For some reason, I decided to read David Brooks’ piece in The Atlantic, How the Ivy League Broke America: The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new. The tl;dr is that Brooks thinks the meritocracy overly focuses on intelligence in college admissions, and he wants a more comprehensive look at candidates, especially at elite schools. He seems to have a nostalgia for the old days when we had a more hereditary elite, but also doesn’t like the current meritocracy. He generates his own list of admissions criteria out of thin air (or so it appears to me) and doesn’t say how to actually implement them. He then zags into a list of mostly non-education policy proposals. It is ultimately a bit of a (very long) hot mess.

As a general matter, I find his nostalgia for the “Well-Bred Man” model to be misplaced (if unsurprising). I think he makes some valid points, but also overstates the degree to which we even have a full meritocracy (while also ignoring, or at least downplaying, the inherent power dynamics in any system). Worse, and I think this gets to my core frustration with Brooks over time, he acts more like a pop philosopher (in the broadest sense of the word) rather than an expert. By this I mean, he seems to think that just thinking about things is sufficient draw conclusions, rather than being an actual expert on the subject at hand.

I will confess, great work if you can get someone to pay you for it, but it often is a bit empty, despite all the words.

This piece really bugs me, and it is part of a genre that I have mentally noted over the years but never really thought about fully, and I am not even sure what to call it. I think one of the problems is that it is built on a foundation of strawmen, and then the answer it just pulled out of thin air because they sound good, usually with weird, tangential references to make them sound smarter than they are.

The formula is basically the following.

The author makes a definitive statement about The Way Things Used to Be.

The author then notes that A New Thing Happened that changed The Way Things Used to Be.

The reader is to accept that the New Thing was so decisive that a threshold was passed over and a New State of Being came to pass.

But, you see, the New State failed to do everything that was promised, so we need a New New State of Being.

The article spends a lot of time on the failings of the New State of Being, both using a lot of words and also simplistic arguments, so that the author can get to their real agenda: the New New State of Being.

The evidence along the way often feels like it came from Thomas Friedman talking to a cabbie.

All the above is an attempt for me to crystallize both what is bugging me about the piece, and to find a way to write about it.

So, here’s the basic run-down.

His whole premise is in the first line of the piece: “Every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like.” This statement sounds accurate, and may beguile the reader into thinking that a truly intellectual predicate for the discussion has been provided. However, while I think the statement has some general truth, it strikes me as overly simplistic, but it does provide Brooks a way to structure his argument.

The Way Things Used to Be.

In America, from the late 19th century until sometime in the 1950s, the superior person was the Well-Bred Man. Such a man was born into one of the old WASP families that dominated the elite social circles on Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the Main Line, outside Philadelphia; Beacon Hill, in Boston. He was molded at a prep school like Groton or Choate, and came of age at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. In those days, you didn’t have to be brilliant or hardworking to get into Harvard, but it really helped if you were “clubbable”—good-looking, athletic, graceful, casually elegant, Episcopalian, and white. It really helped, too, if your dad had gone there.

I agree that this is a simplified stereotype of elites, especially northeastern elites, at the time. That this was the sole model of the superior person, I am less sure.

I think that bolded part is true, on balance, about how people got into Harvard. Of course, it still is kind of true for some people getting into Harvard (and Brooks does acknowledge this, to a point). But Brooks is engaging in a sleight of hand here from the jump.

He gives us a didactic statement about society having a model of a superior man, but in the paragraph that is supposed to define said man, we immediately make the definition about getting into Harvard. Now, reader, you are locked into the notion that all we need to know about The Way Things Used to Be is college admissions standards.

A New Thing Happened.

Brooks then tells us that admissions reforms at Harvard led to a shift in the way the elite are chosen in the United States, and then spends the rest of the piece explaining why this is a problem.

Note that means moving away from a comprehensive discussion of what American society thought was “the superior man” to now looking very specifically at admissions standards as one elite institution and how this then infected the rest of the country.

The most important of them was James Conant, the president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant looked around and concluded that American democracy was being undermined by a “hereditary aristocracy of wealth.” American capitalism, he argued, was turning into “industrial feudalism,” in which a few ultrarich families had too much corporate power. Conant did not believe the United States could rise to the challenges of the 20th century if it was led by the heirs of a few incestuously interconnected Mayflower families.

So Conant and others set out to get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower. His system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.

By shifting admissions criteria in this way, he hoped to realize Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a natural aristocracy of talent, culling the smartest people from all ranks of society.

