How Faith in Meritocracy Undermines Meritocracy

I spent some time this morning involved in another debate at Ethics Alarms, once again arguing that it might be wrong to tell people who are struggling to find employment that their problems can only be the result of their being stupid, or lazy, or just plain not knowing how to look for a job.  Yet precisely those kinds of accusations continue to fly freely in the commentary of people who have no idea what the conditions on the ground are like for young people today.  People like Jack Marshall have no qualms about casting aspersions on the character of bright, earnest, committed, hardworking people, because as far as the accusers are concerned, if you’d done things right you would have gotten what you wanted.

It’s not as though such people – generally middle-aged and middle class – start out with the conviction that their younger and poorer targets are good for nothing, and then construct the meritocratic myth as an explanation for why.  Quite the opposite; they believe so firmly in the perfection of the system through which kids acquire training and education and employment prospects that it only allows one explanation for most people’s failure.  That’s the very problem with their view.  If you are to convince them that an unemployed law school graduate is unemployed by no fault of his own, you must first compel them to abandon their entire way of perceiving American society.

People who are currently in their forties or fifties and have attained middle class status came up through a much different reality than what is faced by young adults in the twenty-first century.  So it is with every generation.  The trends, experiences, and rules of one can’t be expected to apply to the next.  That doesn’t stop anybody from judging the present as if they were interpreting the past.

Yet obviously there are some things about the circumstances surrounding today’s graduates that are wildly different from the situation that was faced by graduates twenty or thirty years ago.  For one thing, there’s a goddamn lot more of them.  For another, they’re carrying a staggeringly higher average debt load.  Obviously, the current global economic crisis is of issue, as well.  Add to that that between then and now, the overall structure of the economy has been transformed, with the death of manufacturing industries, the consolidation of corporate ownership into fewer and fewer hands, and so forth.

Whether the United States has ever possessed a true meritocracy is up for debate, but even if it has, amidst all those changes it can’t rationally be asserted that the same merits today gain the same outcomes that they would have a generation or two prior.  In fact, most people seem to acknowledge this.  There’s little doubt that the Bachelor’s degree has been devalued by its ubiquity, and it seems like this is common knowledge.  Yet that doesn’t stop the accusations of laziness and stupidity from being thrown at unemployed graduates either.

I’ve tended to think that such accusations are just insulting and oblivious to the reality faced by many people like myself today.  But having given the perspective of people like Jack Marshall more thought today, I think it quite possible that negative attitudes towards struggling graduates are much more than that.  They may actually be indicative of a significant part of the reason why all the nation’s unemployed lawyers face so much hardship in the modern job market.

It’s worth considering with what kind of people I and other bright, yet invisible job seekers are applying.  Who is in charge of corporate human resources today if not middle-aged, middle class individuals who came up through life in a time when college degrees were rare and valuable, and the world prosperous for people who held them?  I dare say that most of these people have perspectives like that of Jack Marshall.  I’m sure that most of them believe that today’s America is a perfect meritocracy, because that’s what it was when they were kids, and as far as their concerned that ‘s all that it ever was or ever could be.

That perspective can’t be undermined by anything, no matter how many over-educated applicants come slinking to their offices in pursuit of entry level jobs outside of their chosen fields.  Based on all the anecdotal evidence I’ve come across, certainly including depressingly much of my own, these people are almost universally turned away.  I had long supposed that the reasons for this are that employers expect such people to want too much money, not take an interest in the job, and leave as soon as something better comes along.

I still see it that way, but with new and potentially meaningful nuance.  Low-level employers are probably right when they assume that NYU grads, or engineers, or lawyers who apply with them aren’t pursuing what they want.  If American society is a meritocracy, then intelligent, talented, qualified individuals who pursue what they want get what they want.  Individuals who believe this and are in a position to hire an overqualified applicant won’t accept that the application is the result of them being genuinely short on options.  Instead, they will assume that something must be wrong.

