The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  in the 1960s: In 1966, for example, the most selective colleges spent about $18,000 per student, while the least selective spent about $4,000. See Hoxby, “Changing Selectivity,” Figure 2. The expenditure gap, in other words, has grown by a factor of over five in the past half century, from about $14,000 to about $80,000, per student per year. Note that these numbers report constant 2007 dollars.

  Other studies, which focus more narrowly on shorter time horizons, confirm this basic trend. According to the Washington Post series “The Tuition Is Too Damn High,” private research universities spent $12,435 more per student in 2010 than in 2000, whereas public research universities increased spending by only $3,917. Dylan Matthews, “Introducing ‘The Tuition Is Too Damn High,’” Washington Post, August 26, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/26/introducing-the-tuition-is-too-damn-high/?utm_term=.98a625a37dc1. Another study reports that between 1999 and 2009, educational resource expenditures remained flat at community colleges, grew by about $1,500 at public research universities, and grew by about $10,000 at private research universities. See David Leonhardt, “Though Enrolling More Poor Students, 2-Year Colleges Get Less of the Federal Pie,” New York Times, May 22, 2013, accessed October 24, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/education/2-year-colleges-getting-a-falling-share-of-spending.html. See also Josh Freedman, “Why American Colleges Are Becoming a Force for Inequality,” Atlantic, May 16, 2013, accessed October 2018, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/why-american-colleges-are-becoming-a-force-for-inequality/275923/.

  who attend elite colleges: Rising top incomes make it natural for rich parents to give their college-aged children greater financial support than poor parents, as they indeed do: a parent from the top income quartile is 205 percent more likely to give her child tuition support than a parent from the bottom quartile, and a college-educated parent is 277 percent more likely to provide tuition support than a parent without a college degree. The sums involved are large, moreover, with a top/bottom-quartile difference of over $16,000 annually. Patrick Wightman, Robert Schoeni, and Keith Robinson, “Familial Financial Assistance to Young Adults,” National Poverty Center Working Paper Series 12-10 (May 2012), http://npc.umich.edu/publications/u/2012-10%20NPC%20Working%20Paper.pdf. The gap was $13,336 in 2005 dollars, which is $16,185 in CPI-adjusted 2015 dollars.

  pay 78 cents on the dollar: See Highlights from Rewarding Strivers, 4.

  ballooned to about $75,000: See Hoxby, “Changing Selectivity,” Figure 3.

  This shift may be captured in another way also. Overall, the effective cost of college varies by increasingly less than the incomes of the families who pay it. At private colleges, the shift in effective costs from rich to poor students has been stark. Whereas poor students at private colleges paid 49.5 percent of what rich students paid in 1999–2000, in 2011–12 they paid 55.4 percent. Over those twelve years, the net cost of attendance rose by 32 percent for poor students but only 17.5 percent for rich students. See College Board, “Net Price by Income over Time: Private Sector” (last revised December 2013), https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/net-prices-income-over-time-private-sector [inactive]. Note that public colleges experienced a reversed shift: in 2007–8 poor students paid 55.7 percent of rich students’ tuition; in 1992–93 they paid 67.1 percent.

  hence the name of the ceremony: Phyllis Vine, “The Social Function of Eighteenth-Century Higher Education,” History of Education Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1976): 417. As Vine describes, “Educators gradually invested commencement ceremonies with a symbolic significance that told students and the community that they were ‘now about to step into life.’ In addition to marking an important rite-de-passage for a select group of young men, the commencement ceremonies denoted, as Samuel Johnson told King’s College students, that they would hence be ‘called to act a more important part of life.’”

  including in the professions: The first American law school was founded as a freestanding proprietary academy in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1784. See “Litchfield Law School History,” Litchfield Historical Society (2010), http://litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org/ledger/studies/history_school. The first university law school, variously claimed to be at Harvard and William and Mary, was not founded until the turn of the nineteenth century. See Henry D. Gabriel, “America’s Oldest Law School,” Journal of Legal Education 39, no. 2 (1989): 269–74. The first American medical school, at the University of Pennsylvania, was founded in 1765. See www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/1700s/medsch.html. And the first business school, the Wharton School (again at Pennsylvania), was founded in 1881. See “About Wharton,” The Wharton School, www.wharton.upenn.edu/about/wharton-history.cfm.

