Lauren Rivera on Meritocracy and Its Failings

Hello, this is Stephen Derloff, and welcome to this episode of the Inequality Podcast. It is a particular pleasure to introduce Lauren Rivera as today's guest. She is the Peter G. Peterson Chair of Corporate Ethics at Northwestern University at the Kellogg School and is also affiliated with the Sociology Department. She is one of the leading scholars on issues of merit, meritocracy, and elites.

I also want to add something that I think exemplifies the importance of economists listening to this podcast and reading Lauren's work. I've read Lauren's book in the past and so went to a seminar she gave last year with great anticipation. The seminar was normally wonderful, but as I wrote her afterwards,

It was valuable to me to hear her perspectives on meritocracy and merit, on how to think about elites, because they are so dissimilar from the ways that economists think about these categories. And so I think the sort of work that Lauren is doing, it not only speaks to deep issues, equality, but it also speaks to the importance of interdisciplinarity. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for hosting me, Stephen. I'm delighted to be here. So I thought that we would start.

by discussing some of the main contours of your findings in the book Pedigree, which is an award-winning study of the relationship between elite education and elite jobs. I realized when you've worked years on a book, A summary of synthesis is difficult, but if you could give some of the contours, that would be great.

definitely so the book looks at hiring decisions into the country's most elite jobs which are jobs in investment banks management consulting firms and law firms and to give you a sense when i did the book the book came out in 2015. The difference between getting one of those jobs coming out of college or grad school versus not getting one of those jobs was up to four times the amount of salary. And these jobs have served as pathways into the 1%, if not the 0.0.

And the book's main theme really is that in the United States, you mentioned meritocracy, we really have this ethos that people get to the positions where they're at. in schools and job due to their own hard work and intelligence that hard work not blue blood is really the keys to success and we see this in various textbooks newspapers even in novels we really glamorize

these stories in which an individual rises to the top through their personal drive and perseverance. And the main message that we have about meritocracy in the US is kind of the same in all these stories.

which is again people end up in the economic and social positions they're at because they earned them they're achieved not inherited from their parents Now, this really is in stark contrast to what we see is that even though that we have a classless society or a myth, I should say, of a classless society, economic inequality is now greater in the U.S. than in many other Western industrialized nations, including. so-called class societies like the UK or France.

And our rates of social mobility are lower. And if you look at the actual, the very top and the very bottom rungs of the economic radar, they're particularly sticky. So children born to families are the top of the bottom fifths of the income distributions. tend to stay on those same rungs as adults.

And we know that children from families at the top of the economic hierarchy monopolize access to good schools, prestigious universities and high paying jobs. Now, this raises a somewhat obvious but also important question. If we have ostensibly merit based. admissions in both education and in employment. And we also have equal opportunity protections, at least for the moment in employment.

How is it that this process of elite reproduction occurs? And so I decided to do a deep dive into this issue in employment because there is a lot of sociological work on how this happens in admission to college, especially elite colleges. And so I looked at the really elite jobs I mentioned at the beginning in investment banks large law firms consulting firms.

in particular i looked at hiring decisions because hiring decisions are really important moments of stratification you know where you either gain access to a firm and occupation and all the benefits it yields or you don't

And so I did interviews with 120 gatekeepers in these firms, as well as I spent about nine months as a participant observer in one firm on their recruitment team. And because there are a lot of economists listening to this, they may not know what participant observation or... geography is.

basically you immerse yourself in this research world and you become part of the team and so i worked on the recruiting team and i got to see all the behind the scenes decisions and discussions that happened and what i argue in the book

that at every stage of the hiring process from the decision of where to post ads or even hold recruitment events to the final selections made by hiring committees Firms are using a variety of screens and evaluative metrics that are highly correlated with both parental income and education.

taken together these seemingly economically neutral decisions result in a hiring process that filters students based off of their parents socioeconomic status and really kind of this inherited aspect of socioeconomic position and the book's title pedigree actually refers to a term that employers my study used as a shorthand for what they believed was an individual accomplishment they use this word pedigree

They saw this as a highly desirable, if not mandatory applicant trait. They thought that it represented things like significant personal achievements, like you got admitted to an elite university, you were a varsity athlete, or you had a special early internship at Goldman Sachs. they thought this was interpreted as pure evidence of an individual's intelligence orientation to success work ethic and individual merit and again they considered it to be a quality-based

purely on individual effort and ability. But the original meaning of the term, still in widely used today, is not about individuals. It's about inheritance. It actually means ancestral line. So in that sense, the title of the book evokes the main argument that hiring decisions that appear on the surface to be

based only on individual merit are subtly yet powerfully shaped by applicant's socioeconomic backgrounds and those of their parents so to put it simply in the 21st century parents levels of income and education help determine who works on wall street

who works on Main Street, and who reaches the top of the nation's economic ladder. Well, I think these are first-order issues in thinking about intergenerational mobility and any ethical considerations. because in the background of thinking about equality of opportunity is

the independence of the prospects of children from the facts of their parents as opposed to the facts of themselves. And in that sense, I'm speaking in a way consistent with John Romer and other philosophers. I wonder if we might unpack the meritocracy idea a bit.

