How Elites Protect Their Status: Private School Edition

In National Review, Gabriel Rossman delivers a much-needed skewering of the latest frontier in the “holistic” assessment fad overtaking elite education: The effort by America’s most prestigious prep schools to eliminate transcripts and replace them with jargon-filled written evaluations of each student. Rossman rightly notes that despite its veneer of fairness and the high-minded social justice-y language used to sell it, the effort to downplay old-fashioned measures of academic merit is really about protecting the already-privileged. Objective tools like grades and test scores have long been an important tool for distinguishing the talentless elite from upstart competitors from below; “soft” assessments, by contrast, often make it easier for the wealthy and well-connected to navigate the system:

The sick irony is that giving great weight to well-roundedness and character is seen as egalitarian. Test prep serves the role of Satan in the theodicy of meritocracy, a ready explanation for the association between test scores and social class of origin. What this myth overlooks is that most scholarly studies of test prep estimate that it raises SAT scores by a piddling couple dozen points out of 1600. Nonetheless, our suspicion of the SAT’s well-known association with household income provides an egalitarian rationale for the regressive turn to all variety of precocious “achievement” as the basis of college admissions, as if test scores could be bought but résumé-padding could not. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about SATs, they are much less prone to class privilege than having to found an NGO in high school.

And so we had the shameful spectacle of Stanford admitting a young man whose essay consisted of writing “Black Lives Matter” a hundred times, but who also was the son of a hedge-fund manager, attended a $33,400-per-year high school, and generally had a vita stuffed with what he describes as “activism” but is more straightforwardly recognized as waiting in line for grip-and-grin photos at expensive political fundraisers.

All elites justify their claims to power using the accepted language of their age. When the early and mid-20th century WASPs wanted to devise a system that would restrict entry to business and political establishment, the Ivy League adopted admissions criteria like character and breeding and fitness to lead. Today’s diverse, socially liberal elite instead wraps its claim to rulership in the mantle of individuality and social justice. So the past few decades have seen an ever-expanding push for “holistic” evaluations that recognize the ways that each student is special and unique. But the ultimate goal is the same: to consolidate the existing upper-class’s prerogatives while pretending to advance the common good.