  until the early twentieth century: The shift to a graduate school model of professional education was partly motivated by a desire to keep immigrants and members of the lower classes out of the professions by increasing the cost (in both time and money) involved in acquiring a professional degree, so that only children of the elite could afford to pay. The graduate school model concentrates training in the elite not just by happenstance, but partly on purpose. Daniel Markovits, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy in a Democratic Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  had completed college: Anthony J. Mayo, Nitin Nohria, and Laura G. Singleton, Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2007), x. Hereafter cited as Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton, Paths to Power.

  midcentury American firms: For more on workplace training at midcentury, see John W. Kendrick, The Formation and Stocks of Total Capital (New York: Columbia University for NBER, 1976).

  trained by his employer: Cappelli, The New Deal at Work, 70–73.

  over age twenty-five: Cappelli, The New Deal at Work, 199.

  lasted fully eighteen months: Cappelli, The New Deal at Work, 65–66, citing William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956).

  close their stores: Cappelli, The New Deal at Work, 70–73.

  internally trained workers: Cappelli, The New Deal at Work, 199.

  any training program at all: Cappelli, The New Deal at Work, 200–201.

  less than 2 percent of its payroll budget on training: Cappelli, The New Deal at Work, 200–201. This suggests that the transference of training from workplace to school applies to non-elite as well as elite workers. Other evidence reinforces this conclusion. A full quarter of community college students already possess BAs, for example, and are returning to school to acquire specific workplace skills that their employers no longer teach. And the rate of capital infusion into private technical schools, which similarly substitute for training that was once provided by employers, in the workplace, more than tripled over the course of the 1990s alone.

  “from the mail room to the corner office”: Anthony P. Carnevale, Stephen J. Rose, and Ban Cheah, The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings, Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (2011), 2. Hereafter cited as Carnevale, Rose, and Cheah, The College Payoff.

  over two decades: Reich, Supercapitalism, 38, citing Fortune magazine’s book The Executive Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 30.

  by firms or even industries: Carnevale, Rose, and Cheah, The College Payoff, 2.

  “that is probably finite”: Cappelli, The New Deal at Work, 26.

  beyond the residency: See American Board of Medical Specialties, ABMS Guide to Medical Specialties, 2018, accessed October 24, 2018, www.abms.org/media/176512/abms-guide-to-medical-specialties-2018.pdf.

  over the past two decades: U.S. Census Bureau, “Section 4: Education,” Statistical Abstract of the United States no. 131, 2012, www.census.gov/library/publications/2011/compendia/statab/131ed/education.html (see file 304, “First Professional Degrees Earned in Selected Professions”).

  over one hundred thousand new
MBAs each year: U.S. Census Bureau, “Section 4: Education,” Statistical Abstract of the United States no. 131, 2012, www.census.gov/library/publications/2011/compendia/statab/131ed/education.html (see file 304, “First Professional Degrees Earned in Selected Professions”). See also Jonathan P. O’Brien et al., “Does Business School Research Add Economic Value for Students?,” Academy of Management Learning and Education 9, no. 4 (2010): 638–51, 638. On the massive increase in business school education as the mirror image of the decline in workplace training, see P. Friga, R. Bettis, and R. Sullivan, “Changes in Graduate Management Education and New Business School Strategies for 21st Century,” Academy of Management Learning and Education 2 (2003): 233–49, and F. P. Morgeson and J. D. Nahrgang, “Same as It Ever Was: Recognizing Stability in the Business Week Rankings,” Academy of Management Learning and Education 7 (2008): 26–41.

  had not even attended college: See F. W. Tausig and C. S. Joslyn, American Business Leaders (Oxford: Macmillan, 1932).

  have completed college today: Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton, Paths to Power, x.

  hold MBAs or JDs: See M. Useem and J. Karabel, “Pathways to Top Corporate Management,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 184–200.

