The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  at the most selective colleges: The rise of elite elementary and high school education explains the seemingly contradictory patterns concerning high school achievement and college admissions together and at once: “although low-income students have shown strong gains in the indicators that lead to admission to highly selective schools . . . higher income students have simultaneously made even stronger gains on these same indicators. Thus, enrollment in selective colleges has become a horse race in which wealthier students always remain at the head of the pack. As a result, low-income students have failed to make substantial gains in college placement despite substantial increases in academic course achievement.” Bastedo and Jaquette, “Running in Place,” 319.

  any way except toward wealth: This may be straightforwardly read off the face of the SAT: in 2013, the 95th-percentile SAT scores for test takers from households earning less than $20,000 per year and the 95th-percentile scores for test takers from households earning $20,000 to $40,000 all fell well below the 25th percentile of Yale College’s entering class in that year. Indeed, the 99.7th-percentile scores for test takers from both groups of households (with the exception of math) fell at roughly Yale’s medians. At the same time, there are plenty of high-achieving rich graduates. Among high school students from households with incomes above $200,000 per year, the 95th percentile scores above the Yale median, and the 99.7th percentile has a perfect score on every section of the test. All these claims are derived from data on incomes and scores released directly by the College Board, at College Board, “2013 College-Bound Seniors: Total Group Profile Report,” http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/2013/TotalGroup-2013.pdf. Slightly less demanding thresholds and broader conceptions of high school achievement replicate the pattern. For example, only 17 percent of students with SAT or ACT scores in the 90th percentile or higher and A-minus-or-better high school averages come from families in the bottom quintile of the income distribution. See Hoxby and Avery, “The Missing ‘One-Offs.’”

  “about the world by watching ‘Jeopardy’”: The student, Kashawn Campbell, attended high school where “long” writing assignments took a page and where just under 13 percent of students were proficient in English and less than 1 percent were proficient in math. Campbell’s straight As in high school failed to translate into college success, and he struggled massively during his freshman year at Berkeley to get his GPA above 2.0. See Kurt Streeter, “South L.A. Student Finds a Different World at Cal,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.latimes.com/local/la-me-c1-cal-freshmen-20130816-dto-htmlstory.html.

  who hail from low-income households: These conclusions follow from a careful and comprehensive historical study that combined several massive databases of high school students to construct a nationally representative sample that extends over three decades (including high school graduates from 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2004) and used this data to investigate interactions among household income, high school achievement, and college placement. See Bastedo and Jaquette, “Running in Place,” 318–39.

  in a typical year: See “2013 College-Bound Seniors: Total Group Profile Report,” College Board, http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/2013/TotalGroup-2013.pdf.

  fully a quarter of these: This share is calculated using the college’s own reports of SAT scores at the 25th percentiles of their student bodies, combined with the numbers of students that they enroll.

  in the 99th percentile: This share is calculated by combining the Law School Admissions Council’s Current Volume Summaries of LSAT scores, which report the number of law school applicants each year whose scores reach the 99th percentile, with the top five law schools’ reports of their enrollments and the LSAT scores at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of their student bodies. The precise numbers unsurprisingly vary from year to year. The Current Volume Summaries are available at www.lsac.org/data-research/data?search=&page=1. The law school class data are available at https://law.yale.edu/admissions/profiles-statistics/entering-class-profile; https://law.stanford.edu/aba-required-disclosures/; https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-school/hls-profile-and-facts/; www.law.uchicago.edu/files/Std509InfoReport-50-50-12-06-2017%2013-38-43.pdf; www.law.columbia.edu/admissions/jd/experience/class-profile.

  dominate meritocratic competition: The United States is exceptional in this respect also. The skills gap between offspring of at least one college-educated parent and offspring of two parents without high school degrees is 50 percent higher in the United States than the OECD average and at least as great as in any other OECD country. See OECD, OECD Skills Outlook 2013, 113, Figure 3.6(L), “Differences in literary proficiency, by socio-economic background.”

  meritocracy’s triumph: For a similar conclusion, see Reeves, Dream Hoarders, 87. Reeves cites Sigal Alon, “The Evolution of Class Inequality in Higher Education: Competition, Exclusion, and Adaptation,” American Sociological Review 74, no. 5 (2009): 731–55.

  from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations: The American version of the adage is often attributed to Andrew Carnegie, a late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century steel baron and philanthropist. But the adage exists in different versions in other parts of the world. The Chinese have the ancient proverb “rice paddy to rice paddy in three generations,” and the British version is “clogs to clogs in three generations.” Arianna Degan and Emmanuel Thibault, “Dynastic Accumulation of Wealth,” Mathematical Social Sciences 81 (May 2016): 66.

  hereditary landedness: The analogy even penetrates the legal doctrines that support the two regimes. Aristocratic dynasties were supported by legal practices such as the fee tail. Entailed land—land conveyed by deed or settlement to the tenant in possession as a fee tail—could not be sold, devised, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated by the generation that possessed it. Instead, the land passed, undivided and unencumbered, down from generation to generation. This prevented the living from squandering a family’s aristocratic inheritance and so ensured that land would pass down through the family’s generations, in perpetuity.

