Lost in the Meritocracy (2005)

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/01/lost-in-the-meritocracy/303672/

by mitmads • 13 years ago

138 61 13 years ago

theatlantic.com

drakaal• 13 years ago

Author doesn't seem to understand what a meritocracy is.

You can't get lost in a meritocracy. Your merit determines your rank.

What can happen is that you don't understand how the merit is computed. Or you can misjudge your own merit.

AlexandrB• 13 years ago

I believe he's using meritocracy in an ironic sense, since on multiple occasions he notes that his only merit was being good at test-taking and displaying "aptitude".

scarmig• 13 years ago

Meritocracy, it bears repeating, was a word invented in a satire of the idea that you can do it.

Different interests have different merit functions. Even given a merit function there are huge gaps in actually applying the function to get a measure of merit out of a person. And even if you have a group of people falling into a well ordered list of true merits, there's a lot of difficulty in actually translating that merit into success.

rjbond3rd• 13 years ago

From the article: "A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize."

He was an outsider who became an insider, only to discover there was another elite (social, economic, political) level that he feared he'd never crack.

Eventually, he's bed-ridden with a cold, and for the first time, actually reads and gets lost in literary works (whereas academia had become a "scene" too focused on abstract literary criticism).

colemorrison2• 13 years ago

By that notion, America doesn't know what Democracy is, nor does China understand what Communism is. The definition isn't what's necessarily the problem - its the implementation of it. And by his account, that IS how we, as a people, tend to implement meritocracy.

ruswick• 13 years ago

The notion of education as a meritocracy is laughable at best. The correlation between standardized test scores, GPA, high school graduation rate and six-year college graduation rate are bound intimately to income and class. Poor people simply aren't afforded the resources to succeed, nor are they exposed to the social situations that promote ambition. Couple this the fact that the SAT, even when adjusted for economic disparity, is still skewed towards white men, and the notion that education (especially college admissions) is anything even remotely resemblant to a meritocracy is ridiculous.

Granted, there is probably a modicum more of equity than there was at the time of the story, given that colleges have de-emphasized standardized tests (to an extent), and score-inflation combined with increased tendency for curriculum to converge on tested material has made scores far less meaningful. (For instance, I got a 35 on the ACT, and I'm not inordinately intelligent by any stretch of the imagination. Moreover, I know not a single person who received below a 30 [save for a friend from Peru, for whom english is not a first language]. And this is just an average suburban pubic high school. I imagine that average scores at competitive private schools might be in the 33/2270 area. My hunch is that, as testing becomes more pervasive, underperforming education systems that begin using the test will shift the apex of the curve to the left, bringing even average students up the curve, but I digress.) However, this trivialization of testing has merely exacerbated inequality in admissions because it places on emphasis on things like internships (accessible only to the wealthy), hobbies/productive extracurriculars (which favors those who start young, and starting young often necessitates money and or involved parents), etc. Education has never been a meritocracy and it never will be.

redschell• 13 years ago

You would imagine wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Academy

2096 for 2008.

Even Phillips has underachievers, though they are still pretty damn good.

You have inflated expectations because you associate yourself with like-minded, equally exceptional individuals, which, in my opinion, is one of the most terribly underrated aspects of child rearing.

Of course, I don't know if you were just naturally drawn to people of that level, or if it was something your parents/teachers facilitated, but I do believe in the notion that you are the company you keep.

I can only imagine how much higher my standards in high school would have been if I had hung with a smarter bunch.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

You're seeing a lot of self-selection in reporting I imagine. TJHSST (public) is still I think the highest at just under 2,200. Stuyvesant (public) is around 2,100, and most of the top private schools (Exeter, Choate, etc) are in the 2,000 to 2,100 range. A more typical rich public high school is likely to be around 1,800.

As for your larger point, I disagree. I think the rush to deemphasize standardized test scores is racism more than it is embracing a broader view of merit. When I went to TJ (late 1990's) it was about 1/3 Asian/Indian (well-assimilated) and 2/3 white. Culturally it was a good mix--nerdy and hard working but not overly serious or competitive. Sometime in the early 2000's, they made admissions race blind. As a result the school is now 2/3 asian, 1/4 non-latino white, and 4% black or latino. 1% are low-income. My brother went six years behind me and he definitely disliked the cultural change: it became much more serious, much less laid-back, much more competitive and cut-throat. The alumni rant constantly about how the place has gone downhill, even though by the objective measures it is doing better than ever.

I personally think the change was a bad thing. I'd rather go to school with the guy who got a 2,200 on his SAT without much studying than the guy who got a 2,400 after prepping for years. But it's total cultural elitism on my part. To asians from immigrant families that line of thinking doesn't even make sense. If admissions measures certain things, why wouldn't you do everything you can to maximize your score on those measures?

