Within days or weeks, the Supreme Court is going to render a decision on the future of affirmative action in higher ed. If things go as expected, conservatives will be cheering as these policies are struck down — and progressives will be wailing.
But maybe we can all take this moment to reimagine the college admissions process itself, which has morphed into one of the truly destructive institutions in American society.
The modern college admissions era was launched over half a century ago with the best of intentions — to turn finishing schools for the Protestant establishment into talent factories for all comers. But, in the end, the elite universities merely exchanged one privileged elite for another. Today, you don’t need bloodlines stretching back to the Mayflower to have a decent shot at getting into an elite school, but you do need to be born into a family with the resources to make lavish investments in your early education.
In 2017 research led by Raj Chetty found that students from families in the top 1 percent of earners were 77 times as likely to get admitted into the Ivy League than students from families making less than $30,000 a year. In that same year, students from the top income quintile were 16 times more numerous at the University of North Carolina, a state school, than students from the bottom quintile.
We now have whole industries that take attendance at an elite school as a marker of whether they should hire you or not. So the hierarchies built by the admissions committees get replicated across society. America has become a nation in which the elite educated few marry each other, send their kids to the same exclusive schools, move to the same wealthy neighborhoods and pass down disproportionate economic and cultural power from generation to generation — the meritocratic Brahmin class.
And, as Michael Sandel of Harvard has argued, the meritocratic culture gives the “winners” the illusion that this sorting mechanism is righteous and…