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Education

Harvard Professor Challenges 'The Meritocratic Hubris of Elites' (chronicle.com) 228

Posted by EditorDavid from the bored-of-admissions dept.
"Universities have been conscripted as the arbiters of opportunity, as the dispensers of the credentials, as the sorting machine," warns a Harvard political philosopher, in a new interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "The Insufferable Hubris of the Well-Credentialed."

The meritocratic hubris of elites is the conviction by those who land on top that their success is their own doing, that they have risen through a fair competition, that they therefore deserve the material benefits that the market showers upon their talents. Meritocratic hubris is the tendency of the successful to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. It goes along with the tendency to look down on those less fortunate, and less credentialed, than themselves. That gives rise to the sense of humiliation and resentment of those who are left out...

Our credentialing function is beginning to crowd out our educational function. Students win admission to these places by converting their teenage years — or their parents converting their teenage years — into a stress-strewn gauntlet of meritocratic striving. That inculcates intense pressure for achievement. So even the winners in the meritocratic competition are wounded by it, because they become so accustomed to accumulating achievements and credentials, so accustomed to jumping through hoops and pleasing their parents and teachers and coaches and admissions committees, that the habit of hoop-jumping becomes difficult to break. By the time they arrive in college, many find it difficult to step back and reflect on what's worth caring about, on what they truly would love to study and learn. The habit of gathering credentials and of networking and of anticipating the next gateway in the ladder to success begins to interfere with the true reason for being in institutions of higher education, which is exploring and reflecting and questioning and seeking after one's passions.

What might we do about it? I make a proposal in the book that may get me in a lot of trouble in my neighborhood. Part of the problem is that having survived this high-pressured meritocratic gauntlet, it's almost impossible for the students who win admission not to believe that they achieved their admission as a result of their own strenuous efforts. One can hardly blame them. So I think we should gently invite students to challenge this idea. I propose that colleges and universities that have far more applicants than they have places should consider what I call a "lottery of the qualified." Over 40,000 students apply to Stanford and to Harvard for about 2,000 places. The admissions officers tell us that the majority are well-qualified. Among those, fill the first-year class through a lottery. My hunch is that the quality of discussion in our classes would in no way be impaired.

The main reason for doing this is to emphasize to students and their parents the role of luck in admission, and more broadly in success. It's not introducing luck where it doesn't already exist. To the contrary, there's an enormous amount of luck in the present system. The lottery would highlight what is already the case.
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Harvard Professor Challenges 'The Meritocratic Hubris of Elites' More

Harvard Professor Challenges 'The Meritocratic Hubris of Elites'

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  • A lottery? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Saturday October 03, 2020 @05:47PM (#60569262)

    With no possibility of bribes, blackmail and other influences?

    Inconceivable!

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:A lottery? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @08:44PM (#60569676) Homepage

      Seems pretty stupid to insinuate any of that doesn't occur just as much in the present system - doubly stupid in the light of the fact that the past year or two has seen a big story about this very form of corruption. I don't see how changing it to a broader number of accepted applicants and a random lottery would increase or decrease that. It's a lottery anyhow, it's just that the lottery winners are subjectively selected based on a number of non-quantitative aspects of their application.

    • There's been ideas of a lottery system applying to a democratic system, on how leaders are elected. Obviously you would have to regulate the pool of potentially incompetent leaders.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • Why obviously? Take a good hard look at the "leaders" currently in power (I can think of one in particular, but that's me - I'm sure others have a different list)

        Do you really think their leadership is substantially better better for the country than that of some nobody pulled off the street for 4-8 years who knows full well that they'll go back to being nobody when their term is up?

        Of course I'd like to see a requirement for decent literacy in language, mathematics, science, and civics. But then I suspec

  • If you're talking about the higher end of the spectrum of wealth or position where ascending is often a matter of politics or being at the right place. On the contrary. For lower and intermediate rungs of the ladder or vaster gulfs the more skill and competence does tend to play a role. People look at brats with inherited wealth and mistakenly apply this to getting a higher score on SATs. If you doubt this try giving a homeless druggie a lottery ticket or have the mcdonalds cashier operate on you.

    • > where ascending is often a matter of politics or being at the right place.

      And being ready for the opportunity. Being a single mother makes it far more difficult to invest the insane work hours and skrimping on personal finances or personal insurance that many startup businesses need desperately before they can begin to pay off thei operating costs, much less their initial mortgages or venture capital, or even pay back the student loans of their founders.