To my ears, and maybe I'll say an economist's ears, one dimension of the arguments you have made has to do with measurement. In other words, that one could, in principle, think about a process in which... you match the people that are best or will have the highest value in places be at a university or be at a firm and those are not measurable and in contrast what you have is a set of observables which really don't capture the underlying

notion of merit that defines meritocracy once you go down that route then again i'm putting a little bit the economist language for things one would ask about questions of how to eliminate the irrelevances and how to promote better measurements of the factors that are good

But I guess one could make a stronger critique, and that is that maybe the ideal of meritocracy… itself is challenged by your work and so i was hoping that you could say something about your view of the meritocratic ideal after you know obviously you had thought about it deeply before but now

Given the body of research you've done over many years, where your thinking is on the ideals as opposed to the implementation? Yeah, I think that the ideals, it's much more than a measurement situation. i think the problem with meritocracy although it sounds very nice in theory is that the definition of what constitutes merit or as you said best or value are inherently subjective and if we were going to use this type of system it

would also assume that they're neutral, which there never are. Those definitions are intimately intertwined with power relations. And sociologists have shown that in every era, people from dominant groups generally control what counts as merit they tend to define it in their own image i saw that very clearly in my study but i'm not the first to show this that you know whatever merit we know that if you ask someone what kind of driver what kind of parent what kind of scholar

is a good one. People tend to give you a verbatim description of what they are, but also they have more resources to cultivate in themselves and their children qualities that are viewed as meritorious. And so a good example of this is elite college admissions. Prior to around the 1920s, admissions to places like Harvard or Yale were based primarily on academic subject tests.

This was biased towards the children of affluent families because things like tests in Latin and schooling in Latin was only offered at very elite private schools. With the rise of immigration and increasing Jewish enrollment at these schools, gatekeepers at these schools decided to flip.

the version of merit and the definition of merit to preserve advantages for dominant groups, in particular in this case was white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. And so what they did is they actually shifted from performance on subject tests, which seemed to be something that opened opportunity to individuals from a wider array of immigration and religious statuses to this emphasis on quote manliness and quote character. And they did things like looking at things like letters of recommendation.

which were not part of the process before or crucially involvement in. athletic activities, and extracurriculars. And these persist into the present. It's part of the reason why we have this whole extracurricular race when it comes to elite college admissions is it stemmed from the 1920s in which The leaders of Harvard, Princeton, Yale wanted to basically close out opportunity and reserve it for members of dominant groups.

This happens in every era, right? We looked at the SAT. Why was the SAT first adopted at many elite institutions? It was to open opportunity to students from a wider array of geographic backgrounds and socioeconomic backgrounds. closing opportunity on the basis of race. The problem with the idea of merit is that however we define merit is subjective and it's never neutral. It's in the advantage and image of those in power. And you might be curious to know, sociologists take this for granted.

But folks outside of sociology don't always know that the word meritocracy was actually coined by a sociologist named Michael Young in his dissertation in 1958. And he didn't mean it. in a very kind of serious, we should use this way. It was actually coined as a joke. I believe it's called the rise of the meritocracy.

and it was a satire that oh wouldn't it be fascinating if in the uk we moved to a system where everyone was ranked based off of the equivalent of you know iq scores and wouldn't this be interesting and he talks about how the the law logical consequences of this system are not to provide openness of opportunity, but rather affluent and higher class individuals were able to kind of game the way the system.

to make sure the system certified their their young children as the most capable so i am generally not a fan of meritocracy as it happens in practice i do not think it's just a measurement issue i do think that it is contingent upon subjective definitions that are loaded in power and one thing that we may talk about later is also when we talk about meritocratic systems as distributing based off of ability it is

by nature going to disenfranchise or exclude individuals whose abilities may not be conforming to societal norms. So individuals who are neurodivergent, individuals with disabilities, things like this.

So I think I want to extract two distinct arguments you make. One of them I'm actually going to associate with the school of thought that's called public choice theory in economics.

And a dimension of that is to argue that the individual that implement policies are as self-interested as anybody else. And so in any design of government policy, one has to account for the fact that the individuals who are operationalizing things... have objectives i bring that up because well first of all because public choice scholars are often considered to be politically conservative and meritocracy is often associated with more conservative views

you've actually given a pretty damning indictment from the public choice perspective, and that is that we have individuals who wish to perpetuate a socioeconomic elite. For whatever reason that's their preference, they will find ways to skew, to define merit in such a ways that correspond to that.