  have exceeded $350,000: In 2015, Harvard Business School’s expenditures amounted to $660 million, and its enrollment was 1,865 students, yielding expenditure per student of nearly $354,000. Harvard Business School, FY15 Financial Report (2015), 3, www.hbs.edu/about/financialreport/2015/Documents/HBS-Financial-2015.pdf.

  therefore from richer families: Such employer-provided training as endures in the American economy is skewing further and further in favor of elite workers. In 1983, college graduates were roughly three times as likely to receive workplace training as workers without high school degrees. By 1991, the educated workers were nearly four times as likely to receive training as the uneducated ones. Daron Acemoglu, “Changes in Unemployment and Wage Inequality: An Alternative Theory and Some Evidence,” American Economic Review 89, no. 5 (December 1999): 1259–78, 1275, https://doi.org/10.3386/w6658 (citing the 1983 and 1991 CPS supplements, which report on the shares of workers who received some kind of “training to improve skills on the current job”). Hereafter cited as Acemoglu, “Changes in Unemployment and Wage Inequality.”

  in the 97th percentile: Stanford’s median MCAT score is 519. See Farran Powell, “10 Medical Schools with the Highest MCATS Scores,” U.S. News & World Report, March 23, 2018, accessed November 18, 2018, www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-medical-schools/slideshows/10-med-schools-with-the-highest-mcat-scores?slide=3; Association of American Medical Colleges, Percentile Ranks for the MCAT Exam, https://students-residents.aamc.org/advisors/article/percentile-ranks-for-the-mcat-exam/.

  attended Harvard, Princeton, or Yale: See Helen Diagama and Alda Yuan, 2016 Class/Action Report: A Triennial Report on Socioeconomic Class as Experienced by Students at Yale Law School (2017), 10.

  charges over $70,000: For Yale Law School, see “Cost of Attendance,” Yale Law School, https://law.yale.edu/admissions/cost-financial-aid/cost-attendance. For Harvard Business School, see “Annual Cost of Attendance,” Harvard Business School, www.hbs.edu/mba/financial-aid/Pages/cost-summary.aspx. For business schools more generally, see “2014 Ranking of the Top MBA Programs & Best Business Schools,” MBAPrograms.org (2014), www.mbaprograms.org/rankings. More generally, one year of law school tuition, after internal grants, scholarships, and other discounts, averages about $32,000 at private schools, and $28,000 for out-of-state students and $15,000 for in-state students at public schools. These figures suggest a 20 to 30 percent discount of list prices. See Michael Simkovic and Frank Mcintyre, “The Economic Value of a Law Degree,” Journal of Legal Studies 43, no. 2 (June 2014): 249–89, 281n.43. Another report of specific numbers on law school tuition (in 2013) appears at “Law School Costs,” Law School Transparency, www.lawschooltransparency.com/reform/projects/Tuition-Tracker/ and “Cost Calculator: Estimate the Cost of Law School,” AdmissionsDean, www.admissionsdean.com/paying_for_law_school/law-school-cost-calculator.

  more than $105,000: For Yale Law School, see “Cost of Attendance,” Yale Law School, https://law.yale.edu/admissions/cost-financial-aid/cost-attendance. For Harvard Business School, see “Annual Cost of Attendance,” Harvard Business School, www.hbs.edu/mba/financial-aid/Pages/cost-summary.aspx.

  networking benefits of student life: See Jodi Kantor, “Class Is Seen Dividing Harvard Business School,” New York Times, September 9, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/education/harvard-business-students-see-class-as-divisive-an-issue-as-gender.html. Hereafter cited as Kantor, “Class Is Seen Dividing Harvard Business School.”

  equal or even exceed the direct costs: Elite professional school students overwhelmingly possess elite BAs (the professional schools select for this criterion, after all) and so enjoy the employment opportunities that this credential provides. When they go back to school, professional students forswear immediate income. This indirect cost should not be treated as an investment in professional students’ human capital (that would be double counting). But it nevertheless contributes to the concentration of human capital in the rich, by causing professional schools to select directly for students who possess sufficient family wealth to be able to afford the delay to their own income that professional school involves.

