Varsity Blues and the Destructive Myth of Meritocracy
In the wake of the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal that made news on March 12, 2019, I wrote (mildly edited here with more character space and one grammatical correction):
It’s not just a matter of who “should“ get in or not and graduate from where or not. “Elite” educations aren’t really cultivating better critical thinkers — otherwise the graduates would’ve dismantled them by now rather than flashing degrees to lift themselves and justify their advantages.
We need to give up on the notion of “earn” and “deserve,” and make sure our collective resources and wealth are spread (redistributed) evenly, that everyone is taken care of, and that we don’t wreck the planet (reverse the wrecking).
Then I found many other great reminders about the lie of meritocracy and its assistance in building inequality and maintaining the system. I have collected them here.
When rich and famous people allegedly buy their children admission to elite colleges, you have to wonder what terrible fate they believe will befall their incredibly privileged offspring if they don't attend such schools.
What drives the anxiety? Fears of downward mobility? Name brand obsession? Has the education gospel anxiety traveled this far up the economic ladder? Paging @tressiemcphd!
Tressie McMillan Cottom responds:
Yes, I like Shamus Khan and Mitchell Stevens here. It is hard to completely process if it isn't your culture but there is no such thing as "enough" for elite status groups. Their anxiety feels as real to them as the objectively more real risk of failure feels to poor families
What I don't really get about this college scheme is that these kids were gonna be FINE and RICH no matter what. Who cares if they got into some college?
My only explanation - somewhat supported by the totally bananas court document - is that the parents wanted their kids (who were unaware of the fraud) to feel smart. That's some next level shit
Tressie McMillan Cottom responds:
Again, it's hard to explain but the social reproduction of privilege requires this kind of anxiety.
Nadirah Farah Foley adds:
yes — and this is where Khan's distinction between privilege and entitlement is so crucial. an elite degree legitimates advantage as earned rather than inherited, which is essential for status under the meritocratic logics & ideals that dominate US society.
So you mean rich people cheat the system to get their kids in.. in an institution that artificially creates a perception of scarcity regarding a resource that is not scare in order to drive extraordinary costs up which in turn perpetuates mass inequality at all levels of society?
What's funniest about the college bribery scandal is that the privileged, unbright scions of celebrity wealth felt they needed the imprimatur of prestige schools to justify their rank in life, to bolster the charade. A false meritocratic standard is worse than no standard at all.
It's worth recalling that the word 'meritocracy' was coined as a satirical slur in a dystopic novel by a sociologist. Bizarrely, it was ingested by the culture as a universal good that it would be offensive to even question. link to Wikipedia page for meritocracy
I also hate to see us reinforce the idea that the metrics/standards by which we determine deservingness of access to a high-quality education are objectively good/right measures of "merit." and there's a LOT of that implicitly going on in statements about this scandal.
The very idea of our society, higher-ed or otherwise, being a "meritocracy" is something that was made up to justify & reify existing social hierarchies. It's not real. What's real is how wealth & race combine to give ppl things that they tell themselves they inherently deserve.
there's so many angles to this admissions scandal, but I just keep coming back to the fact that stuff like this probably wouldn't happen if we didn't have a super stratified & unequal system in which attending an elite school comes with such outsized material & symbolic benefits.
that, and we might not have such a stratified system of education if we weren't so wedded to the idea that meritocracy is a good system for meting out just inequalities, and education is the way to administer that system.
it doesn't have to be like this, though.
My worry is that it will recede into a discussion about "merit" where we basically say, "oh... we just need to get back to a 'true' meritocracy and then it's all good" rather than asking ourselves what kinds of communities we want to create and what our social responsibilies are.
Nadirah Farah Foley responds:
this. so much of the discourse today is reinforcing the idea that the process is basically about merit except when it's corrupted via bribery or nepotism. the question of what a "true meritocracy" would look like — and whether that's even desirable — is an essential one, imo.
the question of what a "true meritocracy" looks like requires digging into what merit means; the question of whether it's desirable calls for interrogating whether just inequality can exist, or whether inequality in & of itself is unjust/to be avoided. those are tough questions.
They were the kind of liberals who want to change the world as long as that doesn't mean their world having to change. Much of what appears to be reform in our time is in fact the defense of stasis. These are in fact conservatives who fly stealth under the shield of liberalism.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein:
The problem at these schools isn’t these singular bribes. The problem is the tax-free donations they get which literally cut the tax base for public universities. The problem is the large number of legacies they admit who think they got there through hard work.
