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The Atlantic must be having success writing about college admissions since it continues to crank out long-form articles on the subject. Just a few months ago it published a piece about the bad behavior of parents at elite private high schools. Now, it presents the college application frenzy’s more existential threat to society via the very capable and insightful writing of Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law professor who also wrote the well-received Meritocracy Trap.
In the article How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning, Markovits presents a compelling lead-up to where we are with today’s high-pressure college-admissions process, which he believes is hurting our world at the deepest levels. Essentially, he argues that the monied class desire elite college admissions so much, that they let the demands of these colleges dictate who their children become as people. Their very selves are being molded by college admissions officers they won’t meet for years, and who arguably should not hold nearly such power. As a company that fields inquiries from parents of middle school children and younger about how to get into a top college, I can agree with Markovits. Parents do work backward from the college application year, making sure that their kids are checking off all of the boxes and pursuing achievement in every facet of life.
But parents are actually working backward from an even further point in their children’s lives, which is economic security and wealth as adults. College is just another step in the journey to this eventual destination. As Markovits points out, certain elite colleges and graduate schools are a stepping stone to that secure life because elite employers that pay elite wages tend to hire largely from these pools. The 1% know this. They know that there is a limited supply of those top-paying jobs and that not every college graduate can get one. Employers willing to pay at the top of the scale can have any employee they want and so they choose from a list of brand-name schools that have done much of the recruiting for them by sifting through 40,000 high school applicants when choosing their class. Is this ideal? No. Merit can be found anywhere and exists in so many different types of colleges and kids. But it is efficient and logical for elite companies to recruit this way. It’s not too different from the colleges themselves, pulling students from name-brand high schools because they simply don’t have the resources to thoroughly evaluate every applicant.
Markovits’ writing presents more dismay than solution. He places blame at the feet of standardized testing companies, US News and World Report and the admissions offices of elite colleges and suggests that changes to them might make for a better, more self-actualized society. He writes that:
“A social and economic order based on the immense labor incomes of extravagantly educated workers traps high-achieving students in a pitiless competition to attain meaningless superiority. The more completely people embrace education’s competitive face, the further they retreat from its deeper place in human self-actualization; no matter how skilled they get at capturing status, they never acquire a deep self-knowledge.”
This is tragic on a certain level, but it is also the outcome of a pragmatic viewpoint (and pragmatism is hard to ignore in a society with few social safety nets). As long as wealth is divided the way it is in this country, and the pedigrees most likely to result in the positive participation in this wealth are what they are, well-meaning parents are going to keep working backwards, and keep making decisions that lead to economic security for their children. That means going to a certain group of colleges if possible. And the colleges themselves are not going to change that. Elite ones are not going to pump out more social workers and educators, as the writer makes the case for, simply because that is not the path to wealth. Nor are parents going to push their children down these idealistic but typically financially insecure pathways. If we want colleges to educate for the purpose of self-realization, it’s going to require a fresh look at how income is divided. Until then, expect more people, not fewer, to seek access to the kinds of elite colleges and major choices that lead to a higher likelihood of wealth.
