Are many of the ills that plague American society caused by Ivy League admission policies?
That is the premise of David Brooks’s cover story for the December issue of The Atlantic, “How the Ivy League Broke America.” Brooks blames the Ivies and “meritocracy” for a host of societal problems, including:
- Overbearing parenting
- Less time for recess (as well as art and shop) in schools
- An economy that doesn’t provide opportunities for those without a college degree
- The death of civic organizations like Elks Lodge and Kiwanis Club
- The high percentage of Ivy League graduates who choose careers in finance and consulting
- The rise of populism based on “crude exaggerations, gross generalizations, and bald-faced lies.”
Brooks somehow left the decline of small-town mom-and-pop businesses and the popularity of reality television off his laundry list.
You may be wondering how the Ivies contributed to or caused all these problems. The essence of Brooks’s argument is that “every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like.” His hypothesis is that America’s social ideals reflect and are determined by the qualities that Ivy League universities value in admission.
One hundred years ago, the Ivy League social ideal was what Brooks terms the “Well-Bred Man”—white, male, aristocratic and preppy, athletic, good-looking, and personable. What was not part of the ideal was intellectual brilliance or academic prowess, and in fact those who cared about studying were social outcasts. Applying to the Ivies resembled applying for membership to elite social clubs.
That changed starting in the 1930s when a group of educational leaders, the most prominent being Harvard president James Conant, worried that the United States was not producing leaders capable of dealing with the problems it would face in the future. Their solution was to move to an admission process that rewarded intelligence rather than family lineage. They believed that intelligence was the highest human trait, one that is innate and distributed randomly throughout the population. Conant and his peers believed the change would lead to a nation with greater opportunities for social mobility.
Brooks seems far from sure that the change was positive for America. He acknowledges that “the amount of bigotry—against women, Black people, the LGBTQ community—has declined” (that might be debatable given the current political climate), but observes that the previous ideal produced the New Deal, victory in World War II, NATO and the postwar world led by America, while the products of the ideal pushed by Conant have produced “quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.” Those examples seem cherry-picked.
In the essay, Brooks cites a number of troubling societal problems and trends, all supported with extensive research, but the weakness of his argument is that he tries to find a single cause to explain all of them. That common denominator is what he calls “meritocracy.”
Meritocracy, a society with opportunities based on merit, is an appealing concept in theory, but defining merit is where things get sticky. Merit may be similar to Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s description of pornography, in that you know it when you see it. Does merit consist of talent alone? Talent combined with work ethic? Talent, work ethic and character?
Merit is in the eye of the beholder. If I was admitted to an Ivy League university, it was obviously because I had merit. If someone else, especially someone from an underrepresented population, got the acceptance instead of me, factors other than merit must have been at play. If two candidates have identical transcripts but different SAT scores, which one possesses more merit? Complicating the discussion is the fact that many things cited as measures of merit are in fact measures of privilege.
For Brooks, Ivy League meritocracy involves an overreliance on intelligence and academic achievement, to the detriment of noncognitive skills that are more central to success and happiness in life. He argues that “success in school is not the same thing as success in life,” with success in school primarily being individual while success in life is team-based. He quotes Adam Grant’s argument that academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence.
Ultimately, he argues that “meritocracy” has spurred the creation of “an American caste system,” one in which “a chasm divides the educated from the less well-educated,” triggering “a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.” Yet Brooks’s beef is not so much with meritocracy as it is with a mindset that he attributes to Conant and his brethren. He equates meritocracy with a belief in rationalism and social engineering that assumes that anything of value can be measured and counted. What he is criticizing is something different from meritocracy, or at least reflects a narrow definition of meritocracy.
Even if we don’t agree with Brooks’s definitions, or the implication that Ivy League admission policies are responsible for the ills of society, his article raises a number of important questions about the college admission process at elite colleges and universities.
First, is the worship of standardized testing misplaced? The SAT became prominent in college admission at around the same time that Conant and others were changing the Ivy League admission paradigm. They believed that intelligence could be measured and latched onto the SAT as a “pure,” objective measure of aptitude. Today, of course, we recognize that test scores are correlated with family income and that scores can be manipulated through test preparation. And the “A” in SAT no longer stands for aptitude.
Do we measure what we value or do we value what we can measure? Brooks criticizes the Ivies for focusing on academic achievement in school at the expense of “noncognitive skills” that might be more important to success in life after college, things like curiosity, relationship-building skills and work ethic. He’s right, but there are two reasons for the current emphasis. One is that going to college is going to school, so an admission process focused on scholastic academic achievement is defensible. The other is that we haven’t developed a good mechanism for measuring noncognitive skills.
That raises a larger question. What do we want the admission process to accomplish? The SAT is intended to predict freshman year college GPA (in conjunction with high school grades). Is that a satisfactory goal? Shouldn’t we have a larger lens, aiming to identify those who will be most successful at the end of college, or after college? Should we admit those with the greatest potential, those who will grow the most from the college experience, or those who will make the greatest contribution to society after college?
Brooks questions elite colleges’ preferences for “spiky” students over those who are well-rounded. Is a student body full of spiky students really better? An even more important question arises from a distinction Brooks made some years ago between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”
Does the elite college admission process as currently constituted reward and encourage students who are good at building résumés? A former student attending an elite university commented that almost every classmate had done independent academic research and started a nonprofit. Do students aspiring to the Ivies choose activities because they really care about them or because they think they will impress admission officers, and can admission officers tell the difference? What is the consequence of having a student body full of those who are good at playing the résumé-building game?
There is one other issue raised by Brooks that I find particularly important. He argues that those who are successful in the elite admission process end up possessing greater “hubris,” in that they believe their success is the product of their talent and hard work rather than privilege and luck. Rather than appreciating their good fortune, they may believe they are entitled to it. That misconception may also fuel the populist backlash to elites that has increased the division within our country.
I don’t buy Brooks’s definition of meritocracy or his contention that the Ivy League “broke” America, but his article nevertheless merits reading and discussion.