I shudder to think how many people have been shut out from gainful employment because of the reasoning that says, “With this person’s background, either he’s too unmotivated to apply for a job in his field, or his despicable character prevents him from being a good employee anywhere.”  It’s not a malicious sentiment.  Quite the contrary, it’s perfectly altruistic; it emphasizes that if the person is good he will find his way to the better job that suits him, and need never waste his time on something that he doesn’t want to do, is overqualified for, and will not make enough money doing.

On some level, I’ve always recognized that about my situation.  I’ve gotten the sense that many of the people who slip my resume soundlessly into the trash imagine that I’ll be fine, that I didn’t need their job, that the right alternative will be just around the corner if I’m willing to look for it.  It simply isn’t the case.  There are times when bright men and women have to settle for less.  There are times when talents have to be misplaced just to get oneself out of an awful situation.  You can’t recognize that if you believe that America is, always has been, and always will be a pure meritocracy.  And yet you have to recognize it if you’re in a position to help people by hiring them into just such a situation.

Young people’s fates are held now by people who cannot recognize that which they must recognize in order to handle those fates properly.  In this way, faith in meritocracy undermines meritocracy.

Simplistic Thinking from Educated People: Arne Duncan

Every time a representative of the government goes on the television or radio to talk about higher education, my blood boils a little at my recognition of the simple-mindedness that governs policy in that area. On last night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart’s guest was Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. At the very end of the portion of the interview that went to air (the entire thing is available in three parts on the web), Duncan made the most indefensibly black-and-white assessment of the outcomes of education that I have yet encountered.

First, though, he pointed out that the United States is now ranked 16^th in number of college graduates, whereas a generation ago it was in first place. He further explained that our rate of graduation hasn’t fallen, but has leveled off, allowing fifteen other countries to surpass us. Now, after a good deal of research, I’ve found that different reports come to different conclusions on the exact ranking, and they base those rankings on different criteria applied to different countries, so I can’t pin down exactly which countries beat out the US on this subject, or even whether Duncan is quite correct with his statistics. But it’s certainly the case that we’re far from the top, and some countries can be pretty conclusively identified as exceeding us in provision of tertiary education.

Duncan’s point is apparently that our achievement of benchmark standards for secondary education is insufficient to prepare students for college and university. I’ll eagerly agree that that’s true, but it is unhelpfully presumptuous to assume that that’s the only important factor contributing to low levels of higher education attainment. What of the steadily climbing costs of college tuition and the dearth of public funds to compensate for the out-of-pocket expense for students and parents? Might that not hold back some perfectly capable students from actually obtaining the education that they’re intellectually, but not financially, suited for?

Among countries in the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development, the United States is 29^th out of 34 in terms of how much funding for educational institutions comes from public funds. Not only is this situation accepted by US society, it is lauded by some elements thereof. Private institutional dominance of tertiary education, and indeed of all segments of society, increases competition and improves outcomes, they say. But with the US ranking somewhere around 16^th in educational attainment, it’s clearly not working that way. In fact, among the nations that are fairly reliably ranked well ahead of the US on this point, many are classed as those nations that conservative Americans tend to envision as socialist hellscapes.

Several Northern European countries are variously placed in lead positions on the list, including Iceland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands. What’s more, an Economic Policy Institute study of the affordability and accessibility of higher education in various countries concludes that “Finland and the Netherlands should be models for the international community” when it comes to both of these factors.

The correlation between cost and completion rates is not overwhelming, but it is sufficient that it needs to be explored as a factor, rather than being discounted among the ongoing repetition of the claim that if kids are smarter, they’ll always do better. There are other factors, and to deny that is to accept such unforgivably single-minded approaches to solving our problems as will only worsen some aspects of the situation. It’s not just that we’re failing at educating our children, though certainly we are doing that. It’s also that we’re failing to provide our children with suitable opportunities, access, and incentives.

