On meritocracy once again – Ross Douthat in NYT:

‘From the beginning meritocratic culture and standardized testing have been inextricably intertwined. The transformation of America’s elite colleges in the middle of the 20th century, from upper-class finishing schools into modern “multiversities” supposedly open to all comers, was driven and justified by the SAT, which was supposed to provide an equal-opportunity means of ascent and legitimate the new elite with numerical evidence of its brainpower.
For a long time meritocracy’s skeptics, left and right, have noted that the new system created an upper class that seems as privileged and insular as the old one. And according to some of the SAT’s critics, it’s precisely this criticism that’s motivating the current shift away from standardized tests — the idea that they’re inherently biased toward kids from well-off families and that a more holistic definition of merit will open more opportunities for the meritorious poor and middle class.
There are reasons to be doubtful of this account. First, it seems pretty clear that many schools are really ditching the SAT in response to the following sequence of events: Asian American SAT scores rose to the point where elite colleges were accused of discriminating against Asian American applicants to maintain the racial balance they desired, this led to lawsuits, and those lawsuits seem poised to yield a Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action. So universities are pre-emptively abandoning a metric that might be used against them in future litigation, not for the sake of widening opportunity but just in the hopes of sustaining the admissions status quo.’

(…)

‘In this environment, if the most famous benchmark of meritocracy is abandoned, not every school will necessarily devise complex heuristics that serve exactly the same purpose. Many may be content to just balance ethnic diversity with well-off students paying full tuition, coast on their reputations and let their standards slide a bit.’

(…)

‘This combination might be good for America in the long run — fostering a greater regional dispersal of talent, breaking the meritocracy-versus-populism stalemate, weakening the influence of the Ivy League.
But it would represent the death of the meritocracy as we have known it, and old orders do not usually go down without a fight.’

Read the article here.

I don’t know too many people who have good things to say about this order. In 2021 I taught a course om meritocracy at Eindhoven University of Technology. Most of my students, not all of them Dutch by the way, were skeptical about the system, even though they clearly benefited from it. Even those who were in favor of meritocracy admitted that it was not fair, or at least less fair than once was presumed.
The problem is that you will have to select on whatever grounds, income, identity, tests, motivation et cetera.

What selection procedure does more justice to our ideas of justice is unclear to me.

Moving away from credentialism might be something positive, and Douthat suggests that this will happen when we have abandoned SAT and ACT.

In the meantime, I remain curious what kind of fight the meritocrats will put up.