  Meritocratic dynasties are similarly supported by legal rules that limit a person’s power to sell his human capital, by selling himself into slavery or even just making very long-term labor contracts. This prevents a person from squandering his meritocratic inheritance and so increases the likelihood that human capital will be passed down through the generations.

  a stepping-stone on the path of progress: A wider lens generalizes this insight. When meritocracy remakes the family as a site of production, it restores preindustrial arrangements, under which nonaristocratic families were sites of industry and aristocratic families produced breeding. The period from the Industrial Revolution through the mid-twentieth century is distinctive for not centering production in the family. This is yet another way in which meritocracy harkens back to aristocratic social and economic forms. I owe this formulation to Sarah Bilston.

  energy from the outside: These points owe a great deal to a conversation with Joseph Fishkin, author of Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  Yale’s greatest president: See Pat Barnes, “Ex-President of Yale Kingman Brewster Dies,” Washington Post, November 9, 1988, accessed October 24, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1988/11/09/ex-president-of-yale-kingman-brewster-dies/9edcd521-a603-4f98-b264-88c83568e4fa/?utm_term=.11f6fa327fd4.

  no end in sight: Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution.”

  are admitted to Ivy League colleges: Sharon Otterman, “Diversity Debate Convulses Elite High School,” New York Times, August 4, 2010, accessed October 20, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/nyregion/05hunter.html. Hereafter cited as Otterman, “Diversity Debate.”

  ten times more applicants than spaces: In 2014, 2,268 students applied for 225 places. Derrell Bradford, In Defense of New York City’s Selective High Schools, Report, Thomas B. Fordham Insti
tute, February 2, 2015, accessed October 20, 2018, https://edexcellence.net/articles/in-defense-of-new-york-citys-selective-high-schools.

  the school’s entrance exam: Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites, 39.

  the New York City public schools generally: Hayes, Twilight of the Elites, 40. The $45,000 threshold is for a family of four. See Paula Tyner-Doyle, “2018–2019 Free and Reduced Price Income Eligibility and Policy Information,” Memorandum from the State Education Department, Albany, NY, June 2018, accessed October 24, 2018, 34, www.cn.nysed.gov/common/cn/files/2018policybooklet.pdf.

  fell by factors of four and six: “In 1995, the entering seventh-grade class was 12 percent black and 6 percent Hispanic, according to state data. This past year, it was 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic.” Otterman, “Diversity Debate.”

  its fourth new head in five years: Otterman, “Diversity Debate.”

  in order to relieve student stress: Jenny Anderson, “At Elite Schools, Easing Up a Bit on Homework,” New York Times, October 23, 2011, accessed October 20, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/education/24homework.html. The discussion of Hunter High in particular occurs in a correction posted at the end of the article.

  “The value to me of my education”: In his classic book Social Limits to Growth, Fred Hirsch called goods that have this character positional goods. People derive well-being from positional goods based not on their absolute holdings but rather on whether they have more or less than others do, and this entails that an incremental addition to a person’s stock of a positional good that increases her holdings relative to others—that moves her up in the ownership rankings—adds the same amount to her well-being, no matter how little or much of the good she and others held before the increase. One might even say that the true good, in such cases, is rank or position, and that the nominal good whose ownership is ranked is just an input into the production of position. People do not tire of the positional goods as they do of others. And demand for positional goods rises, unfettered, together with rising incomes. The term positional good has been used capaciously, to cover an overlapping set of phenomena, rather than in a narrow, parsimonious, or technical precise way. The approach to the term taken here falls within conventional usage, although it does not—indeed, it could not possibly—coincide with every precedent. Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).

  do not become sated on schooling: The distinction between ordinary goods and positional goods does not present a binary so much as a continuum, with chocolate near one end and education near the other. Luxury goods—which produce well-being not directly by being consumed but rather by signaling wealth and thus constituting status—fall in between. When clothes, or watches, or cars are desired for being expensive, demand might remain steady in the face of increases in their extravagance and cost, rather than declining as on the model of ordinary consumption. Which goods are positional depends on contingent social and economic factors rather than on logic. A thought experiment proposed by Robert Frank illustrates this. When people are asked whether they would rather live in four-thousand-square-foot houses in a world in which others live in six-thousand-square-foot houses, or live in three-thousand-square-foot houses in a world in which others live in two-thousand-square-foot houses, they prefer the second world. But when people are asked whether they would rather have four weeks of annual vacation in a world in which others have six weeks, or have two weeks of vacation in a world in which others have one, they prefer the first world. In the frame of the experiments, housing is a positional good but vacation time is not. Robert H. Frank, “Positional Externalities Cause Large and Preventable Welfare Losses,” American Economic Review 95, no. 2 (May 2005): 137, accessed October 20, 2018, doi:10.1257/000282805774670392.

  “turtleneck syndrome”: Simon Mundy, “South Korea’s Millionaire Tutors,” Financial Times, June 16, 2014, accessed October 20, 2018, www.ft.com/content/c0b611fc-dab5-11e3-9a27-00144feabdc0.