  • Luck? (Score:3, Informative)

    by cygnusvis ( 6168614 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @06:00PM (#60569292)
    I work 12 hours a day for my success, and there is no luck involved.

    • Re:Luck? (Score:5, Funny)

      by lessSockMorePuppet ( 6778792 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @06:40PM (#60569374) Homepage

      Then you aren't successful in any definition ever used by the investor class.

      You're supposed to have other people work 12 hours a day for scut wages while you play 2 hours of golf.

    • I've worked 12-16 hours a day, 7 years without a day off save for New Years', Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and then only if the variable days fell on workdays. And several holidays actually I worked, doing what could not be done when everyone else was working.

      And I was LUCKY.

      I was born into an era of unprecedented prosperity, in the US and much of the rest of the world.

      I was born in a nation where opportunity was easily exploited.

      I was in the right place, at the right time, to take ad

      • To add to what you've said: I'm guessing you also had the luck to have ancestors who chose to be part of the colonization of the Americas, rather than ancestors who were forced to be part of it.

        • Surprisingly, a noticeable number of those who shared versions of my luck, and some who exceeded it, where descendants of those who were forced to be part of it.

          They had their share of problems, like being able to hail a cab at night, or waking into a store and not being followed by someone in uniform. Me I just had to, for a brief time, avoid being beaten for an ambiguous presentation of my sexuality, not so difficult, compared to those who, for their unambiguous sexuality, did suffer physical harm. And wo

          • Perhaps I shouldn't admit this, but I've done pretty well without having to work anywhere near 12 hours a day at any point in my life other than a couple of times when servers have crashed. I've definitely seen the advantages from the inside of being a white man if you want to work hard only occasionally, spend most of your time at work avoiding work, and still do well for yourself.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          The most successful people in that nation are those that were forced to be part of it, today. Asians.

          The whole "black slavery defines everything" argument really loves to pretend that internment of Japanese didn't exist, indentured servitude (read: slavery in all but name) of Chinese didn't exist and so on. Long after slavery of blacks was banned.

        • MOST people in the US actually had ancestors who were essentially forced to work their butts off building America. It's a sort of cartoon view of American history to imagine that those who "chose to be part of the colonization of the Americas" had some sort of easy life - many had brutal lives here which did not end well for them.

          The idea that a bunch of elite whiteys came to the continent on yachts and then imported a bunch of black folk from Africa to do all the hard work is an insane and childish bit of

      • Re:Luck? (Score:4, Funny)

        by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @07:19PM (#60569464)

        I've worked 12-16 hours a day, 7 years without a day off save for New Years', Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and then only if the variable days fell on workdays. And several holidays actually I worked, doing what could not be done when everyone else was working.

        And I was LUCKY.

        MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

        GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

        TJ: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

        EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulfuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'

        MP: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

        ALL: Nope, nope..

      • Doesn't sound like you were lucky.

        It sounds like you were exploited, and/or have no real life other than work, which is sad.

        I've worked 7-9 hrs a day for 6 years with 15 days of vacation plus another 8-9 holidays off, and it's still too much work. It's an interesting job which pays decently, but I don't consider myself particularly lucky to have it. In part that's because I was able to mold it around me, and make it more of the job I want. I could have taken what was offered, but that didn't suit me.

        If I co

        • Huh. You have less than no idea what my life has been like. From accomplishing things I had literally not even imagined, working with people I could never met otherwise, moving from opportunity to opportunity, now I work less than ever for more than ever before, living a life I had no idea existed.

          The exchange was and is fair. All the deficiency in my life is my responsibility, my errors, my choices. I could have had more, but I could have had less... Much less.

          Don't bother me with the exploitation theory.

    • Do you work 12 hours a day as a slave in a Congolese tungsten mine, or do you work 12 hours a day in the most successful economy in the history of the world? Luck always plays some part in success. ;-)
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      I work 12 hours a day for my success, and there is no luck involved.

      If there was truly no luck involved, then you must have been born poor, nonwhite, and female, because being born rich gives you a competitive advantage over others, as does being born white and male.

      So were you born poor, nonwhite, and female, or are you a liar?

    • heh, you're like the poster child of the article. You can't even take a step back and see it's luck. All the people who also worked hard and weren't as successful, obviously they just weren't as good as wonderful you.

    • I work 12 hours a day for my success, and there is no luck involved.

      If you have to work twelve hours a day, you're probably not the elite being referred to, or at least there are people working way less than that and far more successful, or working less and just as successful. Either way, they're telling themselves some other excuse for doing better than you, they work smarter not harder maybe, not luck.

