I wish people would read more Bourdieu.
Merit is some fictional carrot you give to children so they can study at school.
The whole concept of the degree is also quite pointless. Why grade the work of students? Why introduce competition in learning? What's the point of filtering students when they apply? Why would one school be prestigious and not another?
People go to school to learn, so why put a limit on learning by measuring performance?
Just look at this one simple fact: if merit does exist, then why are we still doing interviews? Because in the end, we want group homogeneity. People want to "feel" each other, they don't really care about competence or skill, they want other metrics that are far, far away from merit: politics, culture, identity, etc.