Duncan seems to be under the mistaken impression that the problem underlying our trend of slipping behind the rest of the post-industrial world is just that students are failing at an alarming rate. But it’s not just dropouts that account for the low completion rate; the US ranks behind most of the OECD countries in terms of actual enrollment in higher education. And that fact is specifically ascribed in part to rising costs. That should be fairly obvious, especially to a Harvard-trained economist like Arne Duncan. As opportunity costs rise, the rational motivation for people to invest in something goes down.

The response to this would probably – nay, certainly – be that the opportunity costs of not attending college are unquantifiably higher than the material costs of attending. To that I would offer the simple challenge: prove it. The claim is repeated in the media constantly, always asserted, always assumed, but never adequately proven. And it would be one thing if the assertion was just that, on average, people with higher education backgrounds tend to do better than those without them. But that’s not what representatives of the administration say. Instead, they spread the hideously uncritical idea that if you get a college degree you are guaranteed success, and if you don’t get one you are guaranteed failure.

Do you think I’m mischaracterizing their claims? Arne Duncan said it on the Daily Show: “We have a million young people dropping out of school every year. A million. There are no jobs. None. They are guaranteed poverty and social failure.”

Guaranteed, he says. That there are any guarantees in life is an odious and socially detrimental lie. Virtually nobody would argue that people aren’t better off overall if they’re educated. For my part, I think that education is the most important thing that a person can pursue in life, though I am careful to emphasize that there are different ways of pursuing education, some far less expensive than others, and that education can serve a variety of ends, from vocational training to living a richer, fuller life of poverty. But the universal economic benefit of higher education is a baseless assertion so long as there are other explanations for a portion of the correlation between education and earnings, and other alternatives as to how hiring and job training might take place.

Now, Arne Duncan wasn’t very specific when he said “a million students dropping out.” If he was referring to students who drop out of high school, sure, they have their work seriously cut out for them if they want to be materially or socially successful. However, I’d still consider it irresponsibly closed-minded to say that both poverty and social failure are absolute guarantees for every child who has dropped out of high school in recent years.

Even working at a fast food restaurant can eventually allow a person to make a living wage, as long as he or she doesn’t rush to have children or otherwise climb into a hole that can’t be escaped through years of earnest work and eagerly sought promotions. What’s more, I’ve known people who’ve dropped out of high school and then obtained GEDs earlier than when they would have theoretically graduated. Hell, my ex-girlfriend never finished high school, and she leapt easily from job to job, quitting without notice and being hired for positions with higher pay, more responsibilities, and better titles, all at a time when I, with my fancy NYU degree, couldn’t so much as secure an interview for anything more than an eight dollar per hour retail job. Some people are just lucky; some just aren’t.

Regardless, I don’t think Duncan was referring to high school dropouts. The only statistics that I could find on short notice were from the 2004-05 school year, at which time 540,382 students dropped out of school between grades nine and twelve. Unless that number has doubled in seven years, I think Duncan was referring to any student who has dropped out at any level, primary, secondary, or tertiary. If so, some of the Americans who have been guaranteed poverty and social failure according to Arne Duncan include billionaires Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Ralph Lauren, Dean Kamen, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as a pretty extensive list of other highly successful individuals in a variety of fields.

This repetition of a shockingly simplistic set of talking points about higher education has got to stop. Is learning good? Chirst, yes! That part is perfectly simple. But it’s not a purely economic good, and to whatever extent it does improve your income potential, that’s not the only factor. There is something to be said for the influence of social connections, environment, work ethic, opportunity, investment capital, employer bias, and plain old luck. Amidst all of that, what I want to see happen is that kids start going to school not because they want to make money, but because they want to learn. Is it really too much to ask that we encourage education on those grounds, rather than trying to deceive every young person into pursuing something that he’s not interested in and at which he’s no good?

Talking to Twenty-Six Year-Olds

This is something of an addendum to my post from the other day about talking to twenty year-olds about the future, particularly with regard to post-college expectations. I got to thinking more about my social interactions with youth after I wrote it, and I’ve come to realize that I have an adjacent set of frustrations to contend with when I talk to certain people who are not younger than me, but rather exactly my age.

