The Bush Administration recently filed a brief with the Supreme Court stating its opposition to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions policy. One of the rhetorical points quickly made by the administration’s critics is that Bush himself benefited from affirmative action in his academic applications, using his geographical location and status as a ‘legacy’ student to help him get into Andover and Yale. It’s a pretty effective debating technique, highlighting the fact that – especially when it comes to education – strict ‘merit’ rarely completely wins the day. What I’ve wondered more and more since the stories started hitting the press is, is that such a bad thing?
The idea of a meritocracy appeals to everyone’s innate sense of fairness, I think. We like to see other people get what they deserve, and we like to think that whatever we have, we have because we’ve earned it. In its idealized form, it’s a terrific guiding principle. But when you put it into practice, it becomes pretty mushy. Sticking with education, how do you determine academic merit? Grades? But different schools have different grading systems, not to mention different curricula and standards. Just an example – my high school worked on a 4.0-scale, and didn’t give extra weight to As from honors classes. The guy with the highest GPA in my graduating class didn’t take many – if any – honors math or English classes, while the guy right behind him did. (I am neither of the people in this example, for anyone who might think I’m bitter or anything.) Standardized test might help smooth out the comparisons – but studies have shown that they don’t nearly as good a job predicting future academic performance as our current reliance on them would suggest.
And that’s assuming that we agree that academic merit is the right type of merit to be searching for – which never turns out to be the case, either. Extracurricular activities, writing skills, candidate interviews, athletics – all of these things come into play, as schools attempt to develop a well-rounded student population. We might argue over the prominence of athletics in higher education, and the exact weighting of all these things can get hairy, but I think most of us can agree that this is a better system than just ranking everyone by GPA and throwing everyone in the same percentile into the same institution. A well-rounded community gives all its members a chance to flourish, and lets everyone benefit from the contribution that each other member makes. I couldn’t hit a baseball or ace organic chemistry in college, but I could help run the newspaper that chronicled the baseball team’s exploits and take the philosophy courses that fueled late night dorm room conversations with my pre-med roommate (and eventually led to this site). Even seemingly superficial details like geography have a role to play here – it’s very easy to get caught up in one’s own local culture, so anything that forces you to break free of that is a good thing. We might want to convince ourselves that it’s possible to come up with some objective scale that will measure merit such that further argument is impossible. But we’re actually better off subordinating strict merit evaluations on an individual level to consideration of what’s best for the larger community.
I realize it’s even more problematic to try and apply this standard outside the academic world – employers aren’t really interested in my hobbies, they’re interested in whether I can do the job they might hire me for. And that’s as it should be. In employment and elsewhere, though, there’s often a gray area – you don’t have to choose between one person who clearly can do the job and one who clearly can’t, but between folks who all seem like they can do the job. I may be getting a little touchy feeley here, but I think that rather than try to rank people to determine who’s better than the others, maybe we should start paying more consideration to how everyone’s potential role fits into the greater good. It might mean redefining our notion of fairness and who ‘deserves’ what. In the long run, though, I think we’d be well served by opening up our definitions of those terms and choosing our policies accordingly.