Has anyone done a study about how increased access to higher education has coincided with dramatically worsening economic inequality in the United States? I.e “access” doesn’t mean what it once meant during the postwar boom.
your kid's "spot" doesn't exist. admission to elite american universities is a highly strategic, profit-driven affair. the university gets something out of every student it admits. if it's not money, it's reputation,"diversity," or free labor. your kid's "spot" doesn't exist.
Plot twist: the “legitimate” criteria for acceptance into elite schools are all white supremacist bullshit too. SAT scores. Grades. Extra curriculars. None of them make a person smart or special. They all show you’re willing to play their game tho, which is all you need to do.
My hope was that “legacy” was an obvious enough example, but it’s important to mention because all of these things are connected. You can’t have “elite” schools without being rigged for the elite, in big and small ways.
And you can’t have POC complaining about how they were assumed to be accepted into elite schools because of affirmative action without reinforcing this bullshit either. If you did not get accepted due to aff action you did it by perfecting their rules.
Derrick Bell made it all too clear in 2002: “We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.”
Tyler Reinhard (posted previously):
Ivy diplomas are luxury goods, not qualifications. If they had any real value — some educational secret sauce —they would scale it. Instead they do the opposite by offering something “exclusive”, just like every other luxury brand.
Update: 13 March 2019 (same day as post): I have added many more below and will likely continue to do so.
Anand Giridharadas (See the full interview here.):
In this college scandal, we haven't heard much from the kids themselves.
But I found a glimpse of how they processed their inflated scores in the indictment.
And it offers a vital lesson: rigging things doesn't make the beneficiaries insecure, but rather unduly self-confident. [video embedded]
So many thoughts on #CollegeAdmissionsScandal / #CollegeCheatingScandal.
The true injustice is that with all the cause célèbre, we're missing a prime opportunity to name & address that the US "education" system has since time immemorial been at least racist, classist & ableist.
or, counterpoint: maybe college admissions is a meritocracy! but maybe meritocracy is bad —a system that legitimates inequality and rewards privilege while mischaracterizing it as "ability" and "talent"meritocracy killjoy added,
So if everybody worked as hard as many who are sharing their stories, all without the extreme wealth and connections and lying we would still have a problem. Cuz people shouldn’t have to be working so damn hard and the stakes shouldn’t be so onerous to gain access to higher ed.
I keep hearing people say bribery is different from donating a building because “bribery is a crime,” but I think it’s important we not lose sight of the fact that legality and morality don’t always overlap. something not being a “crime” doesn’t make it okay.
I’m not saying bribery isn’t a particularly extreme manifestation of leveraging wealth to gain access, but if the only reason you draw the line at bribery is because it happens to be designated a crime...I think it’s worth interrogating why.
The real scandal isn’t all the unethical shit rich parents will do to keep their failsons and faildaughters from tumbling down the socioeconomic ladder — it’s that we use adolescents’ test scores to ration economic security in the first place. [link to “All College Admissions Are a Pay-to-Play Scandal”]
I always find "X is not a meritocracy" takes interesting, because they seem to imply that something else is, or could be, a meritocracy. I really wonder about that, though.
The college bribery scam is not a college bribery scam. It is a master class in how America — governed by a cheater, ruled by rule breakers, managed by a class that confuses its privilege for merit — functions. [with link to “The College Bribery Scam Reveals How Rich People Use 'Charity' to Cheat: Anand Giridharadas explains how alleged payoffs to test takers and athletic coaches are part of a larger ecosystem of elite hypocrisy.”]
America is being revealed right now as it hasn't been in my lifetime.
This, for me, is pretty much the only way that the Trump presidency has been useful—at least in terms of its influence on our politics and culture. The nation’s institutional faults, holes, and past errors are being laid bare in a particularly conspicuous way.
John Keogh responding to one of Nadirah Farah Foley’s remarks above:
I find it telling that most people who preach most ardently about the virtues of meritocracy take it as a given they’ll be the ones to win.
Take away that certainty and they find meritocracy a whole lot less attractive.
Nadirah Farah Foley responds:
something that’s surprised me is finding out that while the winners in a meritocratic system may believe in meritocracy more strongly, even those disadvantaged under such a system cling pretty tightly to meritocratic ideals.
We all internalize it because it's the only way to imagine we might end up having some control over it. Socio-economic victim-blaming works like every other type of victim-blaming.
