The SAT meritocracy. Is it based on real merit?

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas
• Position: Scholastic Aptitude Test

Several Years Ago In These Pages, I reviewed a book by E. Digby Baltzell, the sociologist of the American elite (he invented the term WASP), and heartily endorsed Baltzell's observation that the old American "Protestant Establishment" (another term Baltzell invented) had been replaced by a new "SAT meritocracy." I suggested that the rise of the latter group would make a good book of its own.

Since then, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray have published The Bell Curve, which makes claims for the triumph of the SAT meritocracy that make Baltzell's seem super-cautious, and I have been working on my own book about the history of the American meritocracy. I hope the book, besides laying out what actually happened, will set off a discussion of meritocracy's strengths and weaknesses.

The word "meritocracy" was invented in 1958 by a British sociologist and Labour Party policy wonk named Michael Young, in a strange, compelling little book of soc-sci-fi called The Rise of the Meritocracy. It is essential to understand that Young invented the word in order to condemn it, and that he wrote the book to persuade liberals to abandon their commitment to the idea of universal, individual equal opportunity. The more this goal is realized, Young thought, the more deeply stratified society will become; and, if success and failure have been derived through a fair competition, the left will be deprived of a rhetoric with which to attack the real problem, inequality itself. Instead of equal opportunity, liberals should promote equality (what conservatives call "equality of result") as the overarching goal.

In Britain, the Labour Party, although it has now abandoned the goal of equality of result, was founded as explicitly socialist; for it to embrace equal opportunity represented a shift to the right. In America, however, equal opportunity has almost always been the banner under which liberal progress has been achieved and by no stretch of the imagination represents a retreat from higher principles. Second, although Michael Young invented the word meritocracy, the essential idea of a classless society in which one?s station is a product of one's effort is an old one in America, much older than it is in Britain. Young's notion that the choice is between a rigid class system run by a hereditary aristocracy and a ruthless meritocracy generating vast inequality doesn't resonate here because there are other alternatives within our historical memory.

But Michael Young does exert a certain grip on the mind.

America is a huge country with a much less unified culture than you'd think from reading the national press and watching television. The SAT meritocracy is best understood as a distinct, even smallish American subculture -- but one that has had enormous influence on society as a whole. The operative idea in the American meritocratic subculture is that in the bad old days roughly, before the Second World War) the country had slid into being the next thing to a hereditary aristocracy like England. Everything worth running was run by Baltzell's Protestant Establishment. Members of inconvenient ethnic group -- shell, anybody who had not been educated at a New England boarding school -- wasn't allowed to play. And the favored few had no quality that looked to an outsider like merit.

Believing that the country needed to become strikingly more meritocratic after World War II, a group of prominent educators led by the president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, set up a system of national testing to discover the meritorious (defining merit as high IQ and good grades in school), get them to elite universities, and put them on course to take over the jobs that had been reserved for Episcopalians. These included parts of the government (the Foreign Service, Cabinet members, and many of their top aides, but not the civil service), tenured faculty positions at Ivy League universities, investment banking, high-end academic research, medicine, and corporate law firms.

For those who have prospered under the Conant system, the idea that it is a perfect meritocracy, and the only meritocratic part of America, is extremely powerful. It is what you grow up on. The meritocratic race begins as early as the age of three (when you take the standardized intelligence test for admission to nursery...