I want to distinguish that, I'll call that the pragmatic critique. The principled critique simply is that, and Mark Yassin actually wrote this in an essay in a book that I co-edited with Kenneth Ayer on Sam Bowles, that meritocracy is underdefined. because merit is and so to say that one believes in meritocracy presupposes a definition of merit that is contestable and so to go down this list we are both at elite schools they said admissions with a certain notion of merit

Whether or not that's defensible in isolation, they aren't the only criteria. So to go down that reasoning, I could say one objective in universities is to maximize the number of Nobel Prizes in physics. All right. So then you could say, well, conditional on that, this is how I would decide who merits the admissions, et cetera. A different question I could ask is how do I produce the best citizenry, individuals that have humane values?

one can go down the list and so the reason i'm emphasizing this is i think you brought up a very deep issue and that anybody who's sympathetic to meritocracy and i'm going to put myself in the if you define it correctly and think prospectively camp that there's a a defensible view It is absolutely incumbent to start with definitions of merit, and I think you've emphasized something that's extremely important, is that public policy debates and I'd say the modeling that goes on in...

testing whether a system is meritocratic or not, they are presupposing a definition of merit, which is often not one that one can justify. So I think that the two levels of the critiques really are very important, and anybody who...

wants to construct an affirmative defense, has to engage with them. So I wonder if we might turn to issues of gender. The reason I bring that up, first of all, of course, is much of your work has dealt with meritocracy and gender. And second... I think that that opens up these deep issues of the definition of merit, what it means for self-interested parties to perpetuate definitions.

with a agenda that's a little bit different, et cetera. So can you tell us about your work there and how it links up to this discussion? I'm so glad you raised that. When it comes to meritocracy, just as the way that we divide and evaluate merit in different settings can provide advantages from individuals from more affluent backgrounds, we've been talking a lot about socioeconomics, it does so for other dominant groups too.

including dominant gender groups as well as dominant racial groups. And there's a rich body of literature on this, much of it done by economists, also by psychologists and sociologists that have shown that the way that we rate any given performance varies by the identity of the person we think is performing.

And I think one of the most talked about, but also one of the best examples of this comes from economists Claudia Golden and Cecilia Raus, where they look at orchestras. So many of your listeners will know this study well, but back in the day, there were huge... gender disparities in the composition of major orchestras. There was this intervention made to try to address that.

where all of a sudden people who were performing were hidden behind a screen and so you actually couldn't see their identity. Now before this if you talk to you know conductors they would say oh yes there is a distinctly female sound and it is inferior we can't have any of that. here.

turns out you put the the curtain up and lo and behold there is not a female sound and all of a sudden the representation of women in uh national symphony orchestras began to increase and we see similar things in employment right when we judge a body of work, a career, we apply different standards depending on the gender of the person that we think is doing the performance.

And so I've continued to do and work in this tradition of work where I'm actually looking at field cases, right? So taking things out of the laboratory to understand How is the way that we define and evaluate merit related to gender? And I've done a couple of studies of this. I did one audit study.

audit studies for those of you who are unfamiliar which i assume is zero people because there are a lot of economists here but just in case where we send fake resumes to real employers and we vary one or two criteria of interest then we see who gets invited to interview and everything related to performance, like work experience, education, et cetera, is held constant. We did this in large law firms because I wanted to put to the test. The ideas and pedigree is.

is this idea of socioeconomic bias is it actually discrimination because pedigree as rich as it was as a qualitative study It's qualitative data, so we would actually need different methods to make a causal argument about discrimination. So I co-authored with my good friend from grad school, Andras Chilchik, who's at the University of Toronto at Rotman, and we did an audit study of elite law firms. And we sent.

fake resumes to real employers and we varied two things which was the perceived class background of the candidate and i'm happy to tell you how we manipulated that as well as just the name in terms of gender and what we found was indeed the findings in pedigree were substantiated, that employers were discriminating in favor of higher class applicants. But interestingly, this effect varied by gender, and they were only doing so for men.

And we did some follow-up interviews and some survey experiments to try to figure out what the mechanism was. And it turns out that while employers view higher-class women as equally good fits for the culture of law firms, they viewed them as flight risk. because higher class notions of what motherhood looks like.

tend to be all consuming. And so employers would actually say to us in interviews, this person's a flight risk because they're going to work for my firm for two years and then they're going to go be a stay at home mom. And so this is the idea that, you know. Even among a relatively privileged group, we still see gender differences. Or I did have other studies on what happens in academics that we can talk about, but we did a study of teaching evaluations. We know that teaching evaluations...

are one of the worst tools to actually measure teaching quality. If you are interested in the quality of the education of faculty members, giving students, don't do teaching evaluations. Students really like faculty who are charismatic, looking and who give them good grades. But we also know that there are really strong gender differences in teaching evaluations. And I'm interested not only in inequality, but

interventions that we can use to start to make the playing field a little bit more level. So also with Andres, what we did is we took advantage of a school, professional school that had changed the way that it rated. teachers from a 10 point scale to a six point scale. And what we found is that little intervention of going from a 10 point scale to a six point scale actually eliminated a previously large gender gap in evaluations.

