You keep using that word 'meritocracy', I do not think it means what you think it means. It seems the author, Joseph Epstein, picked up on the idea that using

You keep using that word 'meritocracy', I do not think it means what you think it means. It seems the author, Joseph Epstein, picked up on the idea that using privileged education as a proxy for merit is probably a bad idea, yet why he feels that this vindicates WASPishness is beyond me. It wasn't even particularly clear why WASPishness was included in the article at all, since it seemed only to serve as a mildly interesting biographical backdrop on an argument that centered around evaluating the worth of university. Frankly, the article seemed like it had no clear direction. It banged on about meritocracy throughout, and used ivy-league universities as some sort of prima facie proxy for merit, yet it seemed to tiptoe around the crux of the argument: ivy-league universities are the new WASP. Yet rather than make this point outright, and show that attending an ivy-league school is no more an indicator for merit than was WASP birthright, the writer spent the majority of the article romantically eulogizing the old-school WASP. Frankly it all seemed a little tenuously connected. That said, its strongest point -- on which it spent the least time -- was the argument that privileged education does not prove anything of one's abilities. This is certainly true in my experience, yet this undermines the article's claim that a meritocracy would choose someone with a privileged education. If a meritocracy is marking irrelevant traits as indicators of merit, then all that shows is that the meritocracy is incorrectly assigning merit, rather than showing that the concept of meritocracies themselves are flawed. Maybe it's only in the tech community that quality of output is seen as a better proxy for merit than educational background, but here at least I don't believe I've seen much weight attributed to education. When given the choice between two candidates, one of whom having attended MIT and the other of whom having written some fantastic systems, it's been my experience that it is the latter candidate who would be more desired by tech companies. In a meritocracy where one's output alone is judged, that seems to me to be a fair system, because -- unless the output is intrinsically tied to some unfair advantage -- it seems that it cannot be gamed through class, gender or race. I felt that the author failed to consider such a meritocracy, and instead -- to his discredit -- just assumed 'merit' and 'ivy-league' are synonymous without arguing to prove such a point. Why any of you should care what I thought of this essay is another point entirely...