Posts

Blog #10: Abstract and Works Cited

-
Abstract This research paper explores how meritocracy, a system in which people believe advancements should be based on one’s talents and merits rather than family and wealth, influence the current college admissions system. To understand how merit-based admissions consolidate class privilege and legitimize inequality, this paper examines different types of admissions policies that exclusively benefit the elite class and exclude the underserved class. This paper sheds light on the elites who are trapped in a never-ending struggle to sustain the meritocratic image of success and the underprivileged class who are forced to internalize their failures.   Works Cited Avery, Christopher, et al. The Early Admissions Game: Joining the Elite . Harvard University Press, 2004. Burd, Stephen. “The Out-Of-State Student Arms Race: How Public Universities Use Merit Aid to Recruit Nonresident Students,” New America Foundation, 2015.   Burd, Stephen. “Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy
Post a Comment
Read more

Literature Review #5

-
Image
Ho, Karen. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street . Duke University Press, 2009 Summary: In the first chapter “Biographies of Hegemony” of her book Liquidated, Ho analyzes the biographies of Wall Street workers, documenting their backgrounds and revealing how they understood their positions. Ho provides the readers with a close look on the justification of power and privilege based on academic “smarts.”   She argues that the elitism, the empowerment, and the hard work are exploited to legitimate and promote Wall Street’s superiority. She identifies Wall Street’s global dominance as being heavily dependent on the discourse and practice of everyday in attracting and defining smartness, which enables the investment bankers to claim authority. She reveals the process of aggressive recruitment in Wall Street where Harvard and Princeton form the key recruiting grounds and undergraduates are told that they are the smartest of being at elite universities. In fact, Wall Street has become the
Post a Comment
Read more

Blog #9: Argument & Counterargument

-
Image
Merit-Based College Admissions Argument: Merit-based admissions system has become an obstacle to opportunity by perpetuating class divisions and excluding the underserved class. It also puts immense pressure onto the students to mold themselves into the uniform image of a successful achiever.   Counterargument: Criticisms of meritocracy are justified, but only to a degree. The problem is not the meritocratic ideal itself, but the way merit is defined, measured, and legitimated. Today’s merit-based college admissions are too contingent upon numerical measures: standardized tests, college rankings, and grades. SAT and ACT falls short of true assessments as they are used primarily to test demonstrated performance, not one’s true merit and aptitude. It is worth noting that SAT no longer stands for Scholastic Aptitude Tests as Scott Jeffe, a spokesman for the College Board in New York said, “The SAT has become the trademark; it doesn’t stand for anything. The SAT is the SAT, and that’s all
Post a Comment
Read more

Blog #8: Case

-
Image
  OPERATION VARSTIY BLUES      In March 2019, over 50 people were criminally charged with participating in a scheme to gain fraudulent student admissions to elite U.S. universities. At the heart of the scam was a college-counseling consultant named William Rick Singer, who devised corrupt workarounds for anxious, wealthy parents whose children lacked stellar academic credentials that top college required. Rick Singer provided fake athletic credentials, photoshopped applicants’ faces onto action photos of real athletes, payed proctors of standardized tests, and bribed coaches to designate applicants as recruited athletes even though the students did not play the sport. The scandal revealed the secret pathway to college admissions: The “Side Door”. The “side door” was open to Singer’s clients who were willing to pay him huge sums of money (yet less than that of donation) to fake test scores and bribe coaches to gain entry. This mechanism allowed money to override merit.        While this
Post a Comment
Read more

Blog #7: Theoretical Frame

-
Image
  Meritocracy in Higher Education Meritocracy is a social system where advancement in society is based on one’s abilities and merits rather than on the basis of family, wealth, or social background. It has allowed people from low status groups to dream of improving their social status, economic class, and place in the social hierarchy. The impression is that everyone, no matter what their background is, can succeed if they develop the necessary merits. People want to believe they live in a ‘fair’ society where hard work can achieve anything regardless of their social position at birth. However, in reality, higher education has become a powerful means for reproducing class and privilege. College, has stopped to function as an engine of social mobility… Joseph F. Kett, James Madison Professor of History at the University of Virginia, argues that there are at least two strikingly different ways in which merit has been understood in American history.   “Essential Merit”: merit that rests
Post a Comment
Read more

Literature Review #4

-
Image
Deresiewicz, William. Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Free Press, 2015. Summary In his book, Excellent Sheep , William Deresiewicz describes how elite colleges are failing to serve student and society. Having received an elite education at Columbia University and taught English at Yale, Deresiewicz uses his experience at Ivy League schools to deliver an indictment of top-tier higher education. He regards elite college education as a mere extension of elite high school education with students who are obsessed with good grades and resume padding rather than finding their true passions. Deresiewicz is critical of craven conformity that leads elite graduates to pursue the same, monotonous career in financial sector. Furthermore, he explains that the sense of entitlement that merit bestows upon the elite class serves to justify the accrual and maximization of personal wealth as individuals who graduated from elite schools are deemed
Post a Comment
Read more

Blog #6: Visual

-
Image
 Merit-Aid Arms Race at Public Universities      Figure 1 shows that 339 public universities examined has spent approximately $32 billion on non-need-based aid from 2001 through 2007, whereas $49 has been spent on need-based aid. During this period, $2 out of every $5 of the institutional aid went to students who are able to afford college without financial aid.        Figure 2 shows how public universities’ use of non-need-based aid has dramatically increased. In 2000-01, 339 public universities spend about $1.1 billion annually on merit-aid for relatively affluent students; however, by 2016-2017, these schools were spending nearly $3 billion yearly on merit-aid.        As we can see in Figure 3, more than half of the 339 schools at least doubled the amount of money they spent on merit-aid; more than a third at least tripled the amount; and more than a quarter quadrupled the amount; about one in five schools quintupled the amount.   As these data demonstrate, colleges do not merely
Post a Comment
Read more