The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?

In 2019, a scandal broke out in higher education that led to the prosecution of dozens of wealthy elite families for engaging in various schemes and subterfuges to garner access to the best colleges and universities. Largely using the services of a man named William Singer, these families would pay tens, and sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars in order to create illegal paths by which the children of these families could be admitted to prestigious institutions of higher education. These methods ranged from falsifying test results to bribing athletic coaches and directors into making certain students athletic recruits worthy of scholarships.

The scandal, once reported, provoked outrage across the nation that was shared almost universally across political, economic, and geographic lines: “In ways that people struggled to articulate, it was an emblematic scandal, one that raised larger questions about who gets ahead, and why” (8). While the scandal unsurprisingly fed into the various outrage machinery of television news and partisan debates, the outrage was shared equally, simply for different reasons. Liberals saw the scandal as an affront to equality, whereby wealthy families deprived more deserving students of legitimate opportunities, while conservative thinkers focused on the demographic of those involved in the scandal as almost exclusively composed of liberal elites from Hollywood, accusing them of hypocrisy.

The scandal raised questions on a broader scale, however, because it highlighted the reality that college admission is often tied up with economics, and that money often plays a role in who gets admitted to which school in perfectly legal ways, such as on account of donations from donors or alumni. Ultimately, the two paths are characterized in separate ways, as “money buys access in both ‘back door’ and ‘side door’ admissions” (9). The difference is that the “back door” of large donations providing the swing vote for students on the admissions bubble is legal, while the “side door” of bribing officials and faking test results for the unqualified is not.

Part of the ethics involved in such questions is simply related to where the money goes. When large donations are made to the university, it is the school that benefits. When the “side door” is used, the money is going to dishonest third parties and individuals who take advantage of the system and the parent’s desperation in order to garner large profits for themselves. More deeply, however, the question of ethics highlights the distinction between those who make use of the back and side doors thanks to their financial situation and personal connections, and those who enter through the “front door” based on their merits and capabilities to actually flourish in the realm of higher education.

In reality, the distinction is not as simple or clear cut. Money comes into each and every admission to the world of higher education: “Measures of merit are hard to disentangle from economic advantage” (10). The ability of the wealthy to pay for access to better schools or more qualified tutors, among other things, raises important questions about the concept of merit in contemporary approaches to education. Statistics demonstrate that students at Ivy League schools overwhelmingly come from wealthy and privileged backgrounds. For instance, “more than two-thirds of students at Ivy League schools come from the top 20 percent of the income scale; at Princeton and Yale, more students come from the top 1 percent than from the entire bottom 60 percent of the country” (10-11).

For those who laud the principle of meritocracy, institutional failure in this regard is not evidence of flaws in the idea of merit itself, but instead is evidence of failure to live up to the standards that meritocracy demands. This view is taken by the majority of people and policymakers: “Our public debates are not about meritocracy itself but about how to achieve it” (11, emphasis added). When considering the college admissions scandal, more questions arise attempting to discern the genesis of the scandal. Not only does the inequality give rise to its own ethical dilemma, but the consequences of the divide are also problematic: The reason the families cheated in the first place was to avert the seeming disaster of their children not attending prestigious schools, and thereby starting off the rest of their lives on an uneven footing compared to their social peers.

The problem with a meritocratic system is what it does to those who participate: “[T]hose who land on top want to believe their success is morally justified […] the winners must believe they have earned their success through their own talent and hard work” (13). The paradox is that the parents who cheat their way into these schools are falsely garnering the results that merit is supposed to give: success based on hard work. Even in a meritocracy that functions perfectly, the problem is that it causes those who succeed to believe that they have achieved their success as individuals, without any help, and this notion is patently false. Not only is this notion false, but it harms the community by severing individual success from common goals—“the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility. And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good” (14).