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Education, Meritocracy and Class

"Perhaps the central function that meritocracy plays — complete with SAT exams and other presumptively objective testing mechanisms — is in normalizing the growing class disparities in money, power, and resources. Top universities have been the essential building blocks of our new Gilded Age, facilitating the transfer of wealth and opportunity from one privileged generation to the next — and doing so while cloaking the extent to which today’s meritocratic elite are really the beneficiaries of a modern version of an "old boys’ club."

And this applies to elite universities in general,

"[H]igher education is a profound instrument of social power, one that can project values independent of state and corporate demands and offer its students and community members a space for their own cultivation. The dilemma is that our universities, in particular our elite ones, are doing less of this work and far more of the invisible work of class reproduction."

Meritocracy in Obama's Gilded Age

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