With the news media uncovering Harvard’s Z-list admissions practices, many professionals in today’s world of high school counseling, college admission, and education in general sense it’s time to pounce on Harvard for rewarding unearned “privilege.” If only some combination of Harvard and/or the “privilege” bogeyman could be blamed; but, alas, college admissions in the United States today is only a serious symptom of a far larger, more complex, and more serious problem: the thus far extremely successful decades-long attempt by the powers that be to destroy meritocracy in the United States and turn the USA into a modern and high-tech caste-system state in which an individual’s demographic information at birth dictates everything about what preferences and opportunities are and are not bestowed upon that individual until death.
You can be sure that the vast majority of students who get into college because they are put on a Z-List or because they are legacies at the colleges that are admitting them have little personal experience contending with the grim reality faced by the vast majority of American high school students, as illustrated by the chart below.
It is a national scandal that most American high school students have little to no time with any knowledgable college/career counselor before they are thrust out of high school and into the big bad world of reality, which all too often includes going to a college that is not worth the money and joining the debt slave class for decades thereafter. That colleges, almost all of which like to consider themselves progressive and equity-focused, compound the problem by having Z-Lists and admissions preferences for children of alumni who have donated a pretty penny over the years is the definition of adding insult to injury to the vast majority of America’s youth.
Add to this the fact that these days, colleges that employ race-based admissions and Affirmative Action are rewarding many wealthy average students at the expense of exceptionally smart and talented wealthy, middle-class, and poor students and you have the perfect cocktail for the downfall of higher education in the United States. We already see it in our society writ large: the masses are no longer obligingly deferring to the views and opinions of the “higher educated.” Instead, more and more people immediately discount any words out of the mouths of those who teach in or have graduated from those colleges most often associated with ivory, not to mention, Ivy towers.
When education becomes so politicized and so focused on socially engineered preferred outcomes such skepticism is not only natural – it’s fully warranted; yet, for society to function well and advance, there does need to be a go-to group of people who have more knowledge, act more rationally, and do what’s right for not only themselves, but also their communities and their country. Such individuals are now part of an endangered species.
Does all of this anti-meritocracy mishegas sound familiar? Learned people have read this story before when they either independently or in the education world of yore absorbed all of the depressing details of the fall of Communism everywhere it has been tried. We are living in a world where too many want all of the stuff without all of the work! In other words, if you don’t work, nothing will, especially when managed by an unimpressive cabal at the top.
Those who attend and graduate from American colleges and universities today likely have no idea where all this ridiculousness ends because none of this sounds familiar because such individuals never learned the most important lessons of history. But you can be sure such current students and recent graduates – or more likely their parents – know all about how to get ahead in 21st Century America. It’s left to those who know their history to either try to foster change or simply throw up their hands, watch, and wait for the inevitable collapse.
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