
T.M. Landry and the Myth of Meritocracy in Education - IfOnlyYouKnew
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/12/tm-landry-and-myth-meritocracy-education/578149/
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TomMckenny
>And yet, they did not implode the moment they breathed the rarified air of
the Ivy League. Some struggled or dropped out, but a number of Landry
students—particularly those who had spent more time in traditional
schools—simply continued to advance.

This is quite interesting: completely average students who normally would have
no chance of admission can handle ivy league educations. It does appear that
exclusive universities are not selecting the smartest 18 year olds in the land
but bestowing a title of permanent employment and business advantage on a
select group of people of average intellect.

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burkaman
I think it's pretty well known that Ivy League schools are much harder to get
into than they are to get out of, at least among college-aged people. That's
by design, but also partly out of necessity; it's not possible to design a
curriculum so difficult that only 2,000 students in the country can graduate,
and then accurately select those 2,000 students from 50,000 applicants.

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barry-cotter
Reliably picking the top 4% and tailoring the curriculum to them sounds very
difficult. With a large enough potential student body and a small enough
enrolment a sufficiently prestigious institution can have any kind of student
population it wants.

Cal Tech students are admitted purely on academic merit and they’re the only
elite university in the US with a significant drop out rate. I doubt they have
any graduates who aren’t in the top percentile.

In practice you’re mostly right. Look at schools like Yale Law or France’s
École Nationale d’Administration[1] where the student body is so smart that
half of them would pass the exams if handed the reading list and syllabus for
the exams and given a year to prepare.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/École_nationale_d%27administra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/École_nationale_d%27administration)

~~~
ummonk
>where the student body is so smart that half of them would pass the exams if
handed the reading list and syllabus for the exams and given a year to
prepare.

Is that unusual?

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barry-cotter
Yes. If you give an average class of 15 year olds high school textbooks and
past exam papers and tell them you’ll give them lots of money if they get a
good grade they won’t do it. Given expert instruction, dedicated time to learn
and every support plenty fail.

If being able to learn independently from a textbook was normal boot camps
would not exist.

~~~
leereeves
Even students who are able to learn independently need credentials.

And is your statement about the average class of 15 year olds based on
research or is it pure speculation?

~~~
barry-cotter
Credentials are very helpful but none of the boot camps gives credentials
worth a damn and plenty of their graduates get good jobs. Credentials are not
always bad everywhere necessary.

My statement about the average class of 15 year olds is based on my exposure
to the children I tutor, having been a 15 year old myself, observation and a
certain amount of reading in the psychological literature, mostly the
monotonic increase in conscientiousness that goes at least into the late
twenties.

I actually have great respect for the capacity of teenagers to learn and
achieve; I just think very little of their discipline. I’ve no doubt at least
a third of the average high school class could do lambdaschool’s front end or
data science course. Given a similar level of support, scheduling and
structure I’m sure at least a quarter could complete the curriculum of many
Master’s degrees. But the average college student is older, more conscientious
and smarter than the average 15 year old. Twenty percent drop out. More
graduate in six years than in four. The average 15 year old is in no way
prepared to self study given just text books and a syllsbus.

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hvs
While the Ivy League has been associated with "selectivity," was anyone under
the impression that admission came down to "meritocracy"? The Ivys have always
been shorthand for "America's Aristocratic Schools" and the dumping ground for
rich people's kids. That random people from disadvantaged upbringings can
thrive there is hardly a surprise. The only question is where the aristocracy
would send their kids if the Ivys opened up admissions to everyone.

~~~
ummonk
Right. This isn't surprising to anyone who knows how the Ivys work. It just
makes it harder for the Ivys to pretend otherwise.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
>America’s supposedly meritocratic system of elite higher education revolves
around an intensive search for the most capable students.

