Mediocre Elite

                One of the consequences of having an economic and educational system so skewed toward the wealthy is that the children of the top few percent of families economically never fail.  Instead, they are given a pass to the best schools and positions of influence and power regardless of how competent or intelligent they are.  They can fail upward their whole lives, while children in the lower income brackets stand less and less chance of being given a chance.  In a culture that is supposed to value merit and ability, this is critical problem.  It means that more of the top schools and top jobs are populated with people who’s only qualification is the wealth of their parents and not their ability.  The result is an elite class that is really full of pretty mediocre people.

                The textbook example of this is the flap over Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.  I don’t know enough about Hunter Biden to have any idea whether or not he is good at what he does or is qualified to do it.  I do know that Eric and Donald Trump Jr. talking about him taking advantage of his father’s position is more like an SNL skit than they realize.  Whether Hunter Biden has earned it or not, all of us reflexively assume that it is just another example of the rich getting richer while the rest of us scuffle just to stay afloat.  Our society is more and more segregated on the basis of wealth.  Even if we exclude the Ivies, the next tier of top universities in the country are filled with students who come from the top 5-10 percent of family household incomes.  They meet, marry and befriend people from the same economic class they come from.  Education has become a way of reinforcing social and economic stratification.

                It’s been clear for awhile that the economic system is rigged to concentrate wealth in the hands of a tiny minority of people.  The tax laws and monetary system function to help them consolidate and increase their wealth at the expense of everyone else.  The Trump tax cut went almost exclusively to the richest of the rich.  We have created an economic class who’s interests are no longer in synch with the general economic interests of the country.  The top 1% pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us.  The economy being tilted in this direction is not news.  What is noteworthy is the role our educational system plays in making it even worse.

                We all were appalled, but not surprised, by the recent college admissions scandal that saw celebrities use their money and influence to get their kids into schools they probably didn’t belong in.  The farcical part of the story is that it happens every day.  ‘Legacy’ admissions dominate the upper tier of American colleges is a pyramid scheme every bit as brazen as the one the celebrity parents were caught trying to pull off.  As has been the case in capitalist countries for a long time, it’s only the people with new money who are called out, while the old wealth families get away with murder.  Money has always put a heavy thumb on the scale of who does and who does not get into a particular school.  What is new is how the instruments that were supposed to support the meritocracy, tests, have been rigged to help seal the deal.

                The testing regime in American schools is invalid.  Even without all the help economically advantaged parents can provide, the test replicate the existing economic structure.  Rich schools do better than poor schools.  You could imagine a system where the tests level the playing field and let the intelligence and creativity of children from the lower levels of society shine through.  That’s not what we’ve done.  We have invested billions of dollars in a testing industry that does little more than validate and reconfirm the social advantages of the wealthiest families.  Part of this has always been part of the Protestant Ethic, where rich people are, as Calvin put it, “saved to serve.”  Little did we know that they were mostly saved to serve themselves.  This bias means that often the ‘best’ students from the ‘best’ schools are mediocre at best.  If you think that is an exaggeration, remember that the Trump brothers graduated from Georgetown and Penn.  I guess they have a school for clowns.