[…]

By reimagining college-admissions criteria, Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.

The Failings of the New State of Being.

The piece then makes a number of leaps, making it sound as if Harvard’s choices were pivotal, if not monocausal. This is despite the following, which Brooks does note:

In 1951, 18 years into his presidency, the university was still accepting 94 percent of its legacy applicants. When Jews with high grades and test scores began to flood in, Harvard limited the number of applicants it would consider from New Jersey and parts of New York—places that had a lot of Jews.

There is quite a lot of this in the piece, by the way, some amount of significant counter-evidence that is hand-waved away.

But eventually Conant’s vision triumphed and helped comprehensively refashion American life. 

At this stage I can’t help but note that there are other social factors that might also be relevant that don’t emerge in Brook’s narrative, such as the burgeoning civil rights movement in the 1950s and its culmination in a number of important policies that also influenced education and then the women’s rights movement. Indeed, there was also a shift in the general pool of people in higher ed because of the GI Bill after World War II.

In short: there were any number of factors affecting US society that might have something to do with shifts away from the “Well-Bred Man” that had nothing to do with Conant’s admissions policies at Harvard. A social scientist might even note that some of those forces may have influenced Conant’s policy views.

But, of course, all of this interferes with the narrative, so it is conveniently left out.

For example:

America’s opportunity structure changed as well. It’s gotten harder to secure a good job if you lack a college degree, especially an elite college degree. When I started in journalism, in the 1980s, older working-class reporters still roamed the newsroom. Today, journalism is a profession reserved almost exclusively for college grads, especially elite ones. 

This is certainly true. But, again, I think that the shift to mass-level college attendance, and the commensurate usage of the undergraduate diploma as a signaling device in hiring owes a lot more to broader economic trends than it does to Harvard’s admissions policies in the 1950s. Again, the GI Bill had a lot to do with it.

And yes, elite institutions play an outsized role in a lot of industries–but that is a different issue than needing a college degree to get a job.

 A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal had attended one of the 34 most elite universities or colleges in the nation. A broader study, published in a nature.com journal this year, looked at high achievers across a range of professions—lawyers, artists, scientists, business and political leaders—and found the same phenomenon: 54 percent had attended the same 34 elite institutions. The entire upper-middle-class job market now looks, as the writer Michael Lind has put it, like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities,” Lind writes, “can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”

By the same token, the 34 schools in question aren’t all Ivies.

I will agree that there is almost certainly too much emphasis given to the prestige factor in hiring, but I am not ultimately convinced that Brooks really is addressing this. Indeed, even if his preferred changes come to pass, the prestige of these 34 schools would persist, I expect.

Part of all of this is that we all need signalling devices to make decisions because it forms a shorthand. That isn’t going away no matter what we do.

Back to the Failings of all of this. Brooks gives us a remarkable strawman:

Conant’s reforms should have led to an American golden age. The old WASP aristocracy had been dethroned. A more just society was being built.

That’s right! If a change does not give us a golden age, it failed!

This is quite the criteria.

Brooks continues:

Some of the fruits of this revolution are pretty great. Over the past 50 years, the American leadership class has grown smarter and more diverse. Classic achiever types such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Jamie Dimon, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Indra Nooyi have been funneled through prestigious schools and now occupy key posts in American life. The share of well-educated Americans has risen, and the amount of bigotry—against women, Black people, the LGBTQ community—has declined. Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford measured America’s economic growth per person from 1960 to 2010 and concluded that up to two-fifths of America’s increased prosperity during that time can be explained by better identification and allocation of talent.

To me, this sounds like progress to celebrate and build on. But what do I know? I went to state schools.

Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.

This is just remarkably sweeping in its scope and attaching causalities that are not warranted. Plus, the gravitational well of the success of WWII is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Sure, let’s pretend like we can encapsulate 70ish years of history into a short paragraph and pretend like the key variable is the predominant “image of what the superior person looks like” and how that was driven by college admissions.

Brooks then goes on to identify six sins of the meritocracy:

1. The system overrates intelligence. Sort of (see #3).
2. Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. True, but it doesn’t hurt.
3. The game is rigged. If this is true, and it is, then it really isn’t based on merit or intelligence, which undercuts Brooks’ thesis. Wealth and social status still matter. It is not purely based on merit or intelligence.
4. The meritocracy has created an American caste system. Yes, because any system of power tries to perpetuate itself, surely Brooks knows this, having gone to one of the 34 elite schools.
5. The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. This strikes me as Brooksian gobbeydegook.

