And if America abandons it, countries that don’t will outcompete us.
Once upon a time there was a college in New York City that people referred to as the “Harvard of the proletariat.” Many of its graduates were poor or the children of working-class immigrants, yet they went on to become physicians and lawyers and distinguished scholars. Nine alumni were later awarded Nobel Prizes.
In 1970 the school watered down its admissions standards and began admitting anyone who had graduated from high school. “The result was a simultaneous boom in student numbers and a collapse in academic standards,” Adrian Wooldridge writes in his new book, “The Aristocracy of Talent.” Within a decade, “two out of three students admitted to the college required remedial teaching in the three ‘R’s. Dropout rates surged. Talented scholars left. Protests and occupations became commonplace.” In 1994 a task force concluded that the college was “in a spiral of decline.” Five years later, the open-admissions policy was declared a failure and finally reversed.
Mr. Wooldridge’s book is a broad defense of meritocracy—judging people based on their abilities—and its origins. He presents New York’s City College as a cautionary tale for the U.S., where the war on standards has intensified in recent years. Last month, Oregon ended its requirement that students show proficiency in reading and math to earn a high school diploma. Two of the nation’s most prestigious schools, Boston Latin Academy and Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia, have scrapped their admissions tests to achieve more racial balance. New York’s mayor has engaged in a multiyear battle to end testing at the Big Apple’s elite schools.
It’s true that many critics of meritocracy come from the left. “The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever designed to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies,” writes Ibram X. Kendi. But Mr. Wooldridge also quotes conservative populists equally troubled by meritocratic systems. “The S.A.T. 50 years ago pulled a lot of smart people out of every little town in America and funneled them into a small number of elite institutions, where they married each other, had kids, and moved to an even smaller number of elite neighborhoods,” Tucker Carlson argues. “But the problem with the meritocracy [is that it] leaches all the empathy out of your society.”
Meritocracies weren’t designed to degrade and exclude. Rather, the goals were to replace a system based heavily on patronage and nepotism, to treat people as individuals rather than as members of groups, and to distribute opportunities according to ability and talent. “For millennia, most societies have been organized according to the very opposite principles to meritocracy,” Mr. Wooldridge writes. “People inherited their positions in fixed social orders. The world was ruled by royal dynasties. Plum jobs were bought and sold like furniture. Nepotism was a way of life. Upward mobility was discouraged and sometimes outlawed.”
As Mr. Carlson notes, meritocratic systems aren’t without flaws. The Ivy League recruits more students from households in the top 1% than from the entire bottom half of the income distribution, which can make meritocracy look like little more than a cover for perpetuating class privilege. On balance, however, meritocracy has done a better job than its alternatives in moving societies forward. It has provided upward social mobility for the poor, for women and for racial and ethnic minorities. Whatever meritocracy’s shortcomings, the cure is clearly more meritocracy, not moving back in the direction of what it replaced.
Despite the attacks from elites, most people still prefer a system based on merit. A Pew poll from 2019 found that 73% of Americans, including 62% of blacks, opposed the use of racial preferences in college admissions. Gallup surveys show that among the 15% of the world’s adults who want to emigrate from where they live, the most popular destination countries are the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Australia and the U.K.—generally the most meritocratic.
In a “Ten Blocks” podcast interview last month with City Journal’s Brian Anderson, Mr. Wooldridge said there would be economic and geopolitical consequences if the U.S. shies away from merit-based systems while other countries embrace them. Nations such as China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore have been pursuing meritocracy for decades—and have the growth to prove it—while American elites are nudging us away from meritocratic systems and toward race-conscious policies to achieve more-equitable outcomes. That’s a mistake, the author said. Whether you’re talking about countries or businesses, “there’s a very simple pattern that emerges,” he explained. “People who adopt meritocratic selection—that is, selecting people on the basis of talent, and promoting them on the basis of their performance—those institutions win.”
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal