Merit in motion
http://economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5213394
Nov 24th 2005
From The Economist print edition
AMERICANS justify their country's comparatively high social inequality
by emphasising its equality of opportunity. The implication is that it
is talent and hard work, not inherited privilege, which separate the
rich from the poor.
The linchpin of such a meritocratic perspective is the educational
system, which effectively allows access to the top of the socioeconomic
ladder through the process of university admissions. America's big
three universities (Harvard, Yale and Princeton) have for centuries
created and reproduced the national elite, and have long sworn fealty
to the principle of egalitarian opportunity. But in "The Chosen",
an encyclopedic and engaging account of their admissions over the last
century, Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of
California, Berkeley, demolishes their historical claim to be bastions
of meritocracy. More provocatively, he questions the whole idea of
whether you can define merit objectively, and instead uses painstaking
archival research to prove that, over the years, the Ivy League
universities have defined and redefined merit according to their
shifting institutional priorities.
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