My perception is that elite colleges have started to emphasize soft factors not so much because they want more cultural diversity, but because they don't want their schools to be taken over by asian recent immigrants and the culture that creates. Why else are the measures that sufficed for so long suddenly inadequate now? Why do we let in a champion unicycle rider over a hard-working kid with an SAT score 100 points higher? It's not like elite colleges get a large number of disadvantaged minorities in the process--their numbers are still tiny. No, what the new measures do is keep out asian immigrants whose parents don't emphasize "soft" pass-times, who don't have the economic security to pursue unorthodox ambitions, who usually don't have the cultural integration to be active in the community, etc.

WildUtah• 13 years ago

Ron Unz's The Myth of American Meritocracy is the latest news about how elite higher education is being shaped by culture and race and how it affects high achieving immigrants and religious minorities.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...

jonathanjaeger3• 13 years ago

I went to TJ from 2003-2007, and it was a majority white/Caucasian not Asian (unless it changed in just the last five or six years).

It certainly was pretty competitive and serious, but really it was what you made of it. I heard alumni rants about it going downhill after I left, so maybe that's something that happened by 2010 or it's just a consequence of what people say after they leave. There have been some critical newspaper articles about TJ in the last few years.

mattgrice• 13 years ago

ACT of 30 is 95th percentile. If you don't know anybody who got below that, you're living in a bubble.

joyeuse6701• 13 years ago

"Education has never been a meritocracy and it never will be." > Never? In practice I think it could be. I think the crux of the problem the author has is that the merits that the education and society looked for was not actual understanding of what was taught, but in the ability to act a certain way that seemed like they were educated, an act. This is largely due to the decisions being made by humans. The further you can abstract that, with say, machines, the more likely you can achieve a meritocracy I would think.

yummyfajitas4• 13 years ago

The correlation between standardized test scores, GPA, high school graduation rate and six-year college graduation rate are bound intimately to income and class.

So what? Why do you believe that merit is not correlated with income and class?

Suppose, hypothetically, that some reference classes are simply intrinsically better than others at math and reading. Wouldn't any meritocratic system result in rewards being correlated with membership in the aforementioned reference class?

You are correct that using "holistic" admissions rather than standardized tests is likely to reduce meritocracy. That's the whole point. Meritocracy gets you too many of those geeky Asians, and it would be really bad if colleges were full of Asians.

[edit: My last sentence is indeed sarcastic. I favor meritocracy, not ethnic corporatism.]

gms• 13 years ago

Is your last sentence sarcastic?

prostoalex• 13 years ago

It's bound to divorce rate, that differs greatly between socioeconomic circles and ethnicities. End of the day it's tied up to the time parents dedicate to their children's education, and for divorced or never married single parents on a single income this is a tough proposition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-...

Starmie• 13 years ago

I understand your point about merit being correlated with income and class. It is obviously true that wealthy, upper-class high school seniors will have higher test scores, more impressive accomplishments, and (frankly) superior academic abilities when compared with their lower-class counterparts. But you must know that this is attributable to differences in upbringing and opportunities, with varying levels of immediate relevancy (e.g. SAT tutoring, better teachers, parents who introduce intellectual discourse into the home). This means that any supposedly "pure" meritocracy, which does not account for those differences of opportunity, is going to be heavily biased towards those who were born into privilege. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle of class immobility that, I think, most people find undesirable. If you don't agree with the idea that two children with equal natural talents should, in a perfect world, have equal opportunities to pursue those talents, then I'd love to hear your version of meritocracy.

When you say "holistic" admissions, I'm not sure whether you mean holistic in the sense that colleges use it (i.e. taking evidence of talent outside of grades and test scores into account) or as a reference to programs which take race or class into account. Either way, you present standardized tests as the more meritocratic approach, which is silly. A perfect SAT score means a student is great at basic math, reading, and writing in an extremely specific context. That can be an extremely useful foundation, but do you honestly think that indicates this student is the "best?" That someone with lower scores who has published a bestselling book or won an international science prize or started a great humanitarian effort is on a lower tier in the meritocracy? Of course, all of these things are biased even more heavily towards rich students, but that's why class and background must also be taken into account.

I suspect I may have misunderstood parts of what you were saying, so please do clarify (if you can make it through my little word dump :P).

dizzystar• 13 years ago

>> So what? Why do you believe that merit is not correlated with income and class?

I went to inner city schools. You have no idea how poor they are. Even the smartest kids who really wanted to learn had no chance.

Examples:

-> My Calculus teacher taught use that you can use advanced polynomials to beat craps.

-> My economics teacher didn't teach us anything all year. I'm not exaggerating here. We literally never opened our books in class and I don't think we had more than 4 quizzes the entire time.

-> My Spanish teacher was about the same, except he did give one lesson per month, but we mostly chatted in class. If you were already Hispanic, you got an A. If you weren't, you got a C. No point trying beyond that.