      Or how about this, if you think you are a counter example, an elite that earned it all, I'll take your word for it. So tell me what you say to everyone that bests you with

    • Because all people which have had success in life, and that include me, recognize that there is a large part of luck (and yes that include connections coming from your family entourage, or other factor which allows easy access to education or other facilities).
    • You were not born in Liberia. That’s a good bit of luck right from the start.

    • I work 12 hours a day for my success, and there is no luck involved.

      Yes, there is, assuming you actually have success. There are many others who work 12 hours a day, or more, without success. That's not to say that your hard work has no effect; your hard work leverages and increases your luck. You need both.

      I'm quite successful. I'm also very lucky. My luck is that I was born smart, and to a family that expected me to get an education (though they didn't help me pay for school). I've also worked very hard for 30 years to get to where I am. It's not an either/or thing; you

  • A much bettter idea (Score:5, Funny)

    by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @06:04PM (#60569306)

    would be to trap the applicants into a large area, provide them with weapons until there were only 2000 of them left alive.

    Let's call it "The Harvard Games" /s?

  • What's good for the goose... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by david.emery ( 127135 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @06:05PM (#60569310)

    Let's see Harvard get rid of tenure and do this for its faculty, too. Roll the faculty over every 10 years??

    • It's interesting how close people like this get to that argument before backing up from it.

      He says

      We also need to reconsider the steep hierarchy of prestige that we have created between four-year colleges and universities, especially brand-name ones, and other institutions of learning. This hierarchy of prestige both reflects and exacerbates the tendency at the top to denigrate or depreciate the contributions to the economy made by people whose work does not depend on having a university diploma.

      Which is a pretty good argument for taking some action to break up the cultural isolation of high level academic faculty by doing something like moving a tenured position from a lifetime appointment to "no more than 10 years" (a good idea, but good luck getting that through any academic senate).

      Then he goes on to say

      The main solutions consist in things like strengthening unions. The broad solution is to reorient our politics away from dealing with inequality through individual upward mobility by higher education. That is too narrow a response to inequality.

      There's a couple of ways to interpret that thought. One way might be to think he's suggesting we

  • Excluding people from education because their race is over-represented, token university places for women, and now OF COURSE stupid people shouldn't be prevented from studying for a PhD just because of their intellectual limitations.

    How DARE we ?!

    FFS.

    • stupid people shouldn't be prevented from studying for a PhD just because of their intellectual limitations.

      No, they shouldn't.

      Let them try. And fail. Or succeed.

      • Re:Yes, it had to come to this (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ChatHuant ( 801522 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @09:55PM (#60569836)

        Let them try. And fail. Or succeed.

        That's not what happens though. See for example the story of women fireman tests: around the year 2000, despite extensive recruiting, very few women passed the physical tests [nytimes.com] required for a fireman job. The tests checked fitness for the job, and consisted of actions that would need to be performed during a real fire - like raising a 20ft ladder or feeding 50 feet of one-and-three-quarter-inch water-filled hose to firefighters. For biological reasons most of the women candidates failed to complete the tests. This wasn't however considered acceptable, even though the tests were pretty objective and very relevant to the actual job. A number of class actions and press/propaganda campaigns were launched until various firefighting departments were forced to relax the tests [thetimes.co.uk] so that some women would pass.

        The same thing will happen here - failures of those candidates will not be accepted as an indicator of unfitness for the particular role. Instead the blame will be put on society, culture, other people, even racist math [theprint.in]. The standards will be diluted and exams will be relaxed until enough of the favored group will pass, and earning a PhD will become much less meaningful than it is today.

  • How about we put your job in a lottery as well since you say you didn't earn it. It's not like you're pulling the ladder up behind you.... right?

  • It's always struck me as very odd that it is easy to find out the applicant/acceptance ratio, but no school of which I'm aware ever looks to see the relative success of those who attend vs. those who were admitted (or admittable) but did not attend.

    Of course, for prestige schools, even that wouldn't tell you how much the school's educational process contributed to their students' success versus how much was contributed by the ability to list the school's name on the student's resume.

    But it would at least be

    • It's difficult to obtain the data: those people are not current students or alumni, and the schools have no automatic access to the data. It might be easier to examine the applications of graduate school students who also applied for or attended the same university, but the schools would be unlikely to openly share information about each other's applicants. Sharing applicant data could not only be a violation of FERPA guidelines, since the data include the student's high school transcripts and correspondenc

  • it's not a vast conspiracy from the Universities. For high level work (Doctor, Civil Engineer, Mathematician) you really do need decades of training.

