Yesterday, I talked about the problem of justifying public support for higher education strictly in terms of “filling the gap” in existing labor markets. It handcuffs higher education to an impossible task, to a thin political alibi that is used to explain why we have inequality, why so much work is unrewarding and unsatisfying.
To build on this, today I want to talk about an essay by the sociologist Steven Brint in The Chronicle of Higher Education that strives to look beyond meritocracy as an organizing principle for higher education.
Brint primarily understands meritocracy’s role in selective higher education as the first of several funnels that will be used to weed out competitors for the most highly desirable jobs and roles in a small subset of American workplaces. He reviews the wide range of arguments against meritocracy: originally intended to break up a near-hereditary stranglehold of a small number of wealthy and influential families over elite higher education and the positions of power and authority that followed, it evolved steadily into its own form of stifling inequality where families with the social and cultural capital to produce the conventional signifiers of merit in their children then claimed the lion’s share of places in the next cycle of selective admissions, with each turn of the wheel intensifying that exclusivity.
By and large, Brint agrees with the critique, though he quite rightly points out that the dramatic increase in wealth inequality in the United States over the same time period has relatively little to do with higher education or meritocracy per se, given that selective higher education affects only a tiny sliver of the total graduates from colleges and university and even smaller proportion of the total labor market. But in certain domains of highly valued labor and in certain domains of leadership and power, having been trained by meritocratic higher education is still an almost necessary credential to get in the door in the first place.
While the critique of meritocracy is now coming from all sides, I suppose one could still ask, “Well, what’s the problem with having institutions that select the best and the brightest, put them through an exacting and demanding process of training, and matching them to the most important and demanding jobs we have?” Some of the critics of actually-existing meritocracy aren’t against that idea as such, just against the degree to which the meritocracy that we have doesn’t function that way, e.g.,
it is not evaluating the entirety of the population for their potential and talent but instead is looking for conventionalized signs of intellectual and social preparation that makes a candidate “fit” for what selective universities and colleges have to offer (despite the fiction of “holistic” admissions);
it is not putting those accepted through an exacting and demanding process of training that further sorts the best from the rest;
the matching to the most important and demanding jobs has all the defects of the admissions process, only intensified; moreover, those jobs no longer have either the authority or the monetary compensation they used to have and the generalized liberal arts training that higher education provides is no longer informing the upper echelons of power and wealth in the United States.
Brint seems to me to be in this camp: the problem in his view with meritocracy in higher education is not with the idea of a grueling series of selective processes in society that winnow young people into a smaller and smaller group and match them to work of consequences, but that this has gone badly awry in terms of how it actually functions and what it actually leads to. He writes:
…the fact that our leading colleges funnel students into relatively routine if well-paying jobs in consulting, financial services, and high tech looks like something more than a mismatch; it looks like a massive waste of talent.
Brint proposes instead what he calls a civicratic system of selection, where university admissions officers would give
greater weight to indicators that applicants are motivated and prepared to contribute to the well-being of the broader community through research, problem-solving, and innovation.
In essence, Brint argues that admissions should be “Mr. Smith Goes to Harvard”, that it should be about privileging young people who want to do good things in the world, who want to be better citizens, who want to dedicate themselves to society.
Brint is certainly right that these are sentiments found on every college website and in every mission statement in higher education. They’re not new, either: the proposition that the role of higher education is the improvement of the civic commitment and skills of the graduates for the sake of the whole society goes deep into the 19th Century spread of colleges and universities across the United States. Arguably it is the basic idea of liberal arts in its medieval and classical formulation: the improvement of a social class of leaders so that they will be more capable of performing that function.
It’s an uncomfortable concept in that respect once you think about it, though. If contemporary higher education isn’t particularly prone to reference “liberal arts” in that older form, it’s because the anti-democratic elitism inside that version of the idea is impossible to elide. Even if you soften the connection to leadership—and thus to power—with the more palatable idea that a more educated citizenry is a better democratic citizenry, that still argues very strongly against selective institutions, or against the presumption that the more selective the institution, the better the citizen. If this is really your jam, it still leads back to the point that well-funded public universities that take everyone who applies, in the model of CUNY in its most transformative era, is what matters.