At the core of the game is the assumption that the essence of life fulfillment is career success. The system has become so instrumentalized—How can this help me succeed?—that deeper questions about meaning or purpose are off the table, questions like: How do I become a generous human being? How do I lead a life of meaning? How do I build good character?

This strikes me as kind of the case with any system of power, yes? I don’t see this as unique here at all.

6. The meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.

James Conant and his colleagues dreamed of building a world with a lot of class-mixing and relative social comity; we ended up with a world of rigid caste lines and pervasive cultural and political war. Conant dreamed of a nation ruled by brilliant leaders. We ended up with President Trump.

And this is where I have to say: Brooks has road James Conant into the ground. The notion that all of this is the direct result of Harvard admissions policies is absurd. University Presidents, even at Harvard, don’t have the kind of power that Brooks is ascribing.

And yes, there is a populist uprising globally, which may suggest that the issue is not just how Americans view “the Superior Man.”

If only there were a field of study aimed at such questions…

When income level is the most important division in a society, politics is a struggle over how to redistribute money. When a society is more divided by education, politics becomes a war over values and culture.

Or, it may be, as some in political science have argued for a couple of decades now, as societies hit a certain stage of economic development, conflicts often shift from the purely material to what have been termed “postmodern values” such as marriage equality and rights for other minority groups. The struggle to treat everyone in society as equals often creates conflicts with more traditional value sets, especially when once dominant groups are challenged.

Or, you know, it all boils down to Harvard’s admissions standards.

Brooks further pokes holes in his own argument, in my view:

As working-class voters have shifted to the right, progressivism has become an entry badge to the elite. To cite just one example, a study of opinion pieces in The Harvard Crimson found that they became three and a half times more progressive from 2001 to 2023. By 2023, 65 percent of seniors at Harvard, the richest school in the world, identified as progressive or very progressive.

Is Brooks aware of who runs the country right now? Spoiler alert: it’s not opinion writers from The Harvard Crimson. We have an elite that in charge, both in the government and in much of corporate America, who are hardly progressives. Why is it, for some “thinkers,” that the only people who are “elites” are the ones they don’t like?

I prefer a fairly straightforward political science view of “elites” which can more or less be summarized as “those who have power, whether it be political, economic, or social.”

BTW, Pete Hegseth, who occupies an elite level of power, has degrees from Princeton and Harvard. Vice President Vance has a law degree from Harvard. I guess they didn’t need the progressivism entry badges to become elites in America?

We Need a New New State of Being.

I will be honest, by the time the piece gets around to its suggestions, it becomes hard to concentrate on them because I don’t think Brooks makes his argument that the problem is that we focus too much on intelligence. Worse, I think he underplays the degree to which wealth is still a key variable and that perhaps the failure of Conant’s vision is that it was never truly implemented in the way that Brooks describes.

As a former university administrator at a non-elite school, I am open to the notion that college admissions are imperfect. Figuring out a replacement, however, is harder than it sounds.

He wants to move away from an intelligence-focused set of criteria to ones that provide more emphasis on the following.

• Curiosity.
• A sense of drive and mission.
• Social intelligence.
• Agility.

Ok, all well and good. I don’t object to any of this, per se, but what does any of it mean? This is, to me, a list of buzzwords that would still have to be measured in some way, which does not get us out of the test-taking trap nor of the ability of rich parents to find ways to spend money to prove how their child demonstrates the given criterion. (It all reminds me of the focus on GRIT about a decade ago.)

The way Brooks describes these things exemplifies the kind of intellectualizing that drives me crazy about Brooks. For example, on “a sense of drive and mission,” he provides the following:

When the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, he noticed that the men who tended to survive the longest had usually made a commitment to something outside the camps—a spouse, a book project, a vision of a less evil society they hoped to create. Their sense that life had meaning, Frankl concluded, sustained them even in the most dehumanizing circumstances.

A sense of meaning and commitment has value even in far less harrowing conditions. People with these qualities go to where the problems are. They’re willing to run through walls.

So is the Kool-Aid Man, but so what?

In all seriousness: sure, I get the notion that having a sense of purpose would help a person survive terrible conditions, or even be more successful in general. But, what is the world does that have to do with college admissions? The reader will, no doubt, be shocked to learn that Brooks provides no way to measure this, or really any way of defining it.

