Lost in the Meritocracy (2005)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Granted, there is probably a modicum more of equity than there was at the time of the story, given that colleges have de-emphasized standardized tests (to an extent), and score-inflation combined with increased tendency for curriculum to converge on tested material has made scores far less meaningful. (For instance, I got a 35 on the ACT, and I'm not inordinately intelligent by any stretch of the imagination. Moreover, I know not a single person who received below a 30 [save for a friend from Peru, for whom english is not a first language]. And this is just an average suburban pubic high school. I imagine that average scores at competitive private schools might be in the 33/2270 area. My hunch is that, as testing becomes more pervasive, underperforming education systems that begin using the test will shift the apex of the curve to the left, bringing even average students up the curve, but I digress.) However, this trivialization of testing has merely exacerbated inequality in admissions because it places on emphasis on things like internships (accessible only to the wealthy), hobbies/productive extracurriculars (which favors those who start young, and starting young often necessitates money and or involved parents), etc. Education has never been a meritocracy and it never will be.
2096 for 2008.
Even Phillips has underachievers, though they are still pretty damn good.
You have inflated expectations because you associate yourself with like-minded, equally exceptional individuals, which, in my opinion, is one of the most terribly underrated aspects of child rearing.
Of course, I don't know if you were just naturally drawn to people of that level, or if it was something your parents/teachers facilitated, but I do believe in the notion that you are the company you keep.
I can only imagine how much higher my standards in high school would have been if I had hung with a smarter bunch.
As for your larger point, I disagree. I think the rush to deemphasize standardized test scores is racism more than it is embracing a broader view of merit. When I went to TJ (late 1990's) it was about 1/3 Asian/Indian (well-assimilated) and 2/3 white. Culturally it was a good mix--nerdy and hard working but not overly serious or competitive. Sometime in the early 2000's, they made admissions race blind. As a result the school is now 2/3 asian, 1/4 non-latino white, and 4% black or latino. 1% are low-income. My brother went six years behind me and he definitely disliked the cultural change: it became much more serious, much less laid-back, much more competitive and cut-throat. The alumni rant constantly about how the place has gone downhill, even though by the objective measures it is doing better than ever.
I personally think the change was a bad thing. I'd rather go to school with the guy who got a 2,200 on his SAT without much studying than the guy who got a 2,400 after prepping for years. But it's total cultural elitism on my part. To asians from immigrant families that line of thinking doesn't even make sense. If admissions measures certain things, why wouldn't you do everything you can to maximize your score on those measures?
My perception is that elite colleges have started to emphasize soft factors not so much because they want more cultural diversity, but because they don't want their schools to be taken over by asian recent immigrants and the culture that creates. Why else are the measures that sufficed for so long suddenly inadequate now? Why do we let in a champion unicycle rider over a hard-working kid with an SAT score 100 points higher? It's not like elite colleges get a large number of disadvantaged minorities in the process--their numbers are still tiny. No, what the new measures do is keep out asian immigrants whose parents don't emphasize "soft" pass-times, who don't have the economic security to pursue unorthodox ambitions, who usually don't have the cultural integration to be active in the community, etc.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...
It certainly was pretty competitive and serious, but really it was what you made of it. I heard alumni rants about it going downhill after I left, so maybe that's something that happened by 2010 or it's just a consequence of what people say after they leave. There have been some critical newspaper articles about TJ in the last few years.
http://www.tjhsst.edu/studentlife/publications/tjtoday/wordp...
I'm questioning if I would even get in at this point (my work ethic always beat out my test scores). I'm wondering if this rigidity to "scores" is helping things -- I probably would have to agree with the author's assessment of a "robotic student" molding themselves to what the TJ admissions office wants.
I think it's more than just alumni griping. I loved my experience there, but TJ was a very different place in 2002 than it was in 1998. In 1998, the school had the original principal, Geoff Jones. There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about him that the Chinese government donated a bunch of money for a Chinese language lab, and he just spent the money on other projects. He did an incredible job of keeping FCPS out of our hair. His replacement sucked (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05...). She was that typical kind of educator that used the word "special" a lot. My brother (2004-2008), indicated that he seemed to think there was a lot more competition and less collegiality than when I was there.
On the other hand I think to a degree the asians are taking a lot of the heat for other problems with the school. The period of changing demographics just happens to be correlated with the period during which FCPS exerted more influence over the school.
So what? Why do you believe that merit is not correlated with income and class?
Suppose, hypothetically, that some reference classes are simply intrinsically better than others at math and reading. Wouldn't any meritocratic system result in rewards being correlated with membership in the aforementioned reference class?
You are correct that using "holistic" admissions rather than standardized tests is likely to reduce meritocracy. That's the whole point. Meritocracy gets you too many of those geeky Asians, and it would be really bad if colleges were full of Asians.