  properly regard as embarrassing: The administrations at graduate and professional schools, like college administrations, advertise that large shares of students are eligible to receive need-based financial aid: 50 percent at Harvard Business School, for example, and 73 percent at Yale Law School. See “Financial Aid: MBAid Journey: Fast Facts,” Harvard Business School, www.hbs.edu/mba/financial-aid/Pages/fast-facts.aspx; “Cost & Financial Aid,” Yale Law School, https://law.yale.edu/admissions/cost-financial-aid. But as with undergraduate financial aid, so in this case also, nominally “need-based” financial aid is rendered merit-based by the competitiveness of the application process and directed toward rich students on account of the correlation between family background and academic performance. And widespread aid, far from promoting economic equality, thus constitutes a massive subsidy in favor of the already wealthy and well educated.

  “only $20,000”: Kantor, “Class Is Seen Dividing Harvard Business School.”

  in or near poverty: See Sackett et al., Class/Action: A Report on Socioeconomic Class as Experienced by Students at Yale Law School (March 2013), accessed September 28, 2018, https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/department/studentaffairs/document/class_action_report.pdf. Hereafter cited as Sackett et al., Class/Action. Moreover, the Yale Law School study tabulated students’ parents’ educations as well as incomes (this lends credibility to the income data, as children might mistake their parents’ incomes but surely do know what degrees their parents hold): the median Yale Law student has at least one parent with a professional degree or PhD (the top 3 percent of the education distribution), and only 8 percent of Yale Law students have two parents without a BA. See Sackett et al., Class/Action. The skew to wealth might have diminished slightly in subsequent classes, with roughly equal shares of students coming from the top 1 percent and the bottom half.

  that Harvard Business School and Yale Law School are outliers: Moreover, there is good reason to believe that, as with colleges, the most elite professional schools show the greatest skew toward wealth. For example, the Texas Medical and Dental School Application Service processes all applications to state-supported medical schools in Texas and collects demographic data about applications and accepted students. A study of medical school applications and enrollments in Texas in 2005 and 2006 found that the most selective school received a substantially higher share of applicants and enrolled a substantially higher share of students from the most elite of four SES categories than the least selective school. See Michael Kennedy, “Medical School Admissions Across Socioeconomic Groups: An Analysis Across Race Neut
ral and Race Sensitive Admissions Cycles” (unpublished PhD dissertation).

  two professional parents: Linda F. Wightman, Legal Education at the Close of the Twentieth Century: Descriptions and Analyses of Students, Financing, and Professional Expectations and Attitudes (Newtown, PA: Law School Admission Council, 1995), 30, Table 15.

  “revolution in family wealth transmission”: Langbein, “Twentieth-Century Revolution.”

  more rapidly even than income inequality: Consumption here is measured and classified by the categories in the Consumer Expenditure Survey. See Aguiar and Bils, “Has Consumption Inequality Mirrored Income Inequality?,” 2753. Education expenditures have for three decades displayed one of the three highest income elasticities of the twenty expenditure categories studied by Aguiar and Bils. By 2008–10, education expenditures had become the single most income elastic expenditure category.

  that their earlier academic achievements qualify them for: See Gordon C. Winston and Catharine B. Hill, “Access to the Most Selective Private Colleges by High-Ability, Low-Income Students: Are They Out There?,” Williams Project on the Economics of Higher Education, Discussion Paper no. 69 (2005), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED499443.pdf. See also Lisa R. Pruitt, “The False Choice Between Race and Class and Other Affirmative Action Myths,” Buffalo Law Review 63 (2015): 1030; Thomas J. Espenschade and Alexandria Walton Radford, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 97–98. These authors observe that a child from the professional elite is many times more likely to be admitted to a selective private college than a less privileged white child with similar qualifications. This claim is not, however, incompatible with the main thrust of the argument here—namely, that the skew to wealth among elite student bodies is predominantly caused by merit, simply because there are so few high-achieving children from poor parents to whom the claim applies.