with a center of gravity composed by a large mass of mid-skill, middle-class jobs, has lost that center. Middle-class jobs have been displaced by low-skill jobs at the bottom and high-skill jobs at the top. At the same time, the divergence between both the productivity and the pay of the top jobs and of all the others has increased tremendously—hence the struggle to get and stay on top.

  The new work order reflects a deep economic and social logic rather than just a passing adjustment in commercial habits and office customs or a mischief born of political miscalculation and elite greed. The top jobs pay so well because a raft of new technologies has fundamentally transformed work to make exceptional skills enormously more productive than they were at midcentury and ordinary skills relatively less productive. These innovations dramatically favor superordinate workers and dramatically disfavor mid-skilled workers. The path of the transformation varies from sector to sector and industry to industry. But the pattern of work and pay at the end of the technological road repeats itself again and again.

  Economists conventionally call these developments labor market polarization and skill-biased technological change. The more lyrically minded have said that the labor market is increasingly divided up into “lousy” jobs that require little training, involve simple work, and pay low wages, and “lovely” jobs that require elaborate educations and provide interesting and complex work at high pay.

  This lyricism, however, ignores the most important harms that the transformation of the labor market imposes. It papers over the fact that the lousy jobs are not just boring and low-paid but also—indeed, specifically on account of job polarization—carry low status and afford no realistic prospects for advancement. It also obscures the discontent that meritocracy produces even among the elite—the burdens imposed by the enormous hours and pervasive self-instrumentalization that the allegedly lovely jobs demand.

  It is therefore more apt to say that the labor market has divided into gloomy and glossy jobs: gloomy because they offer neither immediate reward nor hope for promotion, and glossy because their outer shine masks inner distress.

  Technology’s shadow, cast over mid-skilled work, accounts for the darkness that engulfs gloomy jobs today, and technology’s brassy light gives glossy jobs their shallow sheen. Finally, as technology advances, increasingly many jobs fall subject to its wage-dampening influence and increasingly few enjoy its expansive effects. As good jobs have over the decades been transformed into gloomy and glossy ones, the lion’s share have become gloomy.

  A TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION AT WORK

  Cafés, diners, and other informal eateries have long played a prominent role in food production and social life. For most of history, these establishments were independently owned, and they employed owner-managers, short-order cooks, and other mid-skilled, middle-class workers. The fast-food chains that came into being at midcentury standardized
production, but they did not fundamentally reject the middle-class model.

  Ed Rensi, who ran McDonald’s in the 1990s, remembers that in the 1960s, “everything we made was by hand,” so that a typical franchise employed seventy to eighty workers to cook the food that it served. Moreover, and almost inconceivably to present-day observers, McDonald’s at midcentury offered its workers systematic and even elaborate training—going so far as to open its own school in order better to prepare its employees to advance through the firm’s managerial hierarchy. The school, which the firm called “Hamburger University,” opened in 1961 in the basement of a franchise in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, and expanded through the 1960s and 1970s to enroll and train increasingly many workers to open their own restaurants. Rensi himself was a product of the midcentury model, joining the fast-food chain as a grill man in 1966 and rising through the ranks to become CEO in 1991. Few workers rose as fast or as high as Rensi did, but his story is far from exceptional. For young midcentury Americans, entry-level work at McDonald’s was both a good job and a credible stepping-stone to a chain of promotions and better jobs.