Universities are among the most elitist institutions in society. I won’t say they are unabashed by this role: in fact, I’d say they are plenty bashful. Certainly, there are many people who wish to be as democratic as possible about letting people enter higher education (though this commitment often drops as the institution becomes more elite and prestigious) but a major part of higher education’s purpose is to winnow; to separate the brightest from the merely bright and shuffle them along to the professions or scientific research. In so doing, it plays a major role in creating the hierarchies that permeate society: it does not “create” the ruling class, per se, but it does play a very big role – maybe bigger than any other single institution – in determining who gets a glimpse of it.

We justify all this on the grounds that universities are built to identify and encourage merit, where merit is designated as some combination of hard work and ability. Neither term is value-free, nor are they uncontested. But broadly speaking, people in different academics tend to agree on who is meritorious and who is not when they see it. It is this spotting function that makes universities key agents in the process of meritocracy.

So when someone writes a moderately successful book attacking the notion of meritocracy, as Daniel Markovits did late last year in his book  The Meritocracy Trap , it’s worth sitting up and paying attention. Meritocracy is universities’ bread and butter.

Now, when the British sociologist Michael Young invented the word, in his 1958 satirical essay  The Rise of the Meritocracy , he was in many ways taking aim at the political consequences of technocracy. His argument was not so much that selecting people into jobs based on talent and work ethic was a bad thing (a point he makes pretty clear in  this 2001 essay ), but rather that the  twin  acts of i) selecting for top jobs on “ability”, which he thought was a fixed and hence mostly genetic trait and ii) allowing those in top jobs to monopolize political power because it was self-evident that they “knew best” would create a permanent underclass and a populist revolt. Western civ hasn’t panned out exactly the way Young though it would in the last sixty years, but you can certainly see some useful foreshadowing here.

Markovits takes a different tack, making three main arguments, two of which are terrible. The first is “look how our meritocratic elites have ruined everything over the past forty years, isn’t meritocracy terrible?”, which is basically the Zuccotti Park argument , only with “meritocrats” taking the place of “the one percent”. It’s a dumb argument, because it confuses “elites” with “meritocrats” – if you get to the point where you start referring to the Koch brothers as part of the meritocracy (as Markovits does), you really need to take a look at yourself. Plutocracy =/= Meritocracy, for God’s sake.

Markovits’ second argument, about the “trap” of meritocracy, is even less useful. It’s basically: meritocracy is not only bad for the losers, it’s bad for the winners, too, look how miserable they all are demonstrating the “hard work” part of the meritocratic definition – so stressed, no sex life, the poor things (yes, he argues this on page 32). This argument is so goofy it’s not even worth spending time on.

His third argument is not entirely original (it was more concisely written up by Richard Reeves in  Dream Hoarders ) but is probably the most cogent: that the way merit is defined and measured – specifically at the top US institutions like the Ivies – is highly susceptible to inter-generational transmission. Upper-class parents are better able to provide high-class learning opportunities (both academic and experiential) and so even though merit is ostensibly open to all, it is the children of the upper-middle-class who win all the prizes. Class reproduces itself, and you end up with a caste system not too far removed from Young’s dystopia.

So, fundamentally, the problem with meritocracy is not the act of awarding jobs based on merit (i.e. evaluating hard work and ability). There may be other ways to allocate jobs, but none of them are obviously better or more egalitarian. There are, however, two problems. The first, identified by Young, is the overconcentration of  political  power with the meritorious. The second, identified by Markovits, is that merit is being defined in such a way that it is hijacked by the rich.

Now there isn’t much universities can do about the first problem, but there is certainly a lot they can do about the second one. Within institutions, merit is judged primarily at the point of entrance (when the largest scholarships are awarded) and again at entrance to graduate and professional programs. We don’t need to make merit exclusively about raw grade-point averages (which are positively correlated to socio-economic status), and we definitely don’t need to make it about prestigious extra-curricular events like who volunteered in Africa, or interned on Parliament Hill – positions that are almost certainly the result of parents’ income and connections.

We can – if we care enough to take the time to do so – contextualize merit relative to socio-economic background. A promising kid from East Vancouver is almost certainly not going to look like a promising kid from Vancouver’s North Shore  and that’s fine . The trick is learning to work out what promise looks like in different contexts and not assume it looks the way it does to the upper-middle class (a point made very effectively by Julie Posselt in  Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity and Faculty Gatekeeping ). That’s certainly possible – if you want an example of how to do this, take a close at how the Loran Scholarships work – but it certainly takes a lot more time and energy than we typically expend in distributing awards at the gradate and undergraduate levels.

I don’t want to overstate the problem. This is certainly less of an issue in Canada than it is in the United States, where access to top schools is more restrictive, and such access is routinely based on some brutally class-based notions of merit. But we can always do better.

Across human history, the surest sign of civilizational decline is when the top jobs become the property of a small, hereditary elite. Literally, the most important job any of us in higher education has is to make sure that we do not become handmaidens to that kind of decline. Contextualizing merit- or, democratizing merit and removing it from the clutches of the upper middle-class – is central to this. Meritocracy can work. But it requires vigilance.