I think people should stop all this hand wringing about opportunity; let the weak die on the vine, it just makes everything simpler. The best and brightest should be allowed to shine, but there are limits to that.
All systems are merit based in that merit is measured by the success achieved in those systems.
If you want diverse viewpoints than hiring people based on race or sex won’t do it if they’ve still spent the same decade of their lives at upper-level schools and then universities.
I’ve done performance review at a number of companies that pride themselves on being meritocracies, and it is highly overrated. You might be able to pick out the superstar, and the total loser, but besides that evaluations are very subjective and depend on the luck of the project, the manager, and other circumstances beyond the control of the employee.
As for employment, I’ve seen what monstro describes. The meritocracy limited recruiting to top schools, but that does not give people who might be better than lots of people in those schools a chance. Plus there is a halo effect where people thinking they are rational overestimate the quality of those from famous colleges. I’ve been the beneficiary of this.
And for getting into college kids whose parents were better coaches have an advantage. Is that meritocracy? Perhaps if you made room for the best kids without this advantage, their kids would have this advantage in the future.
Meritocracy might be great if humans didn’t administer it.
But it’s all shades of gray… my parents did much the same with me that I’m doing with my children. However, some of my Asian classmates had parents who were MUCH more concerned with academic success, to the point where they were severely punished in middle school for not making As (in 1984, no less), and were forbidden from doing extracurriculars for fear that they’d take time and effort away from academic stuff. Their parents were much more intimately involved with their homework and studying, etc…
Should I have got a Harvard slot instead of the Asian kids, because my parents didn’t spend the same effort on ensuring I made straight As that theirs did? Of course not. But that’s exactly what Harvard is doing, and you’re suggesting, for the same exact problem, just moved down the parenting academic emphasis scale.
I misread this as, “Is mediocrity overrated?”. 
I had to stop and think about that for a second.
So you are saying that perhaps Stuyvesant should have diversity in its marketing department? I’m not sure how you are (or even if you are) applying diversity to the Stuyvesant setting.
Does it change for all of college or just for some majors (like marketing).
I can also see how having diversity is useful in the police force, the judiciary, primary care physicians, pharmacists, teachers, etc. where there is a lot of contact with the community.
So subjectivity creeps into meritocratic judgments so we don’t really like meritocracies. Then what is the alternative? Just a lottery?
How do you tell which applicants you should handicap for having good parents?
It’s also not the fault of the Asian students that the black students had shitty parents. If the outcome is to be fair to the kids, why should they be penalized for the failings of other kids’ parents?
Regards,
Shodan
I think some of it is liberalism gone wild. But there is a small fringe on the left that believes that any disparity is evidence of ongoing systemic racism.
Those black parents are shitty parents because of racism so its not really punishing Asians kids for having good parents, its rectifying the injustice created by the systemic racism that made the black parents so bad.
The burden just happens to fall on the backs of poor Asians. They would love if the burden fell on the backs of rich white kids but they are OK with it falling on the backs of poor Asian kids because the Asian community is doing well already, so they can afford it.
Acknowledge that it is subjective. My problem with meritocracy is not the merit part, but that companies use it to stifle legitimate complaints.
There are no easy answers. I once spoke to a Harvard Business School professor who is an expert on this, and he said that all his consulting showed him that no company was ever really satisfied with how they do it.
We have a high school with lots of kids like this. A few years back one of the umpteen valedictorians said, after she was in Berkeley (of course) that of course she cheated - everyone did.
Colleges might worry if these kids are going to slack off once they get in. Couldn’t blame them if they did. They might also worry about the parents putting the same pressure on.
Helping with homework is great, but the pressure of “why did you get only a 98 on that test?” is not something that should be encouraged.
That’s odd. If a diverse workforce really is better than one that is strictly meritocratic, I would have thought it worked out that way at least some of the time.
Regards,
Shodan
Racism pays it forward. That parents - even good parents - have no experience of college or a lot of ability to role model academic excellence will hold back even smart kids.
The kid displaced by a poor kid might have to go to Princeton instead of Harvard. It is unlikely she is going to wind up in Podunk U. Sure you don’t want to penalize the Asian kid, but you also don’t want to penalize the kid who might have done even better with equal family support.