And the reason it did so, and these were among the same faculty, so it's not an issue of, you know, is it different people and things like this? The reason why it did so is that, and back to your point about what do we value, what is considered best, what is the definition of merit? When people were asked to evaluate the exact same person, we did some experimental follow-up too, but the exact same person on a 10-point scale, readers were significantly less likely to give a top-performing woman a

because a 10 is perfect. It's brilliant. And due to societal stereotypes of brilliance and genius, we tend not to associate that with women. So if you took an equivalent performance that was equivalently awesome in terms of a lecture,

We would see a woman giving it, we'll give her a 9. We see a man giving it, we'll give her a 10. But that six-point skill disoriented people, and it took some of the cultural loading and power dynamics off of the definition of merit. And so, again, that simple switch from 10 to 6.

eliminated that previously large gender bias in evaluations. Now, that's not to say that the world will become meritocratic if everyone replaces everything with a six-point scale. That's not a hard point at all. But the point is that, you know, again, Definitions of merit are subjective. They can reproduce privilege.

how can we actually make society more fair by having better tools to evaluate individuals and how we distribute opportunity. I'm glad you brought up these issues of academia because I think that

It is very widely understood that there are ethnic and gender biases in evaluations. You know, the admirable effort of universities to get feedback on teaching, identify where... people are not doing well, etc. They are so mixed up with stereotypes that I personally despair about the value of the evaluations for any categories of people.

So I was wondering if we could then turn to the other side of thinking about meritocracy, which is not the endpoints of universities and firms, but to the beginning. And you have a very interesting recent paper, Milestone is Merit.

that looks at the matching and selection issues, which are intrinsic in what's defined as a meritocratic process, from the perspective of early childhood schooling. And so might you describe the main findings there? Yes. So this was a study. I'm going to give you a little background on it. I did one of my undergrad majors in developmental psychology so I've always been interested in children and their relationship to society.

But I became interested in children as or childhood as a site of elite reproduction when I was finishing the work for Pedigree. I was sitting there in a Starbucks and I had a copy, a hard copy of the New York Times. which tells you how long ago this was. It was not recently.

And I opened the style section and it said there are two things happening today in New York City that are very similar, even though you don't think they would be. And on one hand, it was the Westminster Dog Show. And the other was the pre-K letters to elite Manhattan school. for preschoolers are coming out today. And aren't these the same things because they're both based off of inheritance? And I thought,

this is a strikingly similar argument as the one I'm making about people at the end. So let's see. Let's look at these elite schools and how they pick kids.

To tell you about the kinds of elite schools we looked at, we've talked about elite colleges. And when it comes to elite colleges, there is an advantage to attending elite private schools. So elite private high school students comprise... about one percent of the U.S. graduating class every year, but there are about a quarter of the incoming classes at places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. And so going to one of these schools actually serves as

an advantage in the elite race for colleges and elite jobs later on. But one of the things that's really interesting is that many of these schools admit the bulk of students that end up graduating when kids are around two and a half, three. or four years old.

And this is way before children have demonstrated academic records. And at this age, there are very few things other than parental socioeconomic status that are associated with later life outcomes. So he became really interested in this puzzle of... okay, who gets into these types of institutions which serve as their own vehicles of elite reproduction through where they send kids, but also there is some research by Seamus Kahn and others that looks at these are kind of

factories that teach students how to be and exist in the world as a proper elite. Together with a postdoc who's fabulous, who's currently at Princeton, named Estella Diaz, we did a study of the admissions process of these very late schools in six cities.