In my previous post, I wondered whether I was as naïve when I was twenty as are people I know who are twenty now. As I suggested, it’s easy to be when you’ve had two solid decades of people painting an uncompromisingly optimistic picture about your trajectory in life. Maybe, then, the difference between them and me is simply the measure of how much one’s life and attitude change in the space of six years. Although, I was really much more cynical and morose in previous years than I am now, so maybe I should make that “in the space of two years once you’ve entered your twenties.”

When I put things into a larger context, though, I begin to doubt whether that’s the case. Disillusionment is only one possible outcome when you’ve started life with tremendous ambitions and had some of them dashed along the way. From what I’ve seen, maybe the response to disappointment that the naïve resort to is to pretend that things really did work out all along. That is the frustrating attitude that I encounter from my peers at times. Some of them are in objectively poor situations but have convinced themselves that they are happy there by pretending that what they have is what they were working towards all along.

My last job before I became self-employed was in a meat shop. (As an aside here, most people find that hilarious, because I have been a vegetarian for a long time; I take pride in the belief that I thus had the clearest example of a subsistence job.) The place is a small, privately-owned business. A husband and wife pair runs it, I worked in the back producing the merchandise, there were two or three part-time clerks in the front of the store, and one young man who worked there full-time and was considered the front-of-house manager.

That other full-time employee was exactly the same age as I, and I came to find out that he had gone to a local area college and studied business management. In conversation with this young man, he expressed to me the belief that his degree was the reason why he had been hired by this small-business retailer and entrusted with the position of management. But I know from conversation with the owner that that is bullshit. Education was not a relevant section of the application.

The owner hired my fellow graduate because he had claimed (falsely) that he had worked as a chef. Experience in food service was the only thing that was of value since he was going to be working in food service, regardless of managerial responsibilities. And anyone would guess this by observing what the responsibilities of the young man’s job are. He works with food. Any managerial tasks that he performs could have been taught to a reasonably bright young person in the space of a week, and nothing that he could have learned in a classroom could matter to what he does from day to day.

Nevertheless, my then-coworker had the utmost confidence that his four years of education had thoroughly paid off once he acquired a low-wage job with no benefits that carried the purely cosmetic title of manager. I, on the other hand, knew full-well that my own esteemed education did me no favors when I applied for that job so that I could keep a roof over my head. Quite the contrary, it served as a red flag; it made me a gamble, just as it would have done with any of the previous potential employers who had declined to hire me, or to interview me. As it happened, it was a gamble that paid off for my employer, as he would no doubt attest to. Still, I couldn’t avoid thinking every time I entered that place in the morning, and every time I walked into the other jobs I’d held in the same vein, that I could have more easily obtained that work had I simply proceeded to it after high school, and I wouldn’t have been four years older, and everything I earned would go towards my future and the enjoyment of my life in absence of debt and lost time.

I guess eschewing that kind of awareness helps to make one’s life far more manageable, but I just can’t submit to that kind of self-delusion. That’s all that it is, and it’s far worse than anything that I see in people who are still twenty years old and in college. Their self-delusion is forward-looking; it is grounded in limited interactions they have had with the full-fledged adults around them; it remains to be either gratified via good fortune or shattered by reality. Or, apparently, it may come to neither end, but be cushioned against reality by one’s persistently softened perceptions.

It is most certainly persistent, as it’s not just in twenty-six year olds that I witness this impulse, but it is in everyone. Particularly since I live in Buffalo, it is not difficult to find notable examples of it. A town like this is filled with people who claim that they live in it because they love it, because it’s home, because once you stop and peer through its cracked and fading surface, you’ll find some really great hidden gems of community and experience. But when you press many of those people for the stories of how they came to be where they are, it becomes clear that circumstances weighted them down, that they were compelled to return to a former home, or to reside where they had planned to simply pass through.