That is an incorrect assumption. The elite institutions want people who will
be part of the elite. The big draw for these is networking opportunities. If
one of your dorm mates is a Justice, the other a Senator, and the third a CEO
of a Fortune 500, when you say found a startup, you are going to be able to
pitch your idea to some very powerful and wealthy individuals. Now how do
these elite institutions make sure they get future elites. Well, throughout
human history and even now, the most likely way to become elite is having
parents who are elite. So students who have elite parents are
disproportionately represented. The other way to be elite is to have
extraordinary talent combined with extraordinary determination combined with
some luck. The colleges therefore use test scores/ extracurricular activity
etc to select for these people. It is no coincidence that the founders of
Google, Microsoft, and Facebook all came from elite institutions as have a
majority of Presidents and Supreme Court Justices. The benefit of an elite
institution is not the curriculum but who your classmates are.

~~~
DuskStar
Exactly! If I had the opportunity to go to an institution with Harvard-tier
educational opportunities and reputation but no legacy admissions (merit-based
only) or one where a third of the students were children of the rich and
powerful, I know which one I'd choose.

(Of course, if I was one of those "children of the rich and powerful" I'd
probably choose the first school - much better environment for finding
opportunities to invest in. Less competition, after all)

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rayiner
> Exactly! If I had the opportunity to go to an institution with Harvard-tier
> educational opportunities and reputation but no legacy admissions (merit-
> based only) or one where a third of the students were children of the rich
> and powerful, I know which one I'd choose.

Case in point: I went to a public selective-admission high school where the
average SAT scores were comparable to an Ivy (probably 1,450 when I went, over
1,500 today). That's higher than the top private secondary schools. 15 years
later, folks are mostly pretty successful (doctors, lawyers, engineers,
scientists) but not exactly masters of the universe. Nothing compared to what
you might see in a cohort of Andover or Exeter grads.

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fromthestart
>a socioeconomic segment that, due to pervasive discrimination, is notoriously
underrepresented in higher ed

This argument is getting very tiring, and increasingly dangerous. There's a
laundry list of reasons coming from a poor background is disadvantageous.
Especially growing up without a father and with poor nutritional intake.

If we handwave all inequities away with discrimination, then actual, internal
problems will never be solved. That goes for all marginalized minorities.

~~~
leereeves
Also for white people born into poverty. There's an entire underclass of white
people, so often dismissed as "white trash", who struggle with the same broken
families, drug- and crime-ridden neighborhoods, failing schools, and
(classist) discrimination on top of that, without any help from the leftist
elite.

But correcting those problems would require eliminating wealth inequality and
disrupt the idyllic lives of the elite. Our attention is directed to
discrimination precisely in order to prevent the solution of these actual,
internal problems.

We saw the battle clearly in 2016. Hillary's identity politics vs Sander's
raceless socialism, and we all know which side Wall Street, Democratic
insiders (AKA superdelegates), and the leftist media were on.

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zozbot123
Why on earth would a lack of _social capital_ in the 'underclasses' require
"eliminating wealth inequality" in order to solve? The _material_ living
standards of many "poor" people are far from low! If we truly want to be
cynical about it, we could actually surmise that what the elite of this
country fear most is a ruinous fall in their established _status_ and
_prestige_ , not their wealth. No matter what else you might think about '45',
the election of a President who built _most_ of his successful campaign on
supporting the average folks over the 'out-of-touch' elite also suggests that
this is where the actual fault-lines of modern politics are.

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leereeves
That's an interesting question, but I've yet to see a plan for equalizing
social capital and status that didn't include "raise taxes on the rich".
Perhaps you know of one?

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zozbot123
Social capital is not something you 'equalize' by raising taxes on the rich;
it's something you _build_ by introducing the norms and institutions of civil
society even among people who were formerly socially excluded and
marginalized. As one example, unions are a notable case of an institution
which has played a non-trivial role in improving social capital/civil society
among the "underclasses" of many developing countries.

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leereeves
Oh, that's what you meant by social capital. I meant things like jobs, health
care, education, and most importantly, opportunities to excel.

I think any attempt to blame the underclass for their situation is simply
ignorant of the problems faced by people who don't have access to those
things, and the reasons why people whose best hope appears to lie outside the
"norms of civil society" choose not to obey the norms of a system which is set
up primarily to preserve wealth - that is, to preserve their exclusion and
subjugation.

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zozbot123
Actually, it's pretty much both. And I absolutely agree that any attempt to
blame _individuals_ for their plight is absolutely misguided. Not least
because it's rather misleading to even talk about people "choosing not to
obey" the norms of civil society as a relevant issue - the fact that this is
even a _plausible_ choice simply shows that the self-sustaining aggregate of
norms, solid institutions, _real_ opportunity to be economically productive
and even to excel (and not just pointless make-work) and the like were never
properly established in the first place - that these people, in a way, are
indeed being excluded and subjugated, if perhaps only via inaction.

It's nonetheless a mistake to presume that such subjugation "preserves"
wealth. It _actively destroys_ wealth, whether or not it functionally
preserves an existing social hierarchy.

