
Lost in the Meritocracy (2005) - mitmads
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/01/lost-in-the-meritocracy/303672/
======
ruswick
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_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.]

~~~
dizzystar
>> _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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I'm well aware of how bad many US schools are. But that is besides the point.

If the people coming out of that high school don't know math, economics,
spanish or physics, then they have less academic merit than students from a
better school who do. It might be unfair that some people get a sucky
school/parents/genes, but that doesn't contradict meritocracy.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
If it's not a meritocracy for the most important 18 years of a person's life,
can you really call it a meritocracy?

------
guylhem
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
> _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.

------
lmm
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.

~~~
rayiner
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.

------
freshhawk
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.

------
ims
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.

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

~~~
ims
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.

------
lbarrow
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.

------
drakaal
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.

~~~
scarmig
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.

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

~~~
Ogre
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 :)

------
RockyMcNuts
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."

------
tunesmith
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
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.

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

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

------
reader5000
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".

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ceautery
>>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.

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danbmil99
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)

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