But, you know, he cited an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist about a different subject, so there!

Somehow all of this boils down to four policy suggestions

1. More vocational education.
2. National service.
3. De-emphasizing schooling in American life.
4. More industrial policy like the CHIPS Act.

How all of this connects to the broader piece is tenuous, in my mind, but at this point I was getting a bit exhausted by it all.

Some Concluding Thoughts.

There are a number of maddening problems with this essay.

1. It ignores the fact that no matter the admissions standards, elite schools are going to be elite. That is, as long as society views an institution as a signalling device for excellence (however defined), that institution is going to have influence.
2. He ignores the fact that the very meaning of the word “meritocracy” is “rule by those with merit”–he focused too much on the “merit” part and not enough on the “rule” (kratos) part. People with power tend to replicate their power. This dynamic is kind of important to understanding any system–the self-perpetuation of power is central (he does kind of address this, but not enough to my liking).
3. The argumentation in the piece is the kind of pseudo-intellectualism that Brooks and his ilk frequently engage in. He makes a dubious assertion (Conant changed the world) and then draws massive implications in an overly simplified tale.
4. His recommendations are conceptually squishy. He might as well be Thomas Friedman telling us what cab drivers think.

Let me note that I agree, as a general principle, that the Ivies have too much of an influence on our politics and society. But I also don’t think that the problem is that this is because they overvalue intelligence over all traits or that Conant managed the goal he set out to achieve.

To wit: Donald Trump holds an Ivy League Degree (University of Pennsylvania). Whatever Donald Trump may be, he is not an exemplar of the notion that raw intelligence has been the dominant output of the system. Moreover, George W. Bush has two Ivy League degrees and was not exactly a towering intellect.

Indeed, in both cases, it is hard to escape the fact that they both came from wealthy families, and Bush was almost certainly a legacy admit to Yale. Neither had to prove their progressive bona fides to graduate from said institutions, BTW.

While Brooks acknowledges these kinds of admissions continue to exist, I think he substantially ignores the way they undercut his premise.

And if you want the Brooks’ equivalent to Friedman’s cabbie, here it is:

I once asked a tech CEO how he hires people. He told me that after each interview, he asks himself, “Is this person a force of nature? Do they have spark, willpower, dedication?” A successful meritocracy will value people who see their lives as a sacred mission.

I truly hate this kind of assessment.

My immediate snarky reaction is: Have you listened to/observed most tech CEOs? They tend to think that having a lot of money means they are philosopher kings with innate special powers. They are not the people you should be turning to learn the deep mysteries of social structures.

My almost simultaneous reaction was to recall the university chancellor I worked for who valued things like “vision” and “leadership,” but what all of that meant was basically: will this person do what I want them to do? Indeed, most self-described “leaders” don’t want underlings with vision and leadership skills, but those kinds of people tend to be pains in the ass, rather than loyal soldiers.

The bottom line is that none of what is listed by the very wise and powerful tech CEO is actionable or even clearly defined. It is all gut instinct and ego, plus it is likely based far too much on the energy in the room combined with more assessment of a resume than is being admitted, I suspect.

And while I know I am not one of the Masters of the Universe who runs the tech world, I have been wrong more than once about what a candidate seems to be displaying in an interview. The performance in a moment is often utterly insufficient to assess a candidate. And anyone who has done hiring knows it’s a crap shoot.

It probably helps make things less of a crap shoot, and helps pump up the ego of the given tech CEO, if all the candidates who apply for a high-powered job at a major tech company are almost certainly top-notch to begin with–especially the ones that make it through the filtering process to make it to the CEO’s office.

The bottom line is that The Atlantic published a lot of words by David Brooks, and it made me write a bunch more.

So, yes, let’s try and reform the meritocracy, but let’s not pretend like the problem here is that we are overly run by intelligent, technocratic progressives.

The bottom line:

1. Yes, the Ivies (and elite schools) have too much influence in American life (but nothing in Brooks piece really would change that).
2. Am I open, in a general sense, to improved college admissions standards? Yes. (BUT, any new standards require definitions and ways to measure them, which Brooks does not provide.)
3. While the current system has flaws, it is flatly superior to the “Well-Bred Man” standard.
4. If you are going to provide a critique, then empirical evidence and an actual proposal would be more persuasive than tangential citations and andecdotes.
5. If you are going to conclude with a list of more concrete policu proposals, it would be nice if they were less tenoously connected to the thousands of words that made up the essay.