Comment by estevez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by estevez | Hacker News Reader

Stories like this irk me, because they overlook the larger injustice of continuing to think about elite schools as meritocratic institutions, when they are plainly not. At Harvard, for example, the bottom half of the income distribution makes up 6.5% of students.[1] When we consider the most selective schools in aggregate, we see that nearly three-quarters of incoming freshmen at those schools are drawn from the top quartile of incomes.[2]

The illusion of merit that graduation from these schools imparts leads to a false sense of mastery amongst those who've been able to scale the pyramid of achievement, a self-deception that has had pretty profound consequences for the country since, oh I don't know, say 2008 or so.

[1]: http://chronicle.com/article/Pell-Grant-Recipients-Are/12689...

[2]: http://books.google.com/books?id=4JyQus8r9JYC&pg=PA150&#...

According to this study (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-...), there's a clear correlation between students from high income backgrounds having higher scores versus students from lower income backgrounds having lower scores as well.

I suggest this piece [1] by David Leonhart. As he points out in the final paragraph:

    [...] all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/economy/25leonhar...

The idea that test scores are "meritocratic" is itself a myth. Wealthy people score higher on tests for very simple socioeconomic reasons that are not related to any innate merit but rather to the advantages conferred by an aristocratic upbringing.

Attendance at elite schools and the myth of the "meritocratic test score" is just the most recent form of upper class hegemony. It's a fiction created to justify hereditary rule. The far majority of wealth, power, and status is obtained through heredity and nepotism. The "meritocratic test score" myth is there to hide this simple fact.

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