In part 1, I introduced the idea that people believe that education is the single most important factor to get ahead in our society. The one thing that most believe is necessary to be affluent and not stuck in poverty. Well their idea of poverty anyway. I suppose I should step back and define meritocracy before I go too much further. Merriam Webster defines meritocracy as a system in which the talented are chosen and move ahead on the basis of their achievement. When I refer to meritocracy this will be the definition I am using, however I will slightly modify that to narrow it down to intellectual achievements.
The middle class, the vast majority of people in this country, believe whole heartedly that our system is a meritocracy. Middle class white and Asian parents start pushing their kids to excel from an early age (I live in one of the whitest of the white cities in America, which is why I have not mentioned Hispanics and Blacks. I lack enough experience to know if they buy into the meritocracy at the same level as the whites and Asians do, I suspect not). Some as young as only a couple of years old. I know parents who start looking for developmental milestones when their kids are only months old. Is little johnny or janey sitting up when she should be? Are they walking at an appropriate age? Do they have their first words when they should. Oh no, little johnny is 18 months old and isn’t talking yet. We’d better put him into early childhood intervention and get him working with a speech path right away. Many parents have become ultra competitive in regards to their children’s achievements. There is a constant comparison of their child to other children of the same age. Who knew their letters or numbers first. That kind of inane crap.
By the time their children are 2 to 3 years old the search is on for the right pre-school. In affluent white communities, kids are expected to know and be able to write their numbers and letters prior to starting kindergarten. Parents push their kids to already be reading and doing simple addition and subtraction before they start elementary school. All to hopefully give their child a leg up on all the other kids (which is funny when you consider that they all seem to be doing the same thing).
Parents also realize that top marks in school no longer seem to be enough to get into the right colleges and universities. They start pushing their kids as young as 5 into music lessons, foreign languages, and extra-curricular activities. By the time high school rolls around these kids are living regimented lives revolving around school, sports, community activism, and other groups such as young life. All done in an attempt to pad their college application and give them an appearance of being a well rounded kid these schools would love to admit into their incoming class. There’s a reason that these kids need all this extra padding on their applications.
To wit, there is a dark underbelly to all of this pushing and parental involvement. Grade inflation at the high school level is rampant. A buddy of mine teaches at an upper middle class high school in a suburb of the big city. He told me two years ago that 50% of all the grades given at the school were A’s. Another 25% were B’s, 15% or so were C’s, and the rest were D’s. No Fails. He even told me that it’s gotten worse since then. The emphasis is put on grades, not on learning, and the kids know this. School and grades are just one more item on the list to check off on their road to the promised land.
These kids and their parents believe that to get ahead, they need to get into the right college. On the surface this would appear to be true. The upper echelons of power in the United States are dominated by graduates of Ivy League Schools, and primarily by graduates of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, with lesser numbers coming from Penn, Brown, Columbia, and Dartmouth. Damn, I always forget Cornell is in there too. Of course it’s not really the undergraduate programs that open the doors to power, rather the law schools and to a lesser extent the graduate business programs.
Every year U.S. News puts out their list of top universities in the United States. The top 50 are ranked with the rest being technically unranked in tiers 2, 3, and 4. Status can be derived from which school a student attends. Don’t think for a second that most of these kids don’t know where their school is ranked. Also don’t think for a second that there isn’t rampant manipulation of the metrics by these schools in order to move up to a higher ranking.
So the kids believe that if they have worked their butts off to get good grades and have a full well rounded application they will get into the school of their choice. And yet, that’s not the only route. Sports is big business at the University level bringing in large amounts of money. A successful football program can generate large alumni donations. So if a kid is one of the top 1-2% of all athletes the bar to get into a good school is much, much lower. Every couple of years we hear of a scandal at one university or another giving these athletes (who in many cases can’t compete against the other students) top marks in classes they never attended. Awarding degrees they never earned. There was a scandal about 20 years ago of a pro football player (who attended college but may or may not have graduated) who couldn’t read.
But that isn’t the only route. For the children of affluent parents, a large donation is often the only bar they have to hurdle to get into a top school. One of my best friends in high school applied to the same top 50 university that I applied. I got in, he didn’t. No problem. His father made a generous donation to a top 5 school on the east coast, and he was in. No questions asked.
It is interesting to note, that I was required to take a couple of legal courses for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees. Both times we covered cases of discrimination, including cases involving Universities and colleges that set admission quotas for minorities. Standards for admissions have always been lowered for disadvantaged groups. Over the last 20 years there has been some push back as students who were more qualified to attend were denied access in order to meet some phantom diversity standard. So much for getting in on their own merits.
Part 3 tomorrow…I think.
