I think we have three fundamental problems:
1. We’ve created a society where people think that grades and test scores earn them the right to attend a given school. The goal of universities should be to improve society, in whatever vision it has. Grades are probably just one component of that.
2. Race is,unfortunately, a big deal. People are going to be racist or consciously have to try not to be or need policies to prevent one from being. The only place where people tend to be less racist is when racism leads directly and visibly to poor outcomes - most notably sports. Anytime you have to select people and how results are measured is unclear then racism will seep in.
3. There aren’t great output metrics for college. The prestige of a college is almost purely in its selectivity. Id love to know how well does a college do educating and academically average kid who is an introvert, but loves poetry.
That said I feel like the US college system has worked decently well. Not great, but it’s something we can build on.
4.) "Price No Object" college education. When a college turns itself into a luxury lifestyle club and gold-plated monument to its own glory, it needs to be fully reclassified and taxed as such.
5.) "College Degree Required" credential inflation. If the goal was to debt-burden and generally screw up the lives of average young people, while growing & enriching the whole college industry, I'd count this a huge success. Otherwise? No, FAIL.
This is usually just due to societal bias (oh, the guy from Harvard _must_ be good!), and honestly, on average, people who graduated from a top school (especially the ones that get in on merit and !legacy) are generally better than average.
Society needs to value those attributes if we're going to solve the really hard problems.
Maybe it is more down to what we consider virtuous as a society, and the rest follows. Again, catch-22, education can have a significant role in that, but it cannot carry the whole burden either.
My whole family is in teaching and pedagogical research. I also have quite a few younger cousins. It is obvious that the situation has changed a ton in the last 20 years (at least in EU public education) and keeps changing rapidly, perhaps too rapidly.
There is much more emphasis on group assignments, forcing students to learn how work together (or how to deal with people who don’t want to do shit, with minimal leverage on them). Also many more open-ended assignments and exams, that force you to take some initiative, actually understand and engage with the subject, and then make you get good at expressing yourself both in writing and orally. And grit is always part of it if the bar is kept high, which is a complex issue on its own.
It’s just much harder to teach well like this, and it has been pushed on teachers haphazardly. Good teachers are better, bad teachers are worse. Same with students to an extent, there’s a bigger burden on them to actively engage, and it is easier to get away with not doing so because evaluation is more fuzzy, and group work can be avoided. At some point you do need to learn some facts, this model relies more on imparting the skills and values for students to then be able to learn anything they need, but they do have to then go and do it, otherwise you end up worse-off in aggregate.
Teaching facts and making sure students memorized them is clearly worse, but it is much easier to do effectively and systematically at scale. Education is at the end of the day a mass-production factory of adults.
It’s a very hard question and lots of people are dedicating their lives to figuring it out.
It has always struck me as an issue that the meritocracy poorly distributes the kind of talent it selects for around society, and instead concentrates it in a relatively small number or elite professions in the cities.
Thinking at a society level, especially in a democracy, society really does needs intellectual talent throughout. Having lots of smart farmers, smart factory workers, etc. is a good thing. Some of that has to with the professions themselves (smart farmers coming up with new farming methods and helping their neighbors farm better), but also democracy (smart farmers and factory workers organizing and effectively representing the interests of their peers).
Kinda like a patient having two different kinds of cancer - you gotta keep distinguishing if you're trying to talk about details of the case.
The incentives of the meritocratic system. For instance, in the pre-meritocratic WASP-y system, the intellectual talent couldn't do that, or at least couldn't do it nearly as freely.
I think we've inherited conflicting conceptions of meritocracy. There's an ancient conception that can be traced back to Plato's Republic. The philosopher kings ruled for the sake of society, not for themselves. In Plato's view, philosophers didn't want the job of kings, would rather spend their lives in contemplation, and had to be forced into the unpleasant task of governing because the alternative was much worse, i.e., allowing the incompetent or immoral to rule. Plato's Republic was socialist, not capitalist. Even the raising of children was shared by the community.
Although capitalism is inherently an economic system rather than a moral system—the laws of supply and demand merely descriptive—it has unfortunately taken on a moral sheen. Under this newer conception of meritocracy, those who acquire greater wealth deserve it (morally speaking), due to their greater merit. Wealth is a reward, poverty a punishment. It almost feels as if some people believe that the so-called "Invisible Hand" of the market is God making choices, evaluating the goodness or badness of mortals.
I don't think anyone disputes that our leaders, our doctors, our scientists, ought to be the most qualified people for the jobs. What I personally would dispute is that these people also deserve to be much wealthier than everyone else. I believe that merit is at least partially inborn; it certainly seems that way in my case, and I immediately excelled relative to my peers at a very early age, without even "trying hard". On the contrary, it was quite easy for me and a struggle for them. I don't think that accidents of my birth—genetics and/or family social standing—somehow justify gross inequality in society. I don't think my "merit", whatever that is, makes me deserving of financial success. Perhaps capitalism is the best, most efficient economic system, and rewarding merit is a decent means to an end, but we should never forget that rewarding merit is not the ultimate end, not a moral imperative. The economic system ought to be for the benefit of the masses, not just for the lucky few.
