Among the gripes of egalitarians is the fact that college admissions favor students who show academic promise and disfavor those who don’t. The former have a shot at an elite college or university while the latter have to settle for non-prestige schools. If you assume, as they do, that where you go to college is a big factor in your life success, you’ll rail against the unfairness of a meritocratic admissions system.

In today’s Martin Center article, Shannon Watkins writes about a panel discussion held at UNC-Chapel Hill back in February devoted to that subject. There were four panelists, only one of whom was a defender of the status quo.

One of the egalitarians was NYU professor Caitlin Zaloom. Watkins writes of her:

She prefaced her objections by stating that “meritocracy is the way into higher education — and really — government.” As such, she believes it is inherently unjust to require people to meet a set of arbitrary standards to climb the social, political, and economic ladder. She said she dislikes the idea of measuring people “on a scale of human value” and is concerned that participation in government is “dependent on achievement based on a hierarchy of values that someone may or may not have subscribed to in the first place.”

Another argument of the egalitarians was that, Watkins writes, “Ivy League and other prestigious colleges drain talent and ambition from local communities and concentrate the highly educated in dense geographic areas, mostly on the coasts.”

The dissenter on the panel was black New York Times writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose father grew up in the segregated South, and who lacked the opportunity to attend prestigious prep schools when growing up. As Watkins states:

Williams argued that the SAT was the only objective measure by which he could demonstrate his academic ability. Doing well on the SAT made him confident that he “wasn’t getting a handout” and that he could do as well as others who had more advantages than he had. Because of his test scores, he