
$330,000 in aid bought my slot in the American meritocracy. Now I see its flaws - tomcam
https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/7/20/15999718/financial-aid-education-meritocracy-income-economic-inequality
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WalterSear
_giving me a permanent marker of upper-class status and a near guarantee of
material comfort._

Someone needs to let the author in on the bad news.

 _Many people whose parents pay the full tuition of $50,000 to $60,000 per
year have, without any hint of irony or discrepancy, described themselves to
me as “middle class.”_

Because by certain perfectly reasonable definitions, they _are_ middle class.
The problem is, the author is trying to measure middle class by very different
metrics - those of his parents, and via the statistical interpretations that
support that position. But whatever 'most' people in the 'middle' of the
economic scale make for almost meaningless metric for a social class, which is
driven as much by the outcomes of that income allow as by the relative size of
your slice of the pie.

The problem is that while his parents >were< middle class, if you take 'middle
class' to mean the relative freedom and safety that it once stood for, his
parents aren't that any more. The country has progressed technologically, and
regressed as a society, and the independence and security that was once
afforded the middle class is no longer available via the channels that his
parents started out on.

But, admitting this would involve admitting that the precious society of his
childhood was complicit in it's own demise, which, in some parts of the
country, is quite literally inconceivable.

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squozzer
>On a more personal level, we should be more truthful, with others and with
ourselves, about the situation we are in. This does not, and should not,
require a performance of guilt — this has nothing to do with being a “bad”
person.

Agreed, but sadly, this interpretation of "privilege" is not what people mean.
It IS about labeling certain people as "BAD", who therefore must be punished
somehow.

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daveolsim
This type of argument about meritocracy and class, although important, is
missing the point.

It's not as if you eliminated all class contributions to elite school
attendance suddenly problems with meritocracy would disappear.

The problem is that we overvalue superficial indicators of ability or human
capital as if they were perfect, and ignore more significant, directly
relevant ones.

Not too long ago, there was a linked article about selection bias in education
([https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/03/29/why-selection-bias-
is-t...](https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/03/29/why-selection-bias-is-the-most-
powerful-force-in-education/)). Lurking in that insightful essay were even
darker problems, though: if you look at Figure 1 of that piece, what you might
notice was the huge spread in CLA scores as a function of SAT, revealing how
imperfect SAT is. But it goes further than that, because each of those points
is a mean, and behind each point is an even wider distribution. What we tend
to do is take something like SAT, and treat it as if it were a perfect rank
ordering of ability, when it's not. I'm not saying SAT is all it takes to get
into an elite school; what I'm saying is that we overvalue things like SAT in
evaluating outcomes, and ignore all the vicissitudes of life. It's not a
class-based issue, it's much broader than that.

This extends much more broadly in my opinion than education, though, to
licensing laws, regulatory capture, patent abuse, corporate management, etc.
There's a kind of "winner takes all", or "the end justifies all
rationalizations for the means", assumption with regard to credit in our
society, and meritocracy is just one symptom of this.

It becomes mindless at times.