-> Physics was my first class of the day and I slept through it every time and it was generally the same zoo as all the other classes. I had the highest score in the class.

-> The people with the highest grades in our biology class were the people who didn't show up but once a month and refused to touch a knife. Those of us who sat in class, dissected the pigs, and really tried to learn the material generally got D's.

-> "Computer class" was 4 years of learning how to type.

-> Homework was virtually non-existent.

-> I can assure you that merit had nothing at all to do with the grades I received.

I can't possibly enumerate how bad the education was in one post. You had two options: go to a community college or go to the state college. Anything else would have caused the guidance counselors look at you in shame and they would tell you things like "No one in this district went to that kind of college, so it's no point applying."

As you can gather, I was in all of the so-called advanced classes. I can only imagine what the "normal" classes were like.

colemorrison2• 13 years ago

By the absolute definition of Meritocracy, no, it's not. But then again, by the absolute definition of Democracy, America is not.

However, in the sense that nature/nurture (being born to a well off family that constantly provides opportunities) leads to more "merits" it technically is. Therefore the real problem is that it is so -bound- to income and class.

(and just because we have no explicit labels for class, if you think that such a notion is an "illusion" then you are living in a bubble.)

A child raised in an abusive home has a far lesser probability of success than a child raised in a supportive one. This indeed disbands the zeitgeist of meritocracy (anyone can do it), but reinforces the definition of it (success based on achieved merits).

Zeitgeist of Meritocracy !== Definition of Meritocracy !== Implementation of Meritocracy

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

It isn't a meritocracy, but at least it is more meritocratic than many systems that have preceded it.

smky80• 13 years ago

> the fact that the SAT, even when adjusted for economic disparity, is still skewed towards white men,

Did you mean to say asian women?

guylhem2• 13 years ago

This is the best article I've read these last few weeks - about education, signalling and redemption.

Many people play the education game just like this guy did, but find their salvation on the way. There are many opportunities, like when working on his summerjob he was reminded that selfbetterment was the goal, and offered to come to a meeting.

Along the read, I was worried he might miss it - yet he did find the purpose on the way.

If you play education for the signalling, you will get the piece of paper, but what else? Existential emptiness? Feeling of class envy? He is really envious of the pompous folk with the castle and the european car? Can't he strive for anything more???

Learn stuff you love, learn it because you think it is worth your limited time on this earth, and because you will be able to make a good use of it.

Whether there is a meritocracy or not does not really matter, if you can learn and make one around yourself.

jpdoctor• 13 years ago

> Along the read, I was worried he might miss it - yet he did find the purpose on the way.

I couldn't help but think that he was scamming the reader just as he scams everyone else in the story.

By the end, when sitting down to actually ingest literature, it sounded like the story of redemption is something that The Atlantic would publish so he made redemption part of the story. It wasn't clear that the tiger changed his stripes at all.

Of course, the fact that I made it to the end tells you: I fell for it hook, line and sinker, and I'm just as bad as the rest of the suckers in his story.

tunesmith• 13 years ago

Ugh. Not at the article itself - it's very well-written - but at the mentality it describes, which I get was his point.

I suppose you could see it as "hacking Princeton" but also seems diametrically opposed to a hacker ethos, where you're into autodidacting for the love of the knowledge itself, without putting up with any of the pomp and bullshit that others like to layer on top of it.

I've been aggressively opposite of the mentality in the article which means that I basically learn stuff while my friends talk about tv shows and watch sports - I can't really talk to any of them about stuff I learn other than wait for them to laugh when I'm done. But it seems the alternative is to leave them behind for other sets of friends and a lifestyle where I have to wear suits and learn buzz phrases - and my friends don't tease me about the stuff I learn and seem to respect it.

cf• 13 years ago

The alternative is to surround yourself with other people that love to learn. They might not love learning the same things that you do, but that enthusiasm will enrich your life. Though there is value in keeping around your mates.

lmm• 13 years ago

I read pieces like this and wonder if the authors went to the same kind of high-end university as me. The answer seems to be that they didn't - even if it was the same name on the door, it was always for an arts degree. I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that a magazine writer studied English, but I'd be really interested to hear similar criticism from a graduate of a hard science, which really did feel like a meritocracy when I went through it.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

I'd imagine that's because the admissions criteria colleges use (things like the SAT), does a much better job selecting for people with the right aptitude for hard sciences, at least at the undergraduate level, than it does of selecting for people with the right aptitude for English Literature.

redwood• 13 years ago

My experience was incredibly similar to his, though I felt like the poor one in high school more than in college. I studied physics at a top public school, so sure a different beast: but the dizzying (and awesome) exploration I did, the meandering searching, endless conversing, questioning etc: very similar experience. I never read a book until after college (that is, a non-scientific book)

freshhawk• 13 years ago

I couldn't help but worry as I was reading that that it may have been posted here in praise of the way that these "hustlers", "doers" and "advancement hackers" had found a way to out compete those who were stuck in their stody old ways of actually learning things and successfully disrupted the ecosystem.