First, you have to define merit, and find some way to measure it. Neither of those things is trivial.
You might get cultural artifacts in your definition of “merit”- things that aren’t really related to getting the job at hand done, but that are valued by the culture that is producing the definition of “merit”. People from other cultural backgrounds might have a disadvantage in those things, but be equally well qualified to do the job.
You also have to make sure your scale of merit is the same for different groups of people. This is a problem for comparing men and women- sometimes a man can be praised for conduct that would get a woman labeled “bossy” or “abrasive”.
If you need a lot of time free from things like working for pay and handling family problems to develop merit, that system is discriminating against poor people. It’s going to be easier for a rich person to develop merit than a poor person. College admissions that require a lot of extracurricular activities, or jobs where unpaid internships are a prerequisite, would be examples of this.
Another problem with meritocracy is that a lot of people don’t like seeing their children not do as well as they did. Their children may or may not have the same level of merit (however we’re defining and measuring that) as their parents. It’s very tempting for a parent in a position of power to do something to make things easier for their children. In fact, a lot of people would judge a parent negatively for not doing so.
Diversity wasn’t really the issue. For instance, how do you compare someone who had modest goals and knocked them out of the park to someone who had really hard goals and didn’t meet all of them? In my environment people were on different projects. Do you reward based on the project?
And pay and performance never match up, with a limited pot of money.
My favorite example. I was in a Lab performance meeting, and one of the Chemistry managers brought up her employee who was in charge of a very poisonous gas. If he made a mistake the whole building could die.
No one argued with giving him a good raise.
Isn’t that unfair to the other people, who would be better at handling poisonous gas, if not for the fact that they had shitty parents?
Regards,
Shodan
If everyone in the building isn’t dead, that means he’s presumably doing his job well enough. That doesn’t sound like a job where trying people out on the job and seeing how they do would be a good way to see who can do the best job.
Meritocratic handling is, in general, good. But like most things, the pure and raw deal is probably not the best thing ever.
Issues:
- How do you measure merit? If you measure it by test, then you just end up with everyone teaching to the test, which devalues the actual merits of the individual. Rather than accepting people who are self-guided, creative, and intelligent, you end up with a bunch of trained monkeys that have the ability to cram information for 24 hours and then forget everything and never had any real context on any of it to begin with.
- Humanity is granted with nepotistic instincts. This means that the successes (and failures) of generation X will partially spill over into generation X+1. Two people of equal merit, but with widely different starting positions, will end up in two separate locations, which means that full use of the merit of generation X removes the full use of merit against generations X+1…X+n. Minus some system to equalize everyone’s starting position, a fully meritocratic system is liable to create a feedback loop that breaks meritocracy.
- On the other hand, mankind turns into a bunch of lazy bastards when they are not offered much reward (see the USSR). Breaking the ability to nepotistically benefit our children would strongly impact the willingness of the current generation to work hard and make the world a better place.
Overall, you end up with a system that looks like what we have. You can’t simply get in based on test results, scholarships and racial quotas ensure that people from non-privileged quarters still have a chance, and yet people can still get in largely because they had a good upbringing and worked reasonably hard for it.
Personally, I’d vote that we could do more on #1 and #2. While I respect #3, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to breaking the system.
Emphasis added
Might have done better? Now we are supposed to let people in based on how well they would have done if they tried harder or if they had better parents?
Stuyvesant is full of the children of poor Chinese peasants. Asians have the highest poverty rate in NYC but they still send their kids to the best public school in the city. Their parents were from a culture that exalted education so their parents made shit tons of sacrifices for their kid’s education. Their kids pick up on this and treat education more seriously and focus on it more. In this sense, these poor Asian kids living in Chinatown NYC (Asians in NYC have the highest poverty rate) have an advantage over the middle class non-Asian kids on the upper east side.
Should we stop penalizing these middle class non-Asian kids because they didn’t have the benefit of parents who made education a priority by erasing whatever benefit we think the Asian parents bestowed on their impoverished children? Or is it ok if we only correct for shitty black and hispanic parents?
This is not a question of going to Harvard instead of Princeton. The differences are much more dramatic.