Elites in the contemporary U.S. — whether they be business elites, political elites, cultural elites or academic elites — tend, as a general rule, to think of the U.S. as a meritocracy. That belief is, at best, highly questionable, and more likely simply false, but it is psychologically appealing: people who have “made it” like to think they have done so because they are smarter, more talented and/or more hard-working than those who have not. The advantages that many (though not all) successful people began life with — and for which accordingly they cannot take personal credit — tend to get minimized or occluded altogether in the stories they often tell themselves about their success. (These points are not original and are likely fleshed out in, e.g., D. Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap, which I haven’t read.)
It is in the nature of most societies, and certainly of the contemporary U.S., that “success” must be rationed: if everyone were successful then no one would be, and the notion of success would lose its meaning. Thus, to put it bluntly, success (of some) requires failure (of others). Middle-class and upper-middle-class people who have children are aware of this, and also of the perhaps somewhat narrowing opportunities to acquire upper-middle-class incomes, which accounts for their concern, sometimes amounting to panic, about giving their children every possible leg up in the “meritocratic” competition.
As is widely known, much of this concern in recent years has focused on getting children into “elite” colleges and universities. There is a widespread perception — partly, though only partly, rooted in fact — that attending one of a set of elite institutions gives one significant advantages in the battle for success. The precise list of such institutions is debatable, but at a rough cut it would comprise: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford (HYPS, for short) plus the rest of the Ivy League (Columbia, Penn, Brown, etc.) plus, probably, Duke, Univ. of Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern, maybe certain state flagship universities such as Chapel Hill or U.Texas Austin or U.Michigan Ann Arbor, and then Amherst, Williams, maybe Swarthmore and Haverford, and perhaps a few others. Institutions of this sort enroll a very small percentage of the total college students in the U.S., but attendance at them is perceived to confer various sorts of advantages, a perception that (to repeat) has a partial, but only a partial, grounding in empirical reality. That reality is more complicated than perception goes almost without saying: for instance, look at the elite business or professional circles in any medium-sized or even large city, especially in areas other than the Amtrak northeast corridor, and you’re likely to find a good many people who have attended regional universities or colleges with no particular national reputation, or even in some cases no university at all. Still, if you’re a kid whose ambition in life is, say, to work in the upper reaches of financial capital or in the upper reaches of management consulting (McKinsey, etc.) or perhaps in Silicon Valley, attending one of the aforementioned places may well confer a not insignificant advantage. (ETA: A commenter at another site has repeatedly observed, presumably mostly correctly, that the likes of McKinsey restrict their entry-level recruiting and hiring to a small list of schools.)
As is also well known, the perceived privileged position of these elite institutions has subjected them to an increasing amount of public scrutiny and, in some cases, resentment. Running these places has become increasingly something of an administrator’s nightmare. They are overrun with applications, with far more qualified students applying than they can admit, and they are increasingly perceived as producing too many students who have managed to pass four years in an environment that reinforces their pre-existing views and predilections rather than challenging them.
In addition, these places have come under scrutiny for the ways they educate (or try to educate) and also to assess their students. Grade inflation at Harvard was only a semi-problem in the late 1970s; now it is a Problem capital P. A recent column in Harvard Magazine by an undergraduate, Aden Barton ’24, describes a “high-level seminar” in which students did almost all the reading at the beginning of the semester but then increasingly stopped doing it, giving preference to extracurricular and other commitments, until by the end of the course no one was doing it: “As time went on, the percentage of readings each of us did went from nearly 100 to nearly 0.” All of them got an A anyway. Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, Amanda Claybaugh, was quoted in the NYT (a quote reproduced, with proper attribution, in the student’s column) as saying that “students feel the need to distinguish themselves outside the classroom because they are essentially indistinguishable inside the classroom” — a point that probably applies with even more force to humanities and social-science classes than STEM ones.
This gives rise to more than one problem. First, it relieves students of the need to make trade-offs; since real life requires hard choices and trade-offs, being a student should require some of that too. If one will get an A without doing the work, fewer people will do it, and they may end up feeling, as Barton seems to, that they have missed out on something important (i.e., an actual education). Second, it reinforces what Barton refers to as a “transactional attitude toward the whole college experience.” Third, it may further undermine the legitimacy and standing of elite universities in the public’s perception. A college that (1) admits 5 percent or fewer of its applicants, while giving thumb-on-the-scale preferences to legacies, athletes, and children of faculty and large donors, and (2) hands out A’s the way cupcakes are handed out at an elementary-school birthday party is not positioning itself well to maintain its supposed position as (to quote the opening lines of a recent lawsuit) “America’s leading university.”
Elite universities not only reproduce privilege; they also, to at least some extent, legitimate it. Race-based affirmative action in admissions, now outlawed by the Supreme Court, contributed not only to students’ experiences but also to this legitimating function, helping to persuade the public at large that such places were trying, in however partial or superficial a way, to mirror the increasing diversity of a multiracial society. The multi-pronged attacks on elite universities that have captured the headlines, coupled with self-inflicted wounds such as the trends described in Barton’s column, give rise to a sense that the (supposed) meritocracy is grappling with crises that, if left unaddressed, may eventually reach an “existential” climax.