I’ve had a yfip: meritocracy tag since, well, yfip was a thing that people said. And these days I feel like hating meritocracy is getting increasingly trendy and I am increasingly like “nope actually it’s just good.”
Sure, the current system of college admissions creates an elite that is segregated from the rest of the country, as well as incentivizing lots of zero-sum arms-race behavior among high school students and their parents.
But I just think the basic function that elite colleges serve of just putting all the smart kids in the same place and making them interact is so valuable that nothing else matters.
(The kids that I want to meet each other aren’t exactly the kids with the highest SAT scores–it’s some combination of that and intellectual curiosity and creativity and ambition. But SAT scores get pretty close.)
It’s kind of terrifying to think about what my life would look like if I had gone to a different school. I probably wouldn’t have had the same jobs. I probably wouldn’t be an EA. I probably wouldn’t live here or have befriended or dated any of the same people. And I think in most cases, the outcome would have been worse. (And I didn’t even go to the optimal school.)