30 Time September 30, 2019
In recent years, the “Ivy Plus” colleges have
enrolled more students from the top 1% of the
income distribution than from the bottom
half. They devote vast resources to educating
these already privileged students. The most
selective schools spend almost eight times as
much per student as the least selective ones,
according to one estimate. And the modest in-
creases in economic diversity at elite colleges
are built on a model that cannot be scaled up.
Elite graduates then dominate the highest-
paying jobs. Top bankers, a Wall Street eth-
nography observes, are recruited “only from
the Ivy League and a few comparable schools
like MIT and Stanford.” Four-fifths of the
partners at the most profitable law firm in
America graduated from a “top five” law
school. Elite schooling has become the dynas-
tic technology of choice for the 1%.
Universities
hope that doubling
down on meritoc-
racy will square
unequal outcomes
with equal oppor-
tunities, so that
they can become
more economi-
cally diverse with-
out becoming
less academically
exclusive.
But this is a
false hope. Rich
parents pay for
art and sports les-
sons, hire tutors and, critically, send their
children to schools that spend many times
more on educating their students than mid-
dle-class schools. Colleges and professional
schools extend and increase that training
gap. If the difference between what a typi-
cal one-percenter and a typical middle-class
family invest in their children were put into
a trust fund, to be given to the child on the
death of the parents, this meritocratic inheri-
tance would amount to a bequest of roughly
$10 million per child.
Poor and middle-class children cannot
compete with rich children who have ab-
sorbed all this training. And while corruption
is real and outrageous, grades, test scores and
other meritocratic achievements explain the
bulk of elite families’ dominance in admis-
sions. The most elite schools actually do have
the most accomplished students.
Common usage equates meritocracy with
equality of opportunity, and outrage at elite
self-dealing implicitly valorizes meritocratic
ideals. But when outcomes become sufficiently
unequal, opportunities also become unequal.
Elite universities have assumed aristocracy’s
mantle, only now with a meritocratic twist.Equality rEquirEs reducing the abso-
lute difference between what is invested in
the most educated and the less educated.
Elite universities must adopt a democratic
model— teaching many more students, chosen
on the basis of new criteria. Education must
become less hierarchical and less meritocratic.
Both changes are practical. The share of
Americans age 25 to 29 to get a B.A. nearly
quadrupled between 1940 and 1980, but the
rate of growth then slowed dramatically and
has now stalled. By contrast, expenditures
have kept growing, so colleges now spend
much more per
student than they
used to, and the
Ivy League spends
nearly twice as
much as it did just
two decades ago.
The top schools
can afford to edu-
cate twice as many
students as they
do now. While a
few elite colleges
can retain their
exclusivity while
growing modestly,
doubling enroll-
ments across the board requires making top
colleges less selective and less elite.
Elite universities should embrace change.
When everybody wants to go to the same
“best” schools, admissions processes must
justify the immense inequality that they pro-
duce. Even the most powerful universities be-
come slaves to a narrow conception of merit.
In a more equal world, where people went
to college would matter less and applicants
would pursue different schools for different
reasons. Universities could pursue whatever
values they held dear, crafting admissions
standards that favored community service, or
academic scholarship, or a thousand other vir-
tues. The elite would become less exclusive,
but more free.
America’s top universities face a stark
choice between equality and eliteness. They
should choose equality.Markovits is the author of The Meritocracy TrapA tour group in front of Sterling Memorial Library on
the Yale University campus in New Haven, Conn.TheView Opener
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