    For the low level stuff companies don't want to pay to train. Requiring everyone has a 4 year degree means they have a convenient excuse to bring in an H1-B.

    I will give him points for calling out people who ignore the role of luck, but that goes for everybody, not just "elites" he's banging on about.

    But as for putting too much crap on teens, this is

  • reject the premise (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SkonkersBeDonkers ( 6780818 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @07:06PM (#60569434)

    His subtitle says a 4 year degree is necessary for dignified work.

    There is nothing undignified about being a plumber, electrician, hair stylist and any number of other professions that don't require 4 year degrees.

    In fact even most professions that people would call undignified, that's an elitist position out of the gate.

    All people who contribute productive output are useful and valuable whether a janitor or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

    In fact, I defy you to live a dignified life in a world where we don't have janitors and garbage collectors. Society survives if Boeing goes out of business. If we had no one collecting the garbage and cleaning up the filth, society dies.

    • The idea that employment needs to be "dignified" is one for the children of the privileged wealthy, for people who dream of achieving their life goals with a fulfilling career rather than doing the _jobs_ that lead to a career.

    • I would argue (and often do), that the vast majority of jobs are undignified. None of the ones that you listed are mind you. No, the ones that are undignified are the ones that can (and should) be done by robots, the ones that call for a human worker to act like a robot. Example: call center jobs. Not just by virtue of being callcenter jobs, but because the job calls for following a script, a tree of answers, and the worker is never allowed to deviate from those answers. At that point, you might as well jus

  • "winners in the meritocratic competition are wounded by it"

  • This is a thing I always see in US culture, that is ridiculous to Europeans and Asians:

    Somehow, the wiser people are not looked up to, but attacked, hated, and looked âdownâoe on. E.g. for being âarrogantâoe. All thatâ(TM)s missing is being called "pompous and faggy", like in Idiocracy.

    Stupid people somehow completely lost all shame that usually comes with being caught acting stupid, and even worse, somehow think the one pointing it out is supposed to be ashamed of himself!
    As if I w

    • This is a thing I always see in US culture, that is ridiculous to Europeans and Asians:

      Somehow, the wiser people are not looked up to, but attacked, hated, and looked âdownâoe on. E.g. for being âarrogantâoe. All thatâ(TM)s missing is being called "pompous and faggy", like in Idiocracy.

      As a middle eastern, it doesn't seem ridiculous to me, but all too familiar.

  • Random admissions (Score:3)

    by biggaijin ( 126513 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @07:26PM (#60569478)

    When we admit people randomly to our institutions of higher learning, we completely ignore the value of hard work, determination, and raw talent that has been demonstrated by the applicants up to that point in their lives. Once admissions are reduced to a lottery, do you think all of the applicants would be as well-qualified as they are now, or would many of them just be taking a shot at being admitted to hi-status U? There is a recurring theme of ignoring merit in assigning rewards in our society at present. Indeed, merit is punished in many cases in favor of mediocrity or supposed compassion for those of fewer accomplishments. This whole thing smells like a scam by some sociologist who wants some publicity and is not concerned with the harm to individuals and out society that this stupid idea may cause. Recently, one college professor has claimed that even arithmetic is a racist construct. This know-nothing denial of merit and objective reality is dangerous for our society and is reminiscent of China's cultural revolution, which destroyed several generations of Chinese people and discarded for all time a lot of their culture.

  • It has the least amount of corruption of systems I know. I'm pleased it is being seriously considered for other applications.

    And it has at least one [arxiv.org] study behind it.

    Not to mention there is the problem of those trained in a field perpetuating the dogma of their expertise, acting as gatekeepers to keep new ideas out ("A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar

  • Something needs to change (Score:3)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @08:31PM (#60569660)

    I live in a fairly nice area around NYC, and among those striving for it, the pressure to get into Ivy League schools is insane. As such, it's not a measure of meritocratic genius -- it's a measure of how much time and money the parents shovel in to the process. SAT tutors, extra classes, sports, instruments, extracurricular activities, volunteer work, the mandatory third world mission trip...all to package their kid in a desperate attempt to be one of the tiny percentage of applicants these places accept. With the number of applicants competing for a smaller and smaller number of spots each year, it's a total arms race. You can't just have a 4.0, a 1600 on your SATs and be the president of 4 clubs in your top-10-in-the-state high school. It's gotten so competitive that you need a whole backstory as well to edge out the other candidates who are just like you.