You can see where the joinery in Brint’s vision is awkward right in the word civicracy, in the word stem. Cracy: a system of rule, of power, of influence. A democracy controlled by those most devoted to the public good sounds really great right about now, don’t get me wrong. But Brint suggests that
A civicratic system would not (and indeed could not) diminish the individual struggle for eminence, which is such an important part of human nature and societal progress.
He adds,
Just as meritocracy maintained some aristocratic elements, such as a preference for those with high levels of cultural sophistication, a civicratic system will share some features with the meritocratic selection regime that precedes it. It would certainly prize intellectual ability and work ethic. It would take equality of opportunity seriously, more seriously than meritocracy has for decades. But it would connect these qualities to broader societal purposes and would not fetishize test scores far above other qualities that matter for the realization of an improved common life.
I think it’s that specific moment that I have to opt out of what he’s offering. If for no other reason than I balk at the bland normative statement that “the individual struggle for eminence” is “such an important part of human nature and societal progress”. I especially balk at it when it is combined with some underspecified idea of civic virtue which is then tied to the idea of receiving better material support for educational training and presumably afterwards more entitlement to positions of leadership and power. (“Cracy”, remember.)
Is the individual struggle for eminence an important part of human nature? Like many modern Western declarations about “human nature”, this is the kind of statement that rests on an incredibly narrow range of concrete historical examples. It sneaks its universalizing, normative power in at night, when nobody’s looking. More importantly, is it what produces “societal progress”? Here one does not even have to go looking for historical counter-examples outside of modern Western societies: they are right on our doorstep, in plain sight. Name something you think is an example of societal progress: a technology, a medical treatment, a legal reform, a new kind of institution, a cultural innovation. Free associate a while. In at least some of the examples you come up with, the “struggle for eminence” will either have been arguably a serious impediment to progress or at the least a non-necessary or sufficient condition for it.
If we are thinking about the basis on which we allocate scarce resources—say, a limited number of places at a small subset of universities and colleges that educate a very small proportion of the population—and we want to open up our thinking about how to do that, everything is on the table, everything is debatable. Including the proposition that some sort of competitive dynamic is required and natural, and that a well-designed competitive process produces the best outcomes. Maybe so, but you’re going to have to plant your feet and say why if so. Of course, that also means the idea that there should even be institutions with many resources and few places is up for grabs, but it should be. As Brint himself observes, many of the current critics of meritocracy argue that any process of selection—and thus any acceptance of the idea that some set of admissions officers should make a decision about what young people will best be entitled to “cracy” of any kind, for any purpose—is inevitably corrupting, and that as long as there are institutions that can’t educate all comers, the only fair way to do that is via random selection, a lottery of some kind.
It’s a fair point. And maybe if we think about the roles we assign to those who have had the most privileged education with the most dedicated resources, we could do worse than a lottery for that too. It’s how we choose juries, after all. Maybe if we also used that to choose legislatures and presidencies and judges, we would do no worse than we have already done. Particularly if we guaranteed a university education to all our people and provided the resources to make that possible. That feels more like a civic-minded democracy than greasing the skids for the 18-year old kid who knew how to act like he was a good citizen in his Harvard application to be the next party hack on the Supreme Court.
Image credit: "First Prize Center - Albany, NY - 10, Jul - 14" by sebastien.barre is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Your Wednesday essay suggests one path, universal publicly supported education. With no admission advantages for anyone. Yes, the wealthy sliver get the same free ride, wherever they qualify to be admitted. Forget rating schools on who they admit. The evaluation should be on the difference produced in four years. And then there are the post-bac variables but this first one is pretty straightforward as we already have a concept of “public”…if we can save it. Thanks for pushing on these doors Tim.