deep dive into the constraints of higher education and history of america

But school is not like the rest of life. Success in school is about jumping through the hoops that adults put in front of you; success in life can involve charting your own course. In school, a lot of success is individual: How do I stand out? In life, most success is team-based: How can we work together? Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant—but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage.

In short, the meritocratic system is built on a series of non sequiturs. We train and segregate people by ability in one setting, and then launch them into very different settings. “The evidence is clear,” the University of Pennsylvania organizational psychologist Adam Grant has written. “Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.”

Really quite a few good quotes here. But in summary a saying I’ve heard a few times A students work for B students. C students run companies and D students dedicate buildings.

The theory of the top students becoming the top performers just has not panned out in this article or other places I’ve read it.

_{Quote Citation: David Brooks, “How Ivy League Admissions Broke America - The Atlantic”, 2024-11-14, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritocracy-college-admissions-social-economic-segregation/680392/}