Over time, such people have to choose between resigning themselves to a situation that falls far short of what they’d wanted out of life, fighting against it even at the expense of happiness, comfort, and health, or convincing themselves that what they have really is what they want. I never intend to be that latter sort of person, who chooses the comfortable explanations over the correct ones, but I’m sure that many of the older men I’ve met who did so didn’t want to when they started out. I’m sure that the impulse towards such delusion becomes stronger the longer things remain difficult and frustrating and unfair, but based on much of what I’ve been seeing in my peers, it starts young, too.

Talking to Twenty Year-Olds

As much as I like to be topical and political, I need to start pointing this blog back in the direction of analytical commentary on things that I observe in ordinary life. That kind of thing really is my bread and butter. And I believe that the changes and breaking points that we can realize in personal behavior and social tendencies are ultimately more meaningful. The most significant changes are organic, not imposed, and intellectual, not legal.

I have plenty to say about education and labor policy, but I’m more concerned with and more frustrated by private citizens’ attitudes toward individual instances of education and jobs. My frustration is especially pronounced when I interact with people who are about twenty years old, and I’m beginning to realize that it’s more likely that I’ll reach a breaking point whereby I stop speaking to young people than it is that any of them will abandon naivety for anything short of purely personal experience.

I’m honestly not sure to what extent my frustration is focused on trying to reach others with information that they refuse to listen to, and to what extent it’s focused on defending myself against the implications of their obstinance. I’ve become fast friends with a few college students in the years since I graduated from school and into abject poverty. At the outset of any such relationship, I feel that the insight of my experience puts me in a unique position to be able to provide counsel to people younger than myself regarding what’s wrong with the world they’re growing up in and what they can do to either change it or safeguard themselves against it. Nobody listens.

At every turn since I finished with NYU and faced one dead-end job search after another, I’ve found myself stuck between a crowd of highly educated people with severely limited prospects and a crowd of bright-eyed youths who believe that they are on the fast track to success and who will entertain no statements to the contrary. Perhaps it’s the cynicism talking, but when I try to talk about real life with that latter group, I can actually see them go rigid and put up walls around their minds in order to defend against any early assault on their illusions. By contrast, the lawyers, teachers, and engineers with whom I’ve talked about betrayed promises recognize the subject matter with such casualness that we may as well be talking about the weather.

The cocksure attitude of twenty year-olds towards their future success boggles my mind, and it makes me wonder whether I was like that six years ago. I’m not sure how I would have responded to cautionary tales when I was twenty, about six or so years ago. But at twenty-one, I was experiencing a series of personal setbacks and existential crises, so I don’t think I could have been characterized as cocksure about anything. I’d been forced out of school because I was too far ahead on my education to continue it before graduation, so I had a pretty disillusioned perspective on things working the way they’re supposed to. Nonetheless, I did believe that my degree was going to lead me somewhere, and that once I worked one more menial job and then graduated from my “new ivy league” university, I would be starting a fulfilling career.

However, the question is not whether I believed in what I was doing; it’s whether I believed in it with such blind conviction that I wouldn’t have let evidence stand in the way. When I was in school, nobody questioned the outcome of investing in one’s education. It always paid off, and in indeed life couldn’t pay off if you didn’t make that investment. If someone had come to me when I was a sophomore or a junior in college and told me that he had gone to a school with a better reputation than mine, had excelled there, graduated, and proceeded to fruitlessly look for professional work for months or years afterward, I like to think I would have stopped and wonder, “well, hell, if that can happen, what am I doing here?” I didn’t enroll in college as a crapshoot; I thought I was enrolling in it as a certainty. And it’s clear from the commentary of twenty year-olds today that they are doing exactly the same.

I had a girl of that age say to me just last week, “I’m going to make a lot more money than most of the men I know.” She wasn’t expressing a plan or a dream; she clearly stated it as a fact. Meanwhile, my own failure comes as no surprise to her. Indeed, I am one of those men she knows, whom she expects to always outpace in earnings. Evidently, the reason in her mind is that I plainly made a mess of my life by studying philosophy and religion at NYU, whereas she is in the process of getting a Bachelor’s degree in biology from Buffalo State College, and is therefore destined for greatness.

