Discriminating against schools

In whining about a "Fuck off back to Eton" slogan, Jake Wallis Simons says:

Whichever way you look at it, discriminating against people because of where they went to school is wrong. Even if they went to Eton.

I wouldn't have said this if I were he. Put it this way. Why is discrimination wrong? Most of us would say it's because it penalizes people for something they cannot control. Discrimination violates the principle described by John Roemer (pdf):

Inequalities of outcome [are] indefensible, ethically speaking, when and only when they are due to differential circumstances. Inequalities due to differential effort are acceptable.

But of course, in this sense it is people who went to state school who suffer discrimination whilst the privately-educated benefit from it. As the Sutton Trust has shown, top professions (and journalism are dominated by the small minority of people who were privately educated. 

One reason for this is that employers prefer the privately educated; even controlling for degree class, subject and university, privately-educated men earn almost 5% more (pdf) than state-schooled ones*. A bigger reason, though, is that the privately-educated get better exam results and thus better access to the better universities.

Now, this might be because privately-educated people are just smarter than state-schooled ones and so would do well whatever school they attended. But if this were the case, the billions that parents spend on private schooling would be wasted. This is unlikely. What's more likely that private schools give people better education. Which should be surprising, given that the better ones spend so much more: at over £32,000pa, Eton's fees are five times the average per-pupil spending on state secondary schools.

This poses the question: what would non-discrimination, in the Roemerian sense, look like?

One possibility is that spending on state schools would rise to equal that on private schools, thus removing one "differential circumstance.". This would require massive increases: can you imagine inner-city comprehensives having Olympic-standard rowing lakes?

A cheaper alternative would be a version of Texas's top 10% rule, in which exam results and university admissions are equalized across schools, so that, say, only the top x% of students at each school get an A grade.

Now, I don't think Mr Wallis Simons wants either of these - and, perhaps, nor should he**. So, what can he mean when he says that it's wrong to discriminate against people because of the school they attended?

One possibility is that he and I are talking about two different things. He's talking about discrimination as something an individual consciously does against another person, whereas I'm talking about discrimination as an impersonal emergent process; parents who buy private education don't intend to hurt state-school people, but that is the unintended aggregate outcome of their actions. However, it's not at all clear why the one is morally abominable and the other not.

Which leaves another possibility - that his is merely the voice of a sense of entitlement so bloated that it feels offended by mere posturing and yet ignores the blight upon millions of people's life chances.

* This might not be sheer taste discrimination. Public schoolboys might sort into higher-paying jobs, or they might have "soft skills" (this might or might not be a euphemism) which employers value.