Why Have Elites Abandoned Merit?

If you’re just a grubby striver, firm in your conviction that you deserve to succeed or fail based upon your own abilities and efforts, know well that elite institutions are now arrayed against you.

By Richard J. Shinder April 13, 2021 

 

Surveying several recent news items, one could not be faulted for believing that the notion of merit has been significantly downgraded in American life.

United Airlines tweeted last week that it “plan(s) for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.” While perhaps a worthy goal, left unmentioned are the relevance of gender or race to piloting a jet safely, and any support for the assertion that such groups previously had been excluded from consideration).

In higher education, two Ivy League academic institutions, Harvard and Yale, have been in the crosshairs of legal actions for disfavoring Asian Americans in college admissions, these applicants’ credentials notwithstanding (and this during a time when hate crimes against Americans of Asian heritage are on the rise). More broadly within higher education, this past year’s “test-optional” approach to admissions due to COVID-19 may be here to stay.

While few will give direct voice to the sentiment that “merit no longer matters,” our elites and institutions appear to have moved honest achievement well down the list of what is celebrated and are increasingly hostile to its promotion—a significant reversal of past practice.........To Read More....

 

 

Merit on the Ropes

The campaign against educational excellence spreads to the suburbs.

 Asra Q. Nomani Max Eden September 23, 2020

Last year, students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the nation’s most prestigious public schools, marked a map hanging in a hallway with their families’ far-flung places of origin: from Seoul to Beijing to Hyderabad. Twenty years ago, 70 percent of TJ students were white; today, 79 percent are minority, most from Asian immigrant families.

TJ is a testament to American meritocracy’s melting pot—but last week, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand announced a plan to reduce the number of Asian students at this selective high school. In a four-hour online “work session” alongside the district’s all-Democratic school board, Brabrand laid out an initiative to eliminate TJ’s race-blind, merit-based admissions test and replace it with a “merit lottery” open to all eighth-graders with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in order to increase “equity of opportunity.”

This is not a novel development in American public education. The New York Times has covered activist efforts in New York City to abolish selective high schools on the grounds that sorting students by standardized test scores amounts to “institutional racism.” Asian-American parents objecting to this proposal have been accused by academics of fighting to “keep unjust structures in tact [sic] by denying historical and contemporary systemic anti-Black racial oppression.” For their part, New York’s education bureaucrats have taken aim at the concepts of academic merit and objectivity as manifestations of “white supremacy culture.”............To Read More.....