The Green Carpet

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...

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 ...

  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...

  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 th...

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...