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The Insufferable Hubris of the Well-Credentialed

A four-year university degree has become necessary for dignified work. Michael Sandel says that’s a huge mistake.

By Len Gutkin

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Critiques of meritocracy are on everyone’s lips right now. Why?

I think it’s partly due to the events of 2016. The populist backlash against elites was a big part of the vote in Britain for Brexit and the election of Trump in the U.S. That prompted a reflection on what it was about elites that many working people so resented.
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The meritocratic hubris of elites is the conviction by those who land on top that their success is their own doing, that they have risen through a fair competition, that they therefore deserve the material benefits that the market showers upon their talents. Meritocratic hubris is the tendency of the successful to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. It goes along with the tendency to look down on those less fortunate, and less credentialed, than themselves. That gives rise to the sense of humiliation and resentment of those who are left out.

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The tyranny of merit, you write, is “corrosive of commonality.” How can institutions like Harvard, where you teach — exclusive by design — contribute to the communitarian ethos you say would repair some of the defects in our version of a meritocracy?

I would distinguish two different problems here. One is the more familiar: We don’t live up to the meritocratic principles we profess. 

But even if we could remove all barriers to achievement, the meritocratic ideal would still be flawed. We have cast universities as the arbiters of opportunity. We have assigned them the role of allocating credentials and defining the merit that the wider society rewards — economically, but also in terms of honor, recognition, and prestige.

Society as a whole has made a four-year university degree a necessary condition for dignified work and a decent life. This is a mistake. Those of us in higher education can easily forget that most Americans do not have a four-year college degree. Nearly two-thirds do not.

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Society as a whole has woefully underinvested in the forms of education that most Americans rely upon. That includes state colleges, two-year community colleges, and technical and vocational places of learning. It’s not only a matter of money. We also need to reconsider the steep hierarchy of prestige that we have created between four-year colleges and universities, especially brand-name ones, and other institutions of learning. This hierarchy of prestige both reflects and exacerbates the tendency at the top to denigrate or depreciate the contributions to the economy made by people whose work does not depend on having a university diploma.

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I would put it this way. I would say that governing elites have had too much credulity in relying on technocratic expertise, especially on economists, whose faith in markets led to a false confidence about what they could achieve. I think political leaders generally, but the Democratic Party in particular, have been ill-served by too narrow a notion of technocratic expertise.

“It would be a mistake,” you write, “to think that higher education is solely responsible for the inequalities of income and social esteem we witness today.” But that raises a question — are elite colleges the right target at all? What about the decline of union power, for instance? Ballooning CEO pay? If things like that were addressed, couldn’t Harvard just go on as it is?

I want to emphasize this to avoid any misunderstanding: My main critique is of the way mainstream parties, Democrats and Republicans, have governed over the past four decades. Their uncritical embrace of market-driven globalization led to deepening inequalities which they addressed by offering upward mobility through higher education. My critique is of that governing project. Universities have been conscripted as the arbiters of opportunity, as the dispensers of the credentials, as the sorting machine.

The main solutions consist in things like strengthening unions. The broad solution is to reorient our politics away from dealing with inequality through individual upward mobility by higher education. That’s too narrow a response to inequality.