In his second term, President Trump has promised to make America meritocratic again. In his joint address to Congress, he declared: “We believe that whether you are a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer or an air-traffic controller, you should be hired and promoted based on skill and competence, not race or gender.”
All of the occupations the president mentioned typically require college degrees, as well as advanced professional degrees for doctors and lawyers. But no college diploma is required for the three occupations in the United States with the greatest number of workers — home-health and personal-care aides, retail salespeople, and fast-food workers. In discussing economic opportunity, both Republicans and Democrats often overlook the 62% of Americans who lack a bachelor’s degree or higher.
This oversight is no accident. The debate about meritocracy in both parties is dominated by people who are college-credentialed meritocrats themselves. In promoting “equity” or equality of result, progressives focus obsessively on the racial and gender compositions of university admissions and university faculties. For their part, conservatives typically reject equality of results, in favour of equality of opportunity — which they tend to equate with the successes of highly educated professionals or entrepreneurs.
But fewer than 15% of Americans have a professional or other advanced degree, and only 7% own and run their own businesses. Equality of opportunity, with its promise of delivering exceptional success to individuals with exceptional abilities, is not enough. Broader social progress involves raising the economic level of those with mediocre abilities, because, outside of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, it is mathematically impossible for all children to be above average.
The word “meritocracy” was originally coined as a term of abuse. In his 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, Michael Young, a Left-wing policy expert in Britain’s Labour party, treated the idea of a society of successful test-takers as a dystopian nightmare. In 2001, Young complained that under Tony Blair, Labour had adopted meritocracy as an ideal. He warned: “If meritocrats believe … that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they get.” In our time, a similar point has been made by the British thinker David Goodhart, with his distinction between college-educated “Anywheres” and working-class “Somewheres”.
Debates over meritocracy often focus on college admissions. For many centrist Democrats and Republicans, the golden age of the American university was between the Second World War and the Seventies. In that era, quotas limiting the number of nonwhite, Jews, and Catholics fell away, and new quotas to help black and Hispanic students and faculty were not yet widely adopted.
For those who define merit in terms of academic ability the structures of the university and the workplace in the United States are essentially sound. What is needed is rejection of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), the progressive doctrine that rejects equality of opportunity for equality of outcome, defined as policies to make the demography of every social institution mirror the racial and gender breakdown of the most recent US Census by means of reverse racism, of the kind called for by Ibram X. Kendi: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
But the crusade to end DEI in higher education is more important to conservative activists and donors than to the working-class Americans of all races who put Donald Trump in the White House a second time. Most of those voters did not graduate from college, and they are more concerned about grocery and gasoline prices than about the roster of authors in the literary canon.
Some want the rethink the assumption that an elite college degree is the standard pathway to success. The high-tech libertarians of Silicon Valley include many who are sceptical about traditional liberal-arts education and professional schools. They believe that ambitious young entrepreneurs and innovators should not have to compile diploma after diploma on campus before beginning their working lives until their late 20s or 30s. Peter Thiel has endowed a two-year Thiel Fellowship, described thus on its website: “The Thiel Fellowship gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.”
“They are more concerned about grocery and gasoline prices than about the roster of authors in the literary canon.”
“Move fast and break things”, in the words of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg. Indeed, in the natural sciences, mathematics, and technology, the greatest geniuses often do their best work when young. But entrepreneurial meritocracy is as irrelevant to most people as academic meritocracy. Most Americans neither go to college nor found successful startups. For the majority of people of middling ability, both equality of result and equality of opportunity may be less beneficial than a third option: equality of condition.
Equality of condition means that you don’t have to be a high achiever in order to have access to the things that define a decent life. In 19th-century agrarian America, the promotion of equality of condition took the form of policies that helped people to become farm owners. Widespread ownership of family farms was encouraged by the federal land laws of 1796, 1800, and 1820, which provided for the partition of federal lands into small and inexpensive plots, as well as by the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed Americans to own 160 acres of free public land after cultivating it for five years.
In the urban and industrial America of the 20th century, equality of condition meant well-paid factory and office jobs that permitted mostly male breadwinners to buy homes and cars and enjoy some economic security along with their families. Leisure is also important, because, unlike hard-driving professionals and business tycoons, most working-class Americans are not married to their jobs.
A growing number of thinkers and policymakers in both the Republican and Democratic parties are interested in creating pathways to success that do not require graduation from a four-year college or graduate or professional school. These alternatives include apprenticeship programmes, community colleges, and skills certificates.
But these alternatives to conventional higher education can only succeed if employers are willing to hire workers without traditional academic degrees. Some corporations have removed degree requirements from their online job listings or announced programmes to hire and train more workers without college degrees. But according to Burning Glass, a labour-market analytics firm, this has not led to a significant increase in the share of workers without college diplomas in many of those firms.
It is not enough for employers to be willing to hire more people without college diplomas. Skills certificates and apprenticeship programmes may be avoided by young people if those alternatives do not lead to jobs with pay and benefits comparable to those of many jobs that require undergraduate degrees. Indeed, the multiplication of worthless skills credentials would be no improvement over the multiplication of worthless college degrees.
Dismantling race and gender preferences in higher education and hiring is a necessary and long-overdue reform. So is the creation of alternatives to college. But politicians of Left, Right, and centre should complement these reforms with initiatives that foster a rough equality of condition, allowing more Americans to achieve a middle-class lifestyle by 21st-century standards. What it means to be middle class in contemporary America and similar societies is somewhat subjective, but most people would agree that it includes adequate wages and benefits, access to affordable health care, quality education for children, and access to home ownership for those who seek it.
How to achieve these goals can be debated. But there can be a consensus in favour of equality of condition, to ensure that the rich, the poor, and the middle class do not live so differently that they might as well belong to different societies.