[edit: My last sentence is indeed sarcastic. I favor meritocracy, not ethnic corporatism.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-...
When you say "holistic" admissions, I'm not sure whether you mean holistic in the sense that colleges use it (i.e. taking evidence of talent outside of grades and test scores into account) or as a reference to programs which take race or class into account. Either way, you present standardized tests as the more meritocratic approach, which is silly. A perfect SAT score means a student is great at basic math, reading, and writing in an extremely specific context. That can be an extremely useful foundation, but do you honestly think that indicates this student is the "best?" That someone with lower scores who has published a bestselling book or won an international science prize or started a great humanitarian effort is on a lower tier in the meritocracy? Of course, all of these things are biased even more heavily towards rich students, but that's why class and background must also be taken into account.
I suspect I may have misunderstood parts of what you were saying, so please do clarify (if you can make it through my little word dump :P).
To take two extreme reference classes, children deprived of oxygen at birth have less merit than children given sufficient oxygen. The result of oxygen deprivation is unfair and sad, but that doesn't mean the brain-damaged child strangled by his umbilical cord is more meritorious than the normal child.
Let me be clear about "holistic" admissions. This is usually just a code word that means "we'd love to just use quotas to let in enough non-asian minorities and keep out those jerky asians, but we can't, so we'll do holistic admissions instead." This is what I'm referring to when I use the term.
To follow your example, if the brain-damaged child strangled by his umbilical cord achieve just as much as the normal child, he has more merit.
That's the 2nd principle of political liberalism: "Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society."
In that case, let both brain damaged and normal children compete.
But I agree with your case, most admissions system are poorly disguised racism. Life sucks sometimes.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls#Political_Liberalism
I think you need to start defining what you mean by "achievement" and "merit," because "equal achievement" and "greater merit" are not the same things from my perspective. If a brain-damaged child achieves just as much a normal child, they have equal merit, from my perspective.
Again, I think a lot of people are conflating meritocracy with social justice. I think this attitude stems from the fact that people think meritocracy is "good," and that social justice is also "good," so meritocracy must necessarily be socially just, when that is not the case. Meritocracy alone is neither inherently socially unjust or inherently socially just.
Basically if SAT is your sole criterion then you become Caltech. Caltech is a great school but there are other human phenotypes that would like to go to college and other universities to accommodate them.
What a coincidence - when the supreme court said point-based race discrimination was illegal but discrimination in holistic systems was legal, colleges immediately switched to holistic admissions.
I went to inner city schools. You have no idea how poor they are. Even the smartest kids who really wanted to learn had no chance.
Examples:
-> My Calculus teacher taught use that you can use advanced polynomials to beat craps.
-> My economics teacher didn't teach us anything all year. I'm not exaggerating here. We literally never opened our books in class and I don't think we had more than 4 quizzes the entire time.
-> My Spanish teacher was about the same, except he did give one lesson per month, but we mostly chatted in class. If you were already Hispanic, you got an A. If you weren't, you got a C. No point trying beyond that.
-> Physics was my first class of the day and I slept through it every time and it was generally the same zoo as all the other classes. I had the highest score in the class.
-> The people with the highest grades in our biology class were the people who didn't show up but once a month and refused to touch a knife. Those of us who sat in class, dissected the pigs, and really tried to learn the material generally got D's.
-> "Computer class" was 4 years of learning how to type.
-> Homework was virtually non-existent.
-> I can assure you that merit had nothing at all to do with the grades I received.
I can't possibly enumerate how bad the education was in one post. You had two options: go to a community college or go to the state college. Anything else would have caused the guidance counselors look at you in shame and they would tell you things like "No one in this district went to that kind of college, so it's no point applying."
As you can gather, I was in all of the so-called advanced classes. I can only imagine what the "normal" classes were like.
Some odd summers ago I went across Chicago Public Schools to document building lighting for upgrades to more efficient lamps, since the current lamps the building "engineers" were using stopped being manufactured and supply was starting to run out.
Some of the shit I've seen there puts third world countries to shame. One day my photography partner couldn't make it so I brought my mother along to fill her spot. After we finished a particularly bad school she began crying because it reminded her of her own primary schooling in communist Ukraine some ~50 years ago. It was incomprehensible and heartbreaking to her that such a great country like America could have such terrible education standards. The difference between rich and poor schools is night and day. When you don't have central heating, when half of the bathroom facilities don't work, and when you don't even have enough money to buy chalk, there's absolutely no way you could even possibly comprehend to compete with the likes of Walter Payton.
If the people coming out of that high school don't know math, economics, spanish or physics, then they have less academic merit than students from a better school who do. It might be unfair that some people get a sucky school/parents/genes, but that doesn't contradict meritocracy.
However, in the sense that nature/nurture (being born to a well off family that constantly provides opportunities) leads to more "merits" it technically is. Therefore the real problem is that it is so -bound- to income and class.