Then I realized that it was more likely jumping on the "higher education is broken" bandwagon and missing the delicious irony that every personality attribute, except knowing aristocratic privilege, being held up for contempt in this piece is openly admired in this culture when practised in the tech business world.

Maybe there is some alternate universe where this article was posted as a scathing critique of the whole "hustler/growth hacker" meme and a warning about how the same attitudes in elite higher education have completely destroyed their ability to create any value.

I'd like to move there.

ims2• 13 years ago

Okay, I was trying to stay sympathetic to this article as I read it, but it bears almost no resemblance to reality as I've known it (not a stranger to these institutions).

This is less an indictment of "the system" than further evidence that systems can be gamed. Is this a shock to anyone?

Our narrator seems to have coasted through a variety of moderately prestigious (an adjective meaning that other people think whatever it is must be very discerning) opportunities. He chose to squander them out of a seemingly nihilistic/angsty/meta-hipstery and extremely adolescent rage against the machine.

What a pity. For him.

lbarrow3• 13 years ago

The author clearly regrets the way he wasted his time in college. That's the whole point of the piece.

ims2• 13 years ago

No, I don't think so. Or if so, it was ancillary. He wasn't saying "I should have done things differently" -- instead he was trying to show how depraved, spoiled, and inadequate people are inside the ivory tower. Much as in "Less Than Zero" by Bret Easton Ellis, we are supposed to be shocked at how the privileged elite are venal, cruel, phony, unworthy, and get away with it too.

You may or may not find that persuasive. But just as with "Less Than Zero" (a terrible, terrible book) and much of the similarly themed failure memoir genre, you get the sense that it is wildly exaggerated fabulism with a hysterical moral tone that is supposed to ensnare the reader in outrage.

argonaut5• 13 years ago

His "evidence" is anecdotal. Your evidence is "anecdotal." So too will be my evidence. But the cynicism he describes mirrors a lot of what I observed and continue to observe in the majority (but not the vast majority) of students at top universities. The nihilistic focus on grades/GPA/taking easy classes. The great lack of focus on actually learning anything or absorbing different perspectives. The focus on social proof and prestige. etc. etc.

twic• 13 years ago

So what happened when he got to Oxford? I'm on the edge of my seat here!

lbarrow3• 13 years ago

Based on the way he ends the article, and the reflectiveness with which he wrote it, I'm guessing he finally grew up.

lbarrow3• 13 years ago

Great article -- I really identify a lot with the culture the author describes, particularly the way liberal arts students often scorn the sciences and tear down the Western canon without bothering to read it. It's a shame.

As to the drug abuse and alcoholism, Bob Dylan put it really well in "Like A Rolling Stone":

"You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely, But you know you only used to get juiced in it."

People who go through college the like the author realize, deep down, that they are not getting an education. And some of them also realize that eventually, being a fraud catches up with everyone -- even if it's only in the form of a personal revelation.

bbbhn• 13 years ago

"Rules of Attraction" was far more entertaining than this drivel.

sbierwagen• 13 years ago

Important context: Walter Kirn was born in 1962, and entered Princeton in 1979.

twoodfin• 13 years ago

I guess I wasn't reading it closely enough, because the first time I realized that was the mention of John Lennon's assassination.

Ogre• 13 years ago

It's funny, I realized when he mentioned Nassau Street that I "entered Princeton" at just about the same time he did. Only I was 9, and was only a resident of the town, not a student of the college. My memories are somewhat different than his :)

ceautery• 13 years ago

>>novels I'd ever cracked were Moby-Dick and Frankenstein—both sold to me by a crafty high school teacher as gripping tales of adventure, which they weren't.

Oh, I wish you hadn't said that, you unclean cad! Other than that, this article was a work of art. Thanks for the link, mitmads.

reader50003• 13 years ago

Humans: it's status hierarchies all the way up.

The main dishonesty with the piece is his portrayal of himself as the only bullshitter in the game. I bet the girl that hugged him after he lost the Rhodes thing plagiarized her personal statement (or something).

In many ways his essay, rather than a deep critique of human obsession with status signalling, was just a big status signal itself, since essentially the take home point was "look how fucking good at status signalling I am".

danbmil99• 13 years ago

Having attended college during the years the author did, I'm wondering if this is more of a timepiece than a reflection of today's reality.

BTW these are the exact same years Obama went to Columbia, and was apparently a bit "drifty" (read: high and bad grades)

RockyMcNuts• 13 years ago

Calvin: "People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance."

Hobbes:"You misspelled Weltanschauung."

Lost in the Meritocracy (2005)

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