"By “merit” I don’t mean cosmic merit — moral deservingness, a judgment by the almighty at the gates of heaven. I mean the traits that enable a student to profit from an elite university education, including cognitive aptitude, conscientiousness, and a thirst for knowledge."
The premise sounds nice however I'd gander that you'd likely end up with a similar results as is the case now, a trend towards the connected and interested wealthy making up the student body of Harvard and other elite colleges.
This is due to people having money being able to afford good educational programs for their children at the start while those without significant affluent backgrounds will have significantly less access to quality educational resources before they reach college age.
On paper meritocracy sounds reasonably fair but in practice I believe we'll find it to be otherwise.
> This is due to people having money being able to afford good educational programs for their children at the start while those without significant affluent backgrounds will have significantly less access to quality educational resources before they reach college age.
When you survey high achieving people in the world, or in your wikipedia history, do you mostly find people who got there because of the opportunities their parents paid for? How many of those people have brothers and sisters - do you also find that their entire family does well? I don't see that. At most I see richer/more fortunate people have a higher average. But the idea that it's the dominant factor is in conflict with observation - that it's really common to see people who do much better than those around them even though they all had about the same level of resources.
Also: is your thesis that the more money that is spent on a child's education, the better they will do? How do you square that with observations? Do you believe that claim is supported by evidence? I don't - I think that for example a town with poor but middle class people (i.e. a suburb of Shanghai) would have way higher scores than a town of blue-collar workers in the US who had nominally higher pay. i.e., pay/spend doesn't really matter (unless pay is so low that the kids are directly feeling the effect of poverty). Do you believe that school districts which spend more per student also have higher scores as a result? Have you ever looked up that claim?
Also note that by your thesis that spending money on childhood education leads to improvements in "merit", the educational quality of US & ivy league students should have been going up dramatically in the last 30 years as prices grew much faster than inflation. Yet, I'd bet that per person, Ivy graduate productivity (patents/person, innovative academic publications/person, etc.) has been dropping the entire time. If money makes people more academically proficient, how do you explain that?
> When you survey high achieving people in the world, or in your wikipedia history, do you mostly find people who got there because of the opportunities their parents paid for?
When you look into the backgrounds of the people whose names live on as the units we use to describe and measure physical qualities I think you'll find most had a pretty good early educational foundation and financial support from family or a patron.
> Yes, look up the
How many of those people have brothers and sisters - do you also find that their entire family does well?
You can find other examples of Scientists/Mathematicians having remarkable siblings as well. However in the past the female siblings, while respected by their bother(s), weren't always given the same opportunities to persue intellectual ambitions as their male counterparts were.
Is this a fair summary of your view: meritocracy doesn't really measure merit, since parents can use their money to improve whatever scores you get?
My answer: why then do rich parents routinely have some children who can't cut it? Why does parental wealth correlate less well with achievement than parental education levels (i.e. parents who are lottery winners do not have scientifically-advanced children, but highly educated parents do, regardless of wealth?). My view is that a lot of this runs in families, which is why even ww2 refugee elite academics and their children did fine in the US despite poverty/flight/loss of nearly everything. Smartness does lead to wealth since they invent things and are fast, etc. but the behavior of people who have recently gained wealth doesn't seem accounted for in your measurements. Let alone the large number of failed attempts to show that money can actually improve standardized testing scores. [yes, I believe these tests generally can't be well-studied for. It's not as solid as you think. Send links if you can find one which suggests that you can train an average person to have a 99th percentile SAT or similar test. People attack the tests w/out really looking into it at all; they're super correlated with college GPA and many other pro-social lifetime measurements.]
Second: Do you think the new system is less gameable than the old? i.e. relying on recommendation letters, holistic applications, extra-curriculars, the ability to tell stories where you're the victim, race preferences (not origin, literal race i.e. not distinguishing American descendants of slavery from recently immigrated Africans)? I think these things are even more game-able than before. i.e. read the docs on the Harvard discrimination case - the administrators were using a squishy "personality" evaluation score to discriminate against Asians.
Needless to say, SAT is proven to be very correlated with things we value - I strongly doubt that Harvard's replacement system has anywhere near that predictive ability.
To state it in a testable way: good scores on the SAT/MCAT will strongly correlate with good med school class rank, graduation rate, low rate of malpractice, percent chance to get a medical patent or do widely cited research, etc. Squishy holistic admissions will NOT correlate to many good things - best it can do is correlate with socially manipulable soft science PhDs and papers. But it won't help you with anything that's not gamed already.
> SAT is proven to be very correlated with things we value
What do you mean 'we', kemosabe? If you mean the western neoliberal political economic system, then let's talk about whether or not what that system values is really a mark of merit, or of some other social and historic factors.
If you think "we" means <gestures wildly at everyone>, then that's kind of proof that the people who define "merit" are the ones who turn out to – surprise – measure as highly meritorious.
What do you value then? Testing for things that correlate with that would be a reasonable proposal. Also I'm not a "Kemosabe", not sure what that is. I said we because things like low rates of malpractice, success in grad schools, research seems fair to accept as a general trait to select for in admissions. If you have another proposal please explain. My view is that soft skills to get into test-less ivies are unlikely to select for something more valuable than the prior system.
> On paper meritocracy sounds reasonably fair but in practice I believe we'll find it to be otherwise.
In practice, the non-connected/wealthy Whites and Asians are faced with a choice between 'meritocracy' with all the caveats you list, or a system that still has all those caveats, but also actively racially discriminates against them.
In fact, given how under-represented Whites are at the Ivies, all those connections and wealth fall far short of counter-balancing discrimination against them, so it's not just the lower-class Whites that are made 2nd-class citizens: https://archive.org/details/ivy-league-demographics
Does it actively discriminate or is that just a talking point that is repeated?
Presumably what we want to say is if we have 100 children with similar economic and educational backgrounds and experiences and 70 are of type A, 25 type B, and 5 are type C then when it comes to the college body there ought to be relatively similar representation by those ratios.
That is for every 100 students in college, 70ish are type A, 25ish are type B, and 5ish are type C.
However that's with the premise that each type's makeup of the whole is also having a similar background and experience which we also know is likely not to be true.
So if you wanted to be "more fair" you'd have to include socioeconomic conditions each applicant is coming from rather than just purely by particular racial makeup.
So if you have Low income, middle, high, and 300 students, then take 100 from each income bracket, then within those brackets aim for the racial/cultural make-up be reflective of those income brackets make-up.
I believe that Asian Americans are actively discriminated against in elite college admissions in the US (as mentioned in the article here). This has resulted in several court cases with mixed findings, but even in the 'wins' to support the status quo, it seems to me that there was fairly strong evidence of discrimination.
The premise sounds nice however I'd gander that you'd likely end up with a similar results as is the case now, a trend towards the connected and interested wealthy making up the student body of Harvard and other elite colleges.
This is due to people having money being able to afford good educational programs for their children at the start while those without significant affluent backgrounds will have significantly less access to quality educational resources before they reach college age.
On paper meritocracy sounds reasonably fair but in practice I believe we'll find it to be otherwise.