  “experienced mental health challenges”: Jessie Agatstein et al., Falling Through the Cracks: A Report on Mental Health at Yale Law School, Yale Law School Mental Health Alliance, Yale Law School (2014), 14. Hereafter cited as Agatstein et al., Falling Through the Cracks.

  form of nervous exhaustion: Agatstein et al., Falling Through the Cracks, 15.

  “no idea what to do next”: Ezra Klein, “Ivy League’s Failure Is Wall Street’s Gain,” Bloomberg Opinion, February 15, 2012, accessed October 20, 2018, www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-02-16/harvard-liberal-arts-failure-is-wall-street-gain-commentary-by-ezra-klein.

  “zombies”: William Deresiewicz, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League,” New Republic, July 21, 2014, accessed October 20, 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere.

  “excellent sheep”: William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014). Hereafter cited as Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep.

  expressed surprise at the question: Personal conversation with the author.

  gutless, mercenary children: Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep.

  “that a self is something you just have”: David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2007).

  alive and well today: Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

  down through the generations: See Numbers 14:18.

  Chapter Six: Gloomy and Glossy Jobs

  “by choice or by chance”: The quote is reported in Ho, Liquidated, 59–60.

  at once to seeking work: The data come from Ho, Liquidated, 59.

  “depended more on the number of years”: Reich, Supercapitalism, 38.

  “CEO [of a midcentury firm]”: Reich, Supercapitalism, 109–10.

  insulation from adversaries: See William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956).

  “Rivals did not impinge”: Reich, Supercapitalism, 109–10.

  labor market polarization: The term comes from Maarten Goos and Alan Manning, Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain, London School of Economics, Center for Economic Performance Discussion Paper No. DP0604 (December 2003), http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/20002/1/Lousy_and_Lovely_Jobs_the_Rising_Polarization_of_Work_in_Britain.pdf, eventually published as Maarten Goos and Alan Manning, “Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain,” Review of Economics and Statistics 89, no. 1 (February 2007): 118–33, hereafter cited as Goos and Manning, “Lousy and Lovely Jobs.” For other uses, see David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney, “The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market,” AEA Papers and Proceedings 96 (2006): 189–94, hereafter cited as Autor, Katz, and Kearney, “The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market”; Christopher L. Foote and Richard W. Ryan, “Labor-Market Polarization over the Business Cycle,” NBER Macroeconomics Annual 29 (2015): 371–413.

  skill-biased technological change: David Card and John E. DiNardo, “Skill-Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality: Some Problems and Puzzles,” Journal of Labor Economics 20, no. 4 (October 2002): 734 (“This hypothesis—that a burst of new technology caused a rise in the demand for highly skilled workers, which in turn led to a rise in earnings inequality—has become known as the Skill-Biased Technical Change (SBTC) hypothesis.”); Eli Berman, John Bound, and Stephen Machin, “Implications of Skill-Biased Technological Change: International Evidence,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 113, no. 4 (November 1998): 1245–79.

  interesting and complex work at high pay: Goos and Manning, “Lousy and Lovely Jobs.”

  “everything we made was by hand”: Lydia DePillis, “Minimum-Wage Offensive Could Speed Arrival of Robot-Powered Restaurants,” Washington Post, August 16, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, w
ww.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/minimum-wage-offensive-could-speed-arrival-of-robot-powered-restaurants/2015/08/16/35f284ea-3f6f-11e5-8d45-d815146f81fa_story.html?utm_term=.5e63a0f1d21e. Hereafter cited as DePillis, “Minimum-Wage Offensive.”

  open their own restaurants: Jessica Wohl, “Hamburger University Grills Students on McDonald’s Operations,” Chicago Tribune, April 18, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-mcdonalds-hamburger-university-0419-biz-20150407-story.html; John F. Love, McDonald’s: Behind the Arches (New York: Bantam, 1986), 148–50.

  to become CEO in 1991: “Executive Profile: Edward H. Rensi,” Bloomberg, accessed October 22, 2018, www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=630964&privcapId=1598870; Bio, “Ed Rensi,” Premiere Speakers Bureau, https://premierespeakers.com/ed_rensi/bio.

  far from exceptional: Fred Turner, who founded Hamburger University and served as McDonald’s CEO from 1974 to 1987, also worked his way up through the firm’s hierarchy, and many other early McDonald’s executives began their careers in entry-level jobs at the firm. See Laurence Arnold and Leslie Patton, “Fred Turner, McDonald’s ‘Hamburger U.’ Founder, Dies at 80,” Bloomberg, January 8, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-08/fred-l-turner-mcdonald-s-hamburger-u-founder-dies-at-80.

  the number has fallen by over half: DePillis, “Minimum-Wage Offensive.”

  in favor of robots: The Fight for $15’s efforts to raise street-level wages is bringing the issue to a head. See Julia Limitone, “Fmr. McDonald’s USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour,” Fox Business, May 24, 2016, accessed November 18, 2018, www.foxbusiness.com/features/fmr-mcdonalds-usa-ceo-35k-robots-cheaper-than-hiring-at-15-per-hour.