How the Ivy League Broke America — The Atlantic

In his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy Michael Young predicted that a detached ruling class would be the ultimate consequence of the new grammar school tests developed in the 1950s. Young feared the new tripartite school system (grammars, secondary moderns and technical schools) would give superior status to academic skills over creative or t

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But students competed ferociously to get into the elite social clubs: Ivy at Princeton, Skull and Bones at Yale, the Porcellian at Harvard. These clubs provided the well-placed few with the connections that would help them ascend to white-shoe law firms, to prestigious banks, to the State Department, perhaps even to the White House.

The word “meritocracy” has been around since the late 1950s, when a British sociologist named Michael Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy. He meant this new word as a warning: modern societies would learn how to measure intelligence in children so exactly that they would be stratified in schools and jobs according to their natural ability.

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Crow and Dabars don’t hold back in tearing down what they call the “Harvardization” of universities, where schools are responding to the higher education crisis by decreasing their acceptance rates and increasing their price tags, instead of trying to develop a better product that’s designed for the scale and type of demand we’re seeing today.

Now consider our current situation. Despite all the language professing otherwise, in general the education system of the United States is based entirely on genetic determinism. A child is born assumed to have innate traits, including, for example, a preference as to what they want to be when they grow up (somehow just waiting fully-formed inside o... See more