Opinion: Is A Merit-Based System Actually Fair?

One of the social inflection points, especially in the post-war and postcolonial period, was when marginalised sections became entitled to education-driven upward mobility by challenging hereditary aristocracy with democratic meritocracy. The idea of merit became instrumental in democratising educational institutions, particularly in top-notch centres of teaching, learning and research, which used to be exclusive clubs for the privileged.  

Undoubtedly, this merit-based system succeeded to a certain extent in its goal of providing equal opportunities. It consequently translated to economic success by forming a new educated middle-class, many of whom entered the class of social elites.

Not everyone gets ahead 

However, over time, the intended power-sharing associated with a meritocratic order in a market-driven society not only stalled upward mobility but turned into a new techno-feudal order. These new technocratic elites became the owners, managers and regulators of inaccessible zones of innovation centres.  

These innovation centres have an unwritten rule to predominantly recruit from elite centres of learning, which were, and are primarily accessible to households with large savings or creditworthiness. An article in The Guardian says economists find that many elite US universities–including Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton and Yale–take more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%.

On the other hand, these centres of innovation are focused on profit maximisation, which eventually translates to power centralisation. In parallel, these centres bring a shift in labour market dynamics where erstwhile skilled labour becomes redundant without any mechanism for being re-equipped with new skills. This leads to a decreasing capacity to pay for education, a diminishing ability to acquire skills and severely affects upward mobility.  

Who are the students that make it to the Ivy Leagues in the United States and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in India? Mostly from the upper part of the economic pyramid. Why? Ranking credentialism would attribute it to the personal limitations of students who could not make it in the open merit rankings. However, in hindsight, it is linked to a systematic exclusion that forgets the initial conditions or uneven socioeconomic circumstances of pupils in merit-based rankings. In most cases, these tests are uneven and lack a level playing field.  

How do we measure merit? 

It is a well-established fact that students whose parents are educated and economically well-off tend to do better in competitive exams than those who do not have the same privilege. There are certainly outliers, but we cannot have a public policy based on exceptions. A society marked by underfunded public education, lack of nutrition and low family income cannot validate and justify inequalities by seeking refuge in what Michael Sandel calls the “hubris of merit”.  

Take the example of a first-generation student from a less privileged family who studied in an underfunded public school. This student, presumably not in a position to access a private coaching centre, is under-competent according to the measure of “testocratic” [a reliance on test scores to measure aptitude] merit-driven success, leading to their defeat in an exam with counterparts who can afford such private coaching. Unsurprisingly, democratic meritocracy was supposed to be emancipatory but turned into a trap. 

What makes this meritocratic race more absurd is that techno-feudal elites have been shifting the goalposts for maintaining their feudal status quo! Does quantitative measurement by a “testocratic” system in a meritocratic society serve the larger good of society?  

One of the philosophical critiques of meritocracy is the valourisation of talent through which an individual justifies their privileges. However, talent is not always rewarded in society.  

Nobel Laureate and philosopher Amartya Sen says merit is an incentive system that rewards the actions that society values. There are no metrics by which we can measure talent. It is the market that constantly changes the value of merit.  

A top-notch kho kho or kabaddi player is not economically rewarded for their talent to the same extent as cricket or soccer players. One of the fundamental characteristics of humans that distinguishes them from other animals is the ability to cooperate on a large scale. Therefore, it is essential to recognise the collective efforts that play a role in individual success. It is society that places value on our talent. Can a talented singer hold value in a neighbourhood of deaf people? 

A flawed model 

Lani Guinie, a legal scholar and theorist, articulates how cherry-picking of candidates by top-notch educational institutes through quantitative metrics is flawed and unjust. The goal and the mandate of higher education institutes should be to democratise society, impart required skills to diverse sections and shape thinking skills.  

Selecting a handful of candidates, who by their current yardstick are already brilliant, reduces educational institutes to just recruiting agencies. Lacking some “testocratic” credentials that most likely are linked to the place in which one is born and the environment one was brought up in should not become a reason for exclusion.  

It should be the goal of higher education institutes to recognise and unleash an individual’s talent, thereby serving “participatory justice”. Therefore, educational institutes need a more holistic approach to selecting candidates of diverse backgrounds that go beyond the current ambit of quantitative metrics.  

The condescension of the elite class in a failed meritocracy has political ramifications. We have seen the rise of demagogues across the world as one of its symptoms. For example, the idea of the “American dream” does not resonate among the working class who do not see their children climbing the ladder of upward mobility and attaining the required credentials in colleges and universities.  

This is one of the reasons that we see the shift in voting patterns of the traditional working class from Democrats to Conservatives. For example, Clinton swept the 50 most educated counties, as statistician Nate Silver noted shortly after the 2016 election; Trump swept the 50 least. One of the fundamental starting points to address this meritocratic trap is to redefine merit. Of course, public-funded quality education, access to nutrition and universal healthcare would give a more level playing field to fine-tune this concept. 

The writer is a research scientist at Stanford University