Over recent years and even decades, idealists have been holding up the idea of the meritocracy as the most ideal way to get to a “fairer” and more egalitarian U.S. society. They point out that everyone should be judged on their abilities and that will take care of the problem.
The problem with this idea is that we’re fairly close to that right now (that is, in the sense that in hiring for more and more jobs most people are judged on their credentials), and the current semi-meritocracy hasn’t created a fair and more egalitarian workplace, and that won’t happen so long as the system remains as it’s presently structured or as long as such concepts as “personal freedom,” self-determination, and market economy are part of the legal/social framework (and I’m definitely opposed to removing any of those).
One of the problems with the current “meritocracy” is that poorer or disadvantaged children of equal raw talent/native intelligence to those more advantaged (and thus better credentialed) don’t have anywhere near equal opportunity to refine their raw ability into usable and valuable skills that will allow them to benefit from higher education or advanced technical training.
In addition, the students able to benefit the most from college education are those individuals with the most resources, whose families can provide better nutrition, better economic and educational support (such as college and post-graduate degrees, as well as housing and living expenses) so that they enter the workforce with extensive credentials (since we are a society where success requires credentials for most people), with more developed contacts, and without debt. Unless society is going to strip away all income inequality (effectively destroying freedom), offspring of the well-off will always have an advantage in showing “merit.”.
The upper middle class can provide a certain amount of support for their offspring, but many of them will leave higher education with a certain amount of debt and sometimes a great deal more, without any certainty that they’ll be able to pay it off. And for the vast majority of offspring of less affluent or poor families, higher education means crippling debt, if they can even get into higher education.
Then, too, like it or not, studies show that standardized tests measure fairly accurately a student’s ability to handle college level work. The problem is that they don’t measure as well the ability to handle many post-education jobs, because too many college curricula don’t teach students to think or to persevere, and that’s yet another area where the children of the well-off have an advantage because more of them are taught the social codes of the elite and to think by their families.
So… unless one either destroys the elites and the upper middle class, which means total loss of freedom and rigid socialism, or provides more aid for the children of the working poor, we’ll remain an unequal semi-meritocracy