Rob Henderson on Substack

Upward mobility can be achieved in two ways: opening elite universities, as happened with the GI Bill, or challenging the claim of being elite, and thereby, in revaluing them rationally, creating a more realistic map of excellence and making a degree from a university like Stanford or Harvard not materially different from a degree from Texas State

Elite colleges are admitting primarily those students whose social background allows them to provide an application profile that fits what the universities regard as “their kind of student,” much as it was in the 1920s. On the margins, they accept students of protected classes who may well deserve to be there on their own merits. What is excluded a

White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around a lot of poor white people. Affluent white college graduates seem to be the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by

the unresolved dysfunction in the personnel system is likely to get worse if the armed forces use force-shaping techniques based on seniority instead of merit.

Many students would routinely claim that systemic forces were working against them, yet they seemed pleased to demonstrate how special they were for rising above those impediments.