Of course I can’t prove it, but I’m quite confident that if the situation were reversed and I was destitute after studying biology at Buffalo State while she was pursuing liberal arts at NYU, she would account for my failure by saying that I hadn’t gone to a good enough school. The very nature of this kind of self-delusion is that twenty year-olds contort logic in whatever direction they need in order to explain contrary evidence as anomaly. There’s never any doubt about the economic value of a college education, so every young person who hears my story chases down a series of explanations of what I must have done wrong to mess up that guarantee.

They accuse me of picking the wrong major and I explain that NYU was the top-ranked philosophy department in the English-speaking world, that I wrote more essays in one semester than some students do in their entire time in college, and that thinking analytically is kind of a useful skill in policy, publishing, journalism, advertising, and any office whatsoever. They ask whether I blew off the opportunity for internships and I explain that I worked full-time in a Manhattan office in lieu of a semester of school. They ask me if I even applied for jobs, and I restrain myself from slapping them.

I’ve been chided for my college majors and told that they made me deserving of my unemployment by someone who was majoring in communications at the time. She had the utmost confidence that when she finished her college education, she would go on to a lucrative career, but she didn’t know what it was yet. I’m not speculating about that. She stated that she didn’t know what kind of job she was going to have. But not knowing what she wanted to do with her life was no impediment to her certitude that life was going to work out as expected.

I think there’s actually a lot of breaking points that we need to get to with the way we talk to and teach our children. Many of them fall under one rubric: recognizing that we don’t do children and young adults any good by coddling them and insulating them from the facts of life. There are a lot of uncomfortable truths that people need to face up to as they grow, not the least of which is that there are absolutely no guarantees. Everything you do is, on some level, a gamble, and sometimes even the most rational, well-intentioned actions come to nothing, or worse, bring you to harm.

We tend to tell children the exact opposite. In fact, we tend to spread that delusion to adults who will listen, as well. We say that if you work hard, you will be repaid with wealth, opportunity, and respect. Bullshit. Most of us, as we age, encounter skeins of people who have worked themselves to the bone every day of their lives and still have nothing to show for it. We say that if you are good to others, you’ll get back what you give. Bullshit. Some of the most powerful, richest, most beloved people in the world are psychopaths for whom even generosity is about self-interest. By contrast, some of the most selfless people I have ever known have lived their lives having next to nothing to give, and have given it anyway.

We say that if you go to college you will be employed, and the better the school or the more technical the discipline the better your employment prospects will be. Bullshit. That’s just not always the case. I’m living proof of that, and I’ve met or otherwise heard of many others who are as well. It may be statistically more common for college-educated people to make much of life, but it’s not sufficient grounds for twenty year-old college students to say, “I’m in college, therefore I will never want for money or purpose.”

Yet we tell our children these things. Perhaps it is in hopes of encouraging them, and perhaps it is in hopes of insulating them from the existential pain of growing older. Likely we have both sentiments in mind. But in pursuing those ends, we fail to realize that insulating our children from hard truths that they will inevitably realize ultimately makes it more likely that that realization will damage them in the long run. Fostering ambition need not come at the expense of preparing a person for the possibility of disappointment. Neither should seal their minds off from alternative ways of observing the world.

I guess I can’t blame the twenty year-olds I speak to for dismissing my warning that things might still go badly despite the fact that they’ve followed all the rules so far. On the one hand, I did as well or better than they up to that stage in my life and then fell from my own perch of naivety, so my perspective ought to carry some weight. On the other hand, that weight is on the opposite side of the scale from the testament of virtually every adult a twenty year-old has encountered from childhood through adolescence.

Maybe, despite what I want to believe, I wouldn’t have listened to me either. That’s all the more reason why the chorus of mandated delusion needs to be silenced and we need to start providing our youth with a more balanced, rational way of looking at their lives and the world as a whole. By giving them nothing but optimistic visions until such time as they might come crumbling spectacularly down, we’re actively blinding them to some of the problems of the world, which, if they could recognize and anticipate them instead, they might be able to help fix while they’re still young.