We're interviewing the admissions officers and how they evaluate children for their early childhood programs. So children are generally two to five years old when they go through this process. Now one of the things that was really interesting about this is that this is a really hard time to measure.

merit, if that's what we're going to call it, or even differentiate between children. But schools had remarkably similar ways in which they did this. And what they did is they were screening children by developmental milestones. Now, many of your listeners know what an audit study is, but many of them may not know what a developmental milestone is. A developmental milestone, there are certain social, cognitive, physical traits or behaviors that children

at certain ages tend to display if they are typically developing. Pediatricians, if you use ages and stages, if you have a new kid, when you go to the pediatrician, seemingly every five seconds, you're asked to fill out all this paperwork. That's what they're using to screen. kids and what they are explicitly looking for is do they believe the child is typically developing

And non-disabled. And so this ends up being an explicit screen on perceived disability status. And we were really shocked by these findings because a lot of these schools. despite their eliteness, have active commitments to increasing diversity, equity, inclusion. But the amount of overt discrimination on the basis of neurotypicality, as well as disability status, was

shocking in some of the things that people told us. In fact, some of our interviewees actually used imagery from the eugenics movement to describe why they were selecting the physical and the cognitive elite that would go on to a part of these elite communities. It was one of the most troubling papers that I've written. As a sociologist, I don't generally write about happy things but this one really stuck with me.

Well, I was particularly struck when I first heard you present the research, the bizarre idea of meritocracy in this context, because using developmental milestones... The word development is intrinsic in that. In other words, whatever the latent variables are that one wants to ascribe as defining merit, they get revealed at different rates. you mentioned that this is it's bizarre and and i agree it also is somewhat

intention or in contrast to how we think about education. We typically think of education as supporting development and growth, but they were looking for children who had already mastered the skills that we would typically expect. early childhood education to help foster. But one of the things that was also relevant to our discussion, what you just mentioned was part of the reason they did this is they invoked meritocracy as a justification. They thought this would be fair.

Prior to using developmental milestones, these schools often had used outside academic and neuropsychological testing as part of their admissions process and in particular cognitive testing. The reason why they stopped was that these tests are really, really expensive. It might be between $600 and $3,000 to take at the...

parents' expense. You need to do it for each school you applied to because schools generally would not share test results. You had to do it with their evaluator in their style and so forth. And this was seen as creating unmeritocratic barriers to entry, which indeed it does. And so how schools responded is they decided to take these things in-house. When they did it, they often cherry picked questions from screeners.

Even if you believe that this type of testing was legitimate, that was reliable or valid, they kind of mixed all the screeners. But one of the reasons they did this is they perceived that because the testing was done in-house by the school for free, That meant everyone could compete and it must be fair. But really, what we see through that is, again, like we talked about, the idea of how we construct and define merit.

It is defined in the image of dominant groups, in this case, able-bodied neurotypical kiddos. I want to extract what I thought was a very important point, which is even at the level of the preschool, merit was being defined by a certain... definition of the objective of the institution. And we often do think of education as value added. And so I could have said that I'm going to set up a preschool and my objective is to identify the children who participated in the school.

will have the largest gains compared to everybody else, as opposed to crediting their own objective. It's ask whoever is going to be at the highest endpoint. So in other words, if you come in with somebody who has a very large vocabulary,

whatever happens, they're going to have an outlier in terms of vocabulary. A different question simply is what the change is in the number of words that are known. And I bring that up because that distinction, I think, is absolutely lost in thinking about education. both at the preschool level and frankly at the university level. So if you take a public university system, is its goal, as I said, to produce Nobel Prize winners in physics, or is its goal to...

Increase the human capital, the education, the abilities of people in the population. Those are very, very different objectives. I think on their own merits, no pun intended, one can defend them as... dimensions of what a school does, but the idea to reify one of them as the only goal is giving a specificity to merit, in this case merit, which is not justified. I wonder if we might then turn to your work on disability.

You know, certainly in discourses on inequality, at least the ones in the world I live in, this is very understudied and maybe underappreciated. to comment on one thing that you just mentioned before this idea of

educational institutions viewing their purpose as to kind of certify the best or identify the best rather than actually support growth and learning and growth as an accomplishment. I do think that meritocracy as an ideology enables that because it makes it such that the individuals and groups that control societal institutions of stratification like the educational system

The point becomes, okay, identifying the most able rather than actually providing education or supporting those who need the most help. Likewise, your question about how meritocracy fits with disability. definition of meritocracy that's often used is the most able, however we define that imperfectly or with more or less measurement error, rise to the top. And that idea is inherently exclusionary to people whose abilities do not conform to societal expectations of what ability looks like.

We see that in terms of people whose minds and bodies might diverge from typical standards or normative cultural standards. And so the very idea of saying, I'm going to choose who goes to Northwestern or U of C or Harvard. based off of who is the most cognitively able makes it such that individuals whose cognition may differ from what we typically think of as those high standards as out of running for the race. I think that this idea, what you said about disability,

being excluded from how we talk about meritocracy, I think it is really important. And it also mirrors a larger sidestepping of disability that we see in a lot of different disciplines that deal with stratification. So even in sociology, where we think a lot about social identities and social positions and how they relate to broader social phenomenon. Disability has been relatively absent in mainstream discussions of inequality.

and stratification. There's been a lot of work in disability studies, but when we talk about the work that people cite most often when it comes to stratification and inequality, disability has been silent.

