How’s that privilege doing? Here’s a report from Class Colloquium 5: Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap

The first Colloquium featuring a speaker from the Yale faculty didn’t shy away from challenging some basic assumptions about our “elite education.”

Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits brought his widely hailed book, his grasp of econometrics, and his A-game to our September 30th Class Colloquium.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite is an arresting topic for classmates, in part because, well, it’s about us!  The video of his presentation is below.

Also, his thesis, supporting data, and recommended reforms are included in this Atlantic article, reprinted on Yale1969.org.

Here are a few notes from his discussion with us.

• The very top colleges began to shift from an aristocratic to a meritocratic approach to college admissions after WWII.  Yale was late to the party, but thanks to Kingman Brewster and Inslee Clark that transformation was underway by 1965. (Marcovitz goes into significant detail on this in his book.)
• Rewarding talent and hard work over breeding was an important step, but over the years meritocracy has excluded those outside of a small elite.  The high-achieving graduates of the top colleges have ascended to the top jobs in the economy and can afford to give their children the extra attention, training, and support to follow in their footsteps into the very best schools and beyond.  College applicants who haven’t been privileged with these resources can’t compete.
• This has produced ever-widening disparities in economic inequality, especially between the middle class and rich.  In fact, the higher you climb the ladder, the further apart the rungs get.  As a result, those stuck in the middle class have become more resigned to their limited options for social mobility, which has contributed to a host of negative societal effects—falling life expectancies, self-harm (depression, addiction, suicide), and political populism that exploits legitimate anger over structural inequality.
• This extracts a toll on the rich elite as well, who face unending pressure from childhood through adulthood to continually out-achieve their peers to maintain a competitive advantage.  And the higher they go in the workplace, the higher the demands, and the harder they work.  They suffer from greater levels of depression and anxiety than the rich of generations past.  In short, meritocracy doesn’t work for anyone.
• There are many solutions offered—explained more in his book—which include dramatically expanding access to education, especially college enrollment, and making middle-class workers the center of production.

After presenting the thesis from his book, Professor Markovits took oral questions from the floor.  The ensuing discussion was so rich that we went 10 or 15 minutes over the scheduled hour, and the exchange left us wanting more.

Whether as classmates undertaking a joint learning experience or as a world adapting to new, socially distanced communication tools, we are slowly getting the knack of these meetings!  It seems to be the wave—or particle?—of the future.  We hope you can join us for future Class Colloquium dialogues.