American Meritocracy, The New Class Paradigm and Regression to the Mean

Who needs Meritocracy? 

Of all the members of the Phantom's family, his eldest son clearly had the most verifiable academic talent: He scored a perfect score n the verbal part of his SAT and he read widely from the moment he learned to read.  When the time came to apply to colleges, he said, "I'm not going to some snob school," and he opted to go to college where he wanted to be, "the coolest city in the world"--at NYU.

His parents had been brought up to think the only way to enter the stratum of society to which they aspired was to go to the most elite colleges they could.  As the Yale provost told his entering class, "Welcome to Yale. Your future is assured."

His parents read the Sunday New York Times Society pages, the wedding announcements, which, next to the Social Register, defined who had made it in America,  and for many years it was a parade of Ivy League names. 

But over the years, something happened to dim the luster of those elite institutions.

For one thing, it is not clear the elite colleges can guarantee your future is assured, quite the opposite. Those colleges refuse to make public any sort of accounting and tracking about the success of failure of their graduates.  Yes, the society pages show graduates with multiple Ivy League merit badges, but those are a tiny percentage of all the graduates of the dozen or so most elite institutions.

Glamour, money, power. Shanty Irish. 

One of the driving forces which motivated the Phantom to want to go Ivy was worm's eye view he had from his own highly competitive high school: The really interesting, exciting, attractive kids he knew wound up at the elite schools; the Phantom felt if he wound up at a state school, he'd be mired with the losers, who were losers because they were uninteresting, lacked ambition, wanted only to drink beer and cheer on teams at the football stadium and would wind up selling insurance or real estate, a dismal fate--whereas the winners would be the senators, doctors, high power lawyers, who were so extolled in the Washington, D.C. area.

But, as the years have passed, the Phantom's perceptions have changed. For one thing, the "losers" who went to the University of Maryland, often turned out to be very interesting people who did wonderful things in life. And the "winners" who went to Harvard, Yale and Princeton, turned out to be pretty unattractive, driven, unhappy people who actually never did much other than make money, buy expensive cars and homes, but who, if you went out to dinner with them, you found yourself looking at your watch, thinking about why it was taking the waiter so long to bring the check.

And being a partner at those high power Washington law firms no longer looks so glamorous.  What exactly do those guys do all day? Are they not kissing up, as they always did in high school, and then college? And working on the Hill? Oh, that. Just watch VEEP. Would you really want to live in that world?

In his thoughtful article in The American Conservative, Ron Unz mentions the fall off in math scores among Jewish students over the past decade or two, and he speculates about why this may have occurred. In the end, the most likely explanation is this new generation of Jewish students, who have been raised in relative comfort, are no longer as driven (some would say desperate) to learn what they will be tested on; they  do not have the same faith in the life changing power of scholastic success, and they do not have game because they simply do not care to get into the game. They have made the same choice the eldest son made, to opt out of "snob schools." The value of snob schools is no longer an article of faith.

What they value far more than being able to say they went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, is to be able to  live in Brooklyn or the Upper West Side  or Chicago or San Francisco or Seattle and they are doing really interesting work, succeeding in areas which may be highly lucrative or simply highly rewarding--music, writing, business, engineering--areas in which the merit badge does not matter as much as the solution you've proposed to solve important problems. 

Part of the Phantom's family comes from the far West. When a very talented nephew considered  Princeton and Drexel for engineering, they were unimpressed with the Ivy League glitter; they wanted to look at the finances. Drexel offered a full five year ride with a Masters in Engineering. Princeton offered some financial aide, but seemed to say, "Hey, but we're Princeton." The boy went to Drexel, went to work solving interesting problems for the Philadelphia power company as an undergraduate and had a job with a very healthy salary, a promising career path the day he graduated. 

For an engineer like him, a  society name meant little--it was the problems that needed solving which attracted him. 

This engineer's  brother also came East to go to college, and, after four years,  got his  letter informing him he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and that required $80 for the key. The parents thought it was a scam. They weren't sure what Phi Beta Kappa was. The Phantom frantically offered to pay for the key and tried to explain what an honor this is. "Yeah, well, if it's such an honor why don't they put their money where their mouth is?"  Culture gap there. 

In the real world, the Phantom has seen the whole scheme of work and reward upended, disrupted. As soon as he finished medical school, he framed all this diplomas from three different Ivy League institutions and put them on the wall of his new office, where they impressed almost no one. All his patients cared about was that he had his "MD" and his license, and did he participate with their insurance? If he did not, they'd go to the doctor who did, even if that doctor went to the American Medical School of the Caribbean. 

Life in North Hampton, far from the Ivy League

And, as it turned out, the Phantom got to know a graduate of that school and discovered he was one of the finest physicians he ever met, way better than the dozen or so Harvard Medical School grads he worked with, because he knew as much clinical medicine and he cared more about his patients, knew them better and never failed to take the time to remove the dressing and look at the wound, a necessary if not sufficient requirement for good medical care. The Harvard guys were too busy reading the Wall Street Journal to take the time to remove the dressing, to look at the wound. 

Now, the Phantom lives in New Hampshire, where people want to know if you hunt or fish or hike or ski or surf or boat.  The names of elite institutions mean very little to folks up here. They judge people by other criteria.  

Looking back at life in Washington, the Phantom remembers one dinner in particular, among many. The Phantom and his wife had been invited to dinner by the parents of students at the Sidwell Friends School, where their son had begun as a freshman in high school. Only a small number of students were admitted to SFS in the 9th grade, most starting in grade school or middle school, and this was an attempt to make the Phantom and his wife feel welcome. 

Conversation around the table bounced around the years the various parents had spent at Harvard, mostly in the sixties.  At one point, one of the parents was teased because his daughter had opted to go to Stanford, rather than Harvard, and everyone pretended this was a great calamity, while the disgraced parent played along and everyone enjoyed themselves immensely.  The Phantom looked across the table at his wife and she back at him and they knew what each other was thinking.  He could see the alarm in her eyes, because she knew the Phantom was on the verge of dropping a bomb on these smug elitists, and she fingered her fork in a way which suggested she could quickly throw it across the table and find the Phantom's throat with it.

It was a scene from Downton Abbey, cum Washington, D.C., but the chatter was less urbane and with fewer classical allusions. 

And the Phantom and his wife held their tongues, more or less, until they got back to their car, where she said, "Well, if this is the upper class, you can have it." 

"You know," the Phantom said. "We knew some Vanderbilts in New York. We have rubbed shoulders with real lace.  We took care of Roosevelts, Onassis, Whitneys, Paysons,  at the New York Hospital. They were the elect because of the families they came from, or because of the sheer wealth, and none of them seemed as insecure as the bunch we just saw. Their status is all tied up in those schools and they have to trot it out for full display. It's a little pathetic."

"Ah, but they are the winners. They work for Covington and Burling, the Washington Post, Brookings, all the glittering prizes. But, they are just so unappetizing."

"Well, but they all went to Harvard.  That's what matters."