(and just because we have no explicit labels for class, if you think that such a notion is an "illusion" then you are living in a bubble.)
A child raised in an abusive home has a far lesser probability of success than a child raised in a supportive one. This indeed disbands the zeitgeist of meritocracy (anyone can do it), but reinforces the definition of it (success based on achieved merits).
Zeitgeist of Meritocracy !== Definition of Meritocracy !== Implementation of Meritocracy
Did you mean to say asian women?
Many people play the education game just like this guy did, but find their salvation on the way. There are many opportunities, like when working on his summerjob he was reminded that selfbetterment was the goal, and offered to come to a meeting.
Along the read, I was worried he might miss it - yet he did find the purpose on the way.
If you play education for the signalling, you will get the piece of paper, but what else? Existential emptiness? Feeling of class envy? He is really envious of the pompous folk with the castle and the european car? Can't he strive for anything more???
Learn stuff you love, learn it because you think it is worth your limited time on this earth, and because you will be able to make a good use of it.
Whether there is a meritocracy or not does not really matter, if you can learn and make one around yourself.
I couldn't help but think that he was scamming the reader just as he scams everyone else in the story.
By the end, when sitting down to actually ingest literature, it sounded like the story of redemption is something that The Atlantic would publish so he made redemption part of the story. It wasn't clear that the tiger changed his stripes at all.
Of course, the fact that I made it to the end tells you: I fell for it hook, line and sinker, and I'm just as bad as the rest of the suckers in his story.
Then I realized that it was more likely jumping on the "higher education is broken" bandwagon and missing the delicious irony that every personality attribute, except knowing aristocratic privilege, being held up for contempt in this piece is openly admired in this culture when practised in the tech business world.
Maybe there is some alternate universe where this article was posted as a scathing critique of the whole "hustler/growth hacker" meme and a warning about how the same attitudes in elite higher education have completely destroyed their ability to create any value.
I'd like to move there.
This is less an indictment of "the system" than further evidence that systems can be gamed. Is this a shock to anyone?
Our narrator seems to have coasted through a variety of moderately prestigious (an adjective meaning that other people think whatever it is must be very discerning) opportunities. He chose to squander them out of a seemingly nihilistic/angsty/meta-hipstery and extremely adolescent rage against the machine.
What a pity. For him.
You may or may not find that persuasive. But just as with "Less Than Zero" (a terrible, terrible book) and much of the similarly themed failure memoir genre, you get the sense that it is wildly exaggerated fabulism with a hysterical moral tone that is supposed to ensnare the reader in outrage.
As to the drug abuse and alcoholism, Bob Dylan put it really well in "Like A Rolling Stone":
"You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely, But you know you only used to get juiced in it."
People who go through college the like the author realize, deep down, that they are not getting an education. And some of them also realize that eventually, being a fraud catches up with everyone -- even if it's only in the form of a personal revelation.
You can't get lost in a meritocracy. Your merit determines your rank.
What can happen is that you don't understand how the merit is computed. Or you can misjudge your own merit.
Different interests have different merit functions. Even given a merit function there are huge gaps in actually applying the function to get a measure of merit out of a person. And even if you have a group of people falling into a well ordered list of true merits, there's a lot of difficulty in actually translating that merit into success.
He was an outsider who became an insider, only to discover there was another elite (social, economic, political) level that he feared he'd never crack.
Eventually, he's bed-ridden with a cold, and for the first time, actually reads and gets lost in literary works (whereas academia had become a "scene" too focused on abstract literary criticism).
Hobbes:"You misspelled Weltanschauung."
I suppose you could see it as "hacking Princeton" but also seems diametrically opposed to a hacker ethos, where you're into autodidacting for the love of the knowledge itself, without putting up with any of the pomp and bullshit that others like to layer on top of it.
I've been aggressively opposite of the mentality in the article which means that I basically learn stuff while my friends talk about tv shows and watch sports - I can't really talk to any of them about stuff I learn other than wait for them to laugh when I'm done. But it seems the alternative is to leave them behind for other sets of friends and a lifestyle where I have to wear suits and learn buzz phrases - and my friends don't tease me about the stuff I learn and seem to respect it.
The main dishonesty with the piece is his portrayal of himself as the only bullshitter in the game. I bet the girl that hugged him after he lost the Rhodes thing plagiarized her personal statement (or something).
In many ways his essay, rather than a deep critique of human obsession with status signalling, was just a big status signal itself, since essentially the take home point was "look how fucking good at status signalling I am".
Oh, I wish you hadn't said that, you unclean cad! Other than that, this article was a work of art. Thanks for the link, mitmads.
BTW these are the exact same years Obama went to Columbia, and was apparently a bit "drifty" (read: high and bad grades)