Those who tend the levers and pulleys of the meritocracy machine are not unaware of its human costs. In an honest, insightful essay about the risk of burnout, Harvard College admissions officers worried that those who spend their high school and college years jumping through hoops of high achievement wind up as “dazed survivors of some bewildering life-long boot-camp.” The essay, first published in 2000, is still posted, as a kind of cautionary tale, on the Harvard admissions website.