working on issues of meritocracy has been how do these systems relate to people whose abilities don't conform to cultural standards of bodily, mentally... neurotypicality and i think that this is really important both from an intellectual standpoint and understanding uh ideology of meritocracy but also as a social one because disabled people are the largest minority group in the united states it's you know estimates vary about between 20 to 25 percent of people in the

us are labeled as having at least one disability and disability is something that many of us if we're lucky enough to to age that long will become right and so it's a social category that's really meaningful so i've been looking at disability primarily in the education

educational system, and I'm happy to chat more on that. One of them, as I mentioned, is the study of elite preschools. I will say that this focus on disability and neurotypicality was not what I... expected to find here you know i expected to look at elite reproduction and wealthy parents and things like this but it tended to be a huge overt screen on disability status and then i have another paper that's an audit study with again my favorite co-author

I love all my other co-authors too, but Andras and I have known each other the longest. I should say my longest co-author. Andras Jolczyk and I love that too. I love everybody.

There could be a tie for first place. Exactly, exactly, exactly. That looks at disability discrimination in public education. We think of the private education system. There are fewer safeguards around discrimination on the basis of disability than in the public system. That's not to say that private schools have a free pass, although the ones in my study with Estella definitely think...

They did. But in public system, we actually have fairly robust, albeit imperfect laws to protect students with disabilities and provide their access to a free and appropriate public education. However, we found even there, there was discrimination against students with disabilities. So we did an audit of over 20,000 K-12 public schools. We wrote a request to the principal saying we were moving to the area.

interested in researching schools? Could we potentially meet for a school tour? And we varied two things. One was the perceived disability status of the child, which we signaled through whether or not they have an IEP. Mike, can you explain what that is? Yeah, 100%.

There are two main laws that surround disability discrimination in the U.S. The one I'm going to talk about is the IDEA, which applies to public education. And what the IDEA basically says is that schools cannot refuse to educate educate a kid who has a disability regardless of the impairment type or their support needs.

In addition, they have to provide supports or services for that child to meet or move closer to grade level educational goals. And they have to do so in the least restrictive setting possible. So you can't just take all your disabled kids and warehouse them.

and you know this was happening throughout the 70s things like this part of that is that we have to figure out who qualifies as having an educational disability children might be identified by a teacher a parent it is often a long and conflictual process to get this evaluation in the first place but if you are deemed as having an disability, you are granted what's called an IEP, an Individualized Educational Plan, which will list the categories of disability you have, as well as goals.

and relevant supports so if a child has this in hand it means they are identified by the public education system as having an educational disability so when we were writing these emails the signal of disability for the

The child was my child either in one condition does have an IEP or in the other condition, we didn't say anything because it'd be really weird to write to school and say, hey, my child doesn't have an IEP, right? So we wanted to make this realistic too, which is something we think of in audit work. A portion of them said, yes, my child has an IEP. The other didn't say anything. We also varied the perceived race of the parent.

whether they were black or white. And we found, again, in public education, where it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of disability, even in pre-enrollment inquiries like ours were, we found that the principals were significantly less likely to respond. when they believed the child that was potentially moving into their district had an IEP and they were even less likely to respond when they believed that it was a black disabled child. And so again, this idea of who has merit, who doesn't.

This just saying our system is meritocratic does not mean it is so, right? And so that's one example that we see in which, you know, principals may be engaging in actions to...

keep the enrollment of children who are identified as having a disability low. So I think if I wanted to take the different contours of our conversation together, you really have described a complicated... dynamic of both education and labor market attainment in which one moves from preschool to college to jobs. And from that perspective, it also shows

a deep limitation certainly to conventional discussions of meritocracy. And what I mean by that is that if I said that my objective is to produce the most educated set of adults in a state, that tells me nothing about what should be done in preschool. What I want to extract from the conversation is when you think about the effect of socioeconomic status at different levels, one of the dimensions of this is going to be that

You have what I'm going to call excess meritocracy because it's static. There's some implementation of something that's called meritocracy for preschool in isolation, something for... high schools in isolation, something for colleges in isolation, something for firms in isolation. But social objectives are not intermediate. We don't have any intrinsic desire to maximize something for the average test score of three-year-olds or five-year-olds. We have something.

we want to do in terms of the lives we're going to live as adults. And I emphasize that because I think that it indicates a paucity in the conversation, which is it's not perspective. And the questions to ask at each stage is, we have long-run objectives. How do we facilitate them? And so one long-run objective, which I'm going to call the core, which I think is defensible for meritocracy as an...

objective is to say there's something you want to do at the end. And so we sort of match people in order to achieve the long-run goal. That doesn't entail anything about who... only choosing the children that are fulfilling whatever standards the preschools you identified were using it says something quite different it asks who do you identify here so that as they're being shaped across the life course eventually you get some outcome that you want

I put that on the table as I think that seems to me kind of one important message. The second is simply ethical. Concerns about intergenerational mobility, persistence across families, they're derivative from, I think, our very admirable ideas about equality of opportunity, about the non-existence of impediments that are irrelevant.

to the outcomes of interest. And so, you know, I'd say the admirable part of meritocracy historically was trying to get rid of the accident of birth into the aristocracies, so on and so forth. That all said, What your work shows is there's other irrelevances. In other words, that the fact that socioeconomic status is playing these distinct roles says that there's something else that's going on that's inducing persistence across families that doesn't match the putative objection.

