meritocratic means "judgement on merit (aka skill)"
and the story told is "no judgement on skill, only on being in-group. It's just the in-group is caused by previous employment and not birth-right/nationality/etc"
Personally I don't think it is the same as employment + reference. Imo it is fairly easy to game university and get a good degree from a "top" school without actually learning that much at all. Harder to get a good work reference if you don't deliver at your job.
