British sociologist Michael Young coined the term “meritocracy” in 1958, describing it as the “oligarchy of the future.” He used the term as a warning, not as an ideal. Young’s The Rise of Meritocracy is widely acclaimed as a classic satire on the development of meritocracy.
Over the years meritocracy acquired an altogether different connotation. It became an organizing principle in our societies. The belief in meritocracy became widespread.
Meritocracy was embraced as the handmaiden of equality, built on the essential premise of equal opportunity. A society or an institution was considered meritocratic if it rewarded merit. Meritocracy gained widespread acceptability as it appealed to philosophical liberals who placed a high premium on political morality, liberty, and equality.
Meritocracy worked at first, in the mid-20th century, and helped to replace the hereditary aristocracy. Over the years, as Daniel Markovits of Yale Law School argued, rather than democratizing American society, meritocracy served to increase inequality.
Today, political parties claim to be committed to meritocracy but are cut off from the poor and the disadvantaged. The captains of industry and politics reward themselves for successes that only they believe they have achieved.
Does academia promote meritocracy? Universities in large parts of the world seem to have given up the idea of a university as a community of thinkers engaging in intellectual pursuits not for any external purpose but as an end in itself.
As the editorial of the British magazine “Critic” under the title “Death by Degrees” maintains, “The dream of the university is being killed by greed, dogma, and bureaucracy.” In India, it is fast becoming “schools for skills.”
With higher fees, elite universities are out of reach for the meritorious. Like the US, meritocracy in India too has become a caste system and a degree as a mark of one’s wealth. Didn’t Hannah Arendt warn us that meritocracy without equality “is no less than a form of oligarchy?” Our society has become oligarchic. Yet we pretend it is a meritocracy of the meritorious.
The editorial draws our attention towards another danger: “Your theories may be ridiculous, your research pointless, your teaching useless; but who’s going to fire you when you support all the right causes?”
As American philosopher Michael Sandel, in his much-celebrated book, Tyranny of Merit, posits, in the age of winners and losers, the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Much less does meritocracy address the issue of stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality.
Sandel further contends that meritocracy is not “the friend of equality that it appears to be.” To the contrary, it “functions as an alternative to inequality rather than as its primary justification.” Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from the top 1 percent, the most affluent people, than from those belonging to the bottom 60 percent.
Sociologist Victor Tan Chen of Virginia Commonwealth University describes the American case as “a stunted meritocracy—a rigged game.” Bribing and cheating to gain admission to elite colleges in the US are not unfamiliar. Even at Harvard, while 20 to 40 percent of admissions are on the basis of pure academic performance, other considerations include if one’s parents have gone to Harvard or taught there or made significant donations.
Rich Americans buy their way to these elite institutions. A marriage between merit and money and between meritocracy and plutocracy is an open secret. There are cases of “front door,” “back door,” and “side door” admissions to elite colleges and universities.
The “front door” is the normal pathway to get into an elite school. “Back-door” admissions to these institutions involve huge sums of money through donations. Besides, there are “side doors” to get into these institutions.
As Lauren Puckett-Pope writes in Harper Bazar, the “side door” entry is considered “a goodwill offering, a wink-wink-nudge-nudge that urges admission officers to ogle at the dollar signs and remember the last name of the donor.”
There have been cases of wealthy parents and Hollywood stars being involved in the admission scandal. In 2019, actor Felicity Huffman was sentenced to prison terms for payingthousands of dollars to have one of her daughter’s SAT scores inflated.
For the tiny group of students from the disprivileged sections of society, getting in the Ivy League is only half the battle. Tony Jack, in his book, Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, documents their struggles long after they arrive on campus. Admission doesn’t mean acceptance.
Higher education was seen as the primary locus for scientific research. As Catherine Drew Gilpin, first woman president of Harvard University, says, “Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices.”
Today, a university is being viewed by many as “a factory of knowledge,” and as Yale Law School professor Anthony Kronman explains, the question of what living is for “has been expelled from classrooms in the blinding fog of political correctness.”
There is a widespread belief that meritocracy has led to the much-vaunted “American Dream.” In reality, the much-romanticized meritocracy has become a dystopia. What we call merit is privilege in disguise. How can Ivy League degrees be considered evidence of merit as long as access to these institutions is for the wealthy?
Meritocracy leaves little room for solidarity and the common good. The tyranny of meritocracy not only defeats its intended goals, but it leads to what Daniel Markovits describes as “snowball inequality.”
Lani Guinier, legal scholar and civil rights theorist, argues that the merit systems that dictate the admission practices of elite institutions are functioning to select and privilege elite individuals rather than create learning communities geared to advance democratic societies.
Meritocracy, to her, is “testocracy,” which is the 21st century “cult of standardized, quantifiable merit that values perfect scores. Many believe meritocracy is MAGA’s smokescreen for white supremacy.
The Gaokao exam in China is considered one of the toughest in the world and is a mechanism for meritorious selection. However, the critics maintain that it has legitimized the privileges of those new elites who seized new political and economic power as China went through a period of market reform.
Adrian Wooldridge, author of The Aristocracy of Talent, refers to the example of Venice, how when it embraced talent, it ruled the Mediterranean. But once it became The Stones of Venice, it turned into “a ghost upon the sands of the sea—so weak, so quiet.”
As Sandel argues, merit and meritocracy are two different things. Merit as competence is good. Meritocracy is a system of rule, and “a way of allocating income and wealth and power and honor according to what people are said to deserve” is not.
What makes merit a kind of tyranny is the way it attributes deservingness to the successful. Meritocracy has become a kind of hereditary system, very much like what aristocracy used to be.
Sandel maintains that “even a perfect meritocracy would still have a dark side.” Meritocracy is crippling the so-called “American Dream.” It has created a competition where, “even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”
Meritocracy as it is understood and practiced harms everyone, including the winners. British industrial sociologist Alan Fox dismisses meritocracy as a pernicious form of social organization “that would exacerbate inequality and social stratification based on ‘occupational status.'”
Meritocracy has undermined both democracy and education. As Mark Damazer, former Master of St. Peter’s College, Oxford, says, it has provided “the propulsive force for Donald Trump’s dark populism…turning America into a nation on the verge of a class war.”
Will AI render human intelligence obsolete? Technological advancements, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, are transforming the landscape of work and education. Global challenges such as climate change and inequality will also require a rethinking of meritocratic principles.
Time alone will tell if meritocracy will survive in the age of “technocracy” and “algorithmocracy.” However, one thing is apparent. Meritocracy will not remain as the gold standard for progress and societal advances. We may have already entered an era of AIocracy.