So I put it all on the table, as I said, in terms of, I think, a way to organize many of the ideas that you've presented today. So I'm wondering if we could ask you to step back and say, now you're in the public policy school. Where do you see the levers of policy in terms of promoting equality of opportunity? And I think the language, I'll finish this long-winded question with, part of what you identified was amplification. In other words, initial disparities.

They don't die out over time. There isn't conversions. They amplify. And so stepping back with an ordnative hat on. What recommendations do you have in terms of where one can promote a quality opportunity given the vision you have of the education labor market processes?

So it is a big and important issue and I do not have perfect answers. I will say as a sociologist, strong social institutions and strong social policies are necessary to support this and are given. climate i think that's going to be challenging but i used to say let's lottery everything right for elite colleges let's just make it a lottery of everyone who has like a certain test score certain grades things like this although

There's recent research in sociology to show that lotteries also perpetuate advantages for the privilege. And, you know, in thinking about my own experience, that makes sense. I live in Chicago. One of my kids goes to Chicago public schools. And, you know, we have a lottery for which Chicago public school?

you want to go to outside of your neighborhood potentially. And that lottery requires so much knowledge about when it is, how you apply. Like I have a PhD and it's hard for me to make sense of that lottery. I can't imagine that someone who's...

English as a second language, who doesn't have that same cultural knowledge, doesn't study education as part of what their research interests can make it through. So I don't think there is kind of a universal fix like a lottery to say it's going to fix things everywhere. But I do think that... it involves thinking both about the services, supports, and resources we provide to families, to children as they are navigating life as well as the systems that we use.

I don't want to call them institutions of stratification because they don't have to be, but these institutions that we rely on that link individuals to different positions in society. There are all sorts of policy things that I could talk about. How do we actually provide supports, resources? Just addressing gatekeeping procedures in elite worlds isn't going to make us a fair place. We actually have to invest in all of our people.

not just the people we think are the most wealthy or the most able, things like this. But I think that in those discussions about what kind of systems do we create, at the level of organizations or institutions, it's first we have to think about, and this is a theme in our conversation, what is the objective here when it comes to education as an institution or when it comes to employment or let's focus on education?

is our objective here sifting or is it lifting right sifting would be let me identify the most able students and propel them on their way or would it be lifting in terms of providing everyone resources they need to actually grow we also have to ask who does it serve and by virtue of asking who does it serve whatever system we set up who does it exclude because As a sociologist, anytime we make decisions to focus on a specific objective or a certain group,

there can be potentially exclusionary elements to it so we want to think about that but critically we have to ask what is the implication for society in both the distribution of opportunity but also the aggregate quality of life because in my world of elite institutions when fairness is discussed it's again discussed in this very meritocratic way that oh the best people get the best things but you know we know from sociology that

you know society needs to function as a whole and even if the best people have really awesome lives and everyone else is miserable um you know it's not going to make for a stable society in the whole and then finally how does our system relate to vulnerable individuals. And so I don't have a clear answer. I wish I could say, let's just lottery everything and we'll be all great. But it is investment in societal institutions that help people learn, grow.

develop capacity and it is more thoughtful and really difficult conversations about how do we make decisions about our purpose in terms of societal institutions like education and employment. that hopefully could be one that would result in a more fair distribution of opportunity, but also an increased aggregate quality of life.

So we're in an era where affirmative action and DA policies are under attack, being removed. Where do you see them in inequality of opportunity? So I think one of the things, I know that there's tremendous backlash against both affirmative action and DEI. And I have a study with a group of computer scientists, actually, at the University of Colorado Boulder, where we're looking at DEI backlash among academics. And we would expect that.

the stereotype at least of academics is that they tend to be more left-leaning things like this but we see really strong uh dei backlash even in that group and we kind of present a typology of dei backlash but i will say this i think one of the things that backlash gets wrong

is this idea that if we just close our eyes and don't consider race, gender, social class, whatever it is, these identities and social categories that have... deep historical meanings and power differentials that suddenly things will be fair and we actually know that

that idea that if we just don't think about it or consider it is completely at odds with what the reality of science is in terms of how we evaluate other people that we know from decades of research that like i talked about the exact same performance will judge it differently differently depending on who we think did the performance. A great example of this comes from a study of law firms. It was not done by academics. It was done by a legal organization.