    I read a book this year called "How to Raise an Adult" by the dean of undergraduates at Stanford. She explains in the book how parents are doing everything for their children in a vain attempt to give them every opportunity to get into an elite school. As a result, they have zero experience doing anything for themselves and are a total wreck the second anything doesn't go their way once they're somewhat independent. I can see why they do it...the rewards are huge for even making it in. But if you end up somewhat non-functional as an adult as a result or can't do anything other than cram for exams and get perfect grades, that's not ideal either.

    My kids are 7 and 9, and although they're OK at school, I can tell they're not born academics. They just don't have that robotic "feed me knowledge while I quietly sit and memorize" mentality needed to ace standardized tests and get perfect school grades. And IMO that's OK -- I wasn't a great student either, but I graduated from a state university and did OK for myself. It really stinks that they're going to have to work harder than any of these Ivy Leaguers ever will once they graduate...the Ivy Leaguers are going to get management consulting and investment banking jobs that just aren't accessible to people like me and my kids. I see why parents play the game, but I hate the fact that it needs to be played at all. Still, I'd love to be making $250K plus bonus right out of school with no experience working for Goldman Sachs or something -- but it's not happening for the vast majority of people...hence the article.

  • Why? (Score:2)

    by dcw3 ( 649211 )

    Why would we change the system that is generating arguably the best grads in the world out of Harvard and Stanford? On your hunch? Fuck off.

    • Why would we change the system that is generating arguably the best grads in the world out of Harvard and Stanford?

      Because maybe it isn't? Many graduates of Harvard and Stanford did not get admission based purely on ability, but instead, based on the donations of their parents. Once in, the universities are going to make sure they graduate.

  • The biggest thing that academics forget... (Score:3)

    by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @10:28PM (#60569906)

    The credentials they award aren't accomplishments, they are yard sticks which are attempting to measure their success in learning material they would then use to actually accomplish things in the real world after going to school. That PhD seems like a big accomplishment but it actually represents maybe a year of accomplishment comparable to a year of real work experience.

    • Yeah, a year of real world experience is definitely equivalent to earning a PhD in physics or chemistry or bioengineering. That's why so many NIH and NSF grants are going to PI's with a BS.

  • not going to happen (Score:3)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Saturday October 03, 2020 @11:00PM (#60569944)
    These elite institutions BANK on their reputation. They have set themselves up as arbiters of entrance into the elite class (not completely to a large degree). This is largely why they exist.

    To destroy the illusion of meritocracy.... would be to admit that they aren't actually adding much true value. It mostly destroy their business model.

  • Success in life requires some luck, that is true. But only after you spend enormous amount of effort in the first place.

    Say what you want for Bill Gates for example. (He is not the exemplary guy for us Slashdotters). However looking at his history, he had spent lots of time coding, and making products his customers liked. Yes, there was luck, his mom had contacts at IBM, and he was raised in a middle class family. However there are millions of middle class kids, and possibly thousands of them with contacts

    • Bill Gates was in no way 'middle class'.

      His mother was high level for United Way and was connected to all the 'important rich people' in the major corporations (which is how he got to sell his DOS solution to IBM... through a friend of his mom that was high up there).

      His grandfather also owned the largest bank in Seattle. He had a million dollar trust fund given to him as a baby. I don't know any "middle class" people like this..

      Guys like Steve Jobs.. now that was the real deal..

  • this "elites" problem only occur in countries where access to university is gated by ridiculous tuition fees.
    in countries where the university is free to attend, and where the faculty is paid by the states through everyone's taxes, you don't see this.
    here in France, you have a smug elite too, though, but they are from a mafia all coming from the same ENA school (think of cooptation)

  • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Alternative Lede (Score:3)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday October 04, 2020 @02:38AM (#60570408)

    Harvard political philosopher states “I’ve written a book, please buy it”.

  • A trade school (Score:3)

    by NotEmmanuelGoldstein ( 6423622 ) on Sunday October 04, 2020 @04:07AM (#60570504)

    ... to accumulating achievements and credentials.

    Go look at any job-board: There's an infinite number of employers demanding people have experience in X and certification in Y. Universities are doing the same thing for the same reason, because they can, which also lowers them to the position of a trade school.

  • Really revolutionary.... (Score:3)

    by njnnja ( 2833511 ) on Sunday October 04, 2020 @09:15AM (#60570946)
    The prof is accurately seeing the problem, but dealing with only the symptom, not the disease. If there are 30,000 qualified applicants, why only accept 2,000? My guess is that they would argue that they canâ(TM)t accommodate so many students. But if universities canâ(TM)t accommodate all of those that are qualified, then society should stop using them to filter the âoewinnersâ at age 18. That is the real injustice.

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