but they were looking at applications to elite law firms again the types of places i study and they had two writing samples that they included for a new associate position and it was the exact same writing sample submitted to different firms but they varied whether the picture of the potential associate was black versus white. When it was the black candidate or people believed it was a black candidate, they found

a significant number, percentage of more errors compared to the white applicant. Again, same piece of text. And this is... in line with a long line of research that shows that you actually as a member of a negatively stereotyped group like black americans like women in a certain technical field things like this you actually

overshoot the bar to be perceived as equally competent. And so when we are quote-unquote blind, which is an ableist word, I don't like it, but when we take the consideration of race or gender out of the equation, we're actually making unfair decisions, right? Because what we bring to the decision are these biases. So when we take these things away, it's not like, oh, we suddenly have this fair system. We actually, we're kind of resegregating things.

We know, again, when we don't actively have race or gender on the table, we will make... more gender biased or racially biased decisions. And then there's also this body of literature and psychology on something called moral licensing, that if people think they're being meritocratic, they actually engage in discrimination even more. We have actually seen

what happens in the state of California, in the state of Michigan, when it comes to racial equity, when we abandon these policies. I think that the pushback to these policies stems from lots of sources. Some of them may be this fear of losing opportunity and to preserve advantages for dominant groups. The last thing I'll say, which is so interesting to me, is that when we think about affirmative action or DEI, the backlash is lopsided, right? Take, for example, the Supreme Court decisions.

about the use of race conscious admissions at elite universities. As an aside, this decision did not apply to employment, although a lot of employers are very scared that further legal action could. But it was just a college admissions, but it focused exclusively on race. Affirmative action also happens on the basis of gender.

eliminated affirmative action on the basis of gender, the incoming classes at places like Harvard and Yale would probably be about 70% women, right? This pushback is not just about fairness. It's about preserving advantages for historically dominant groups, which to come full circle is kind of what meritocracy is often marshaled to serve.

So in discussing affirmative action, of course, opens up another hour of conversations. I could go off for so long. So I think I want to just add one thing, and that is my view actually is that affirmative action is meritocratic. If we think about meritocracy functionally, in other words, I have certain social goals, and who deserves to get these positions at universities or in firms or to meet the social goals?

We can debate whether the social goals are legitimate or not, but conditional on their legitimacy, that doesn't entail anything about the rules of being backwards looking. Whoever has the highest test score wins, so to speak. So going down that route, if you compare, you know, I'll go at a 1550 on the SAT. I'll take an extremely high score. The 1550 went to Phillips Exeter.

and the 1450 went to the worst high school in California where I grew up. Would you possibly say that the signals are the same?

The 1450 is the one that seems to speak more to the putative notion of ability. And so the reason I put this on the table is I think that part of the polarity that's alleged between affirmative action versus merit, DA versus merit, is simply not thinking about it in this holistic way of a dynamical system in which information differs according to the individual in terms of the observables, and it doesn't account for the dynamics.

In other words, individuals that have had a different set of role models have grown up in communities where you know different things about what it means to go to college, etc. All of those are inextricably linked to issues of race and gender because that is the United States. And to try to put them in opposition, I think, is missing that one can set up legitimate social objectives in which both affirmative action and DEI play significant roles in their achievement.

And maybe I'll just add as a final comment, I think the issues about backlash among academics, this is a generalization. But it's one thing to identify cases where you think a policy didn't work well, or you feel that the implementation of something has been heavy-handed and helpful. That isn't an argument about the core. That's an argument about details of the process.

Again, obviously, I'm speaking as somebody who supports affirmative action, and I've written about it many times. I want to distinguish the principle versus dimensions of the implementation. That seems to get lost. yeah no definitely and i i want to just respond by saying i also i think affirmative action and dei i don't like the word meritocracy but i do think they're necessary for a fair society lauren i can't thank you enough for a wonderful conversation

As has been the case every time we've interacted, you've given me so much to think about. I'm personally grateful. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure speaking with you. The Inequality Podcast is a production of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth, Inequality, and Mobility at the University of Chicago. I want to end with thanks to the people who really make it happen. First, I want to thank our producer and engineer, Shane McKeon.

Second, I'd like to thank our assistant director, Gerardo Espinalfranco, for really the production oversight and doing everything that is required to bring the podcast to fruition. And finally, I'd like to thank our executive director, Grace Colavo. for her support, not just for this project, for every activity at the Stone Center. You may get in touch with us at stonecenter at uchicago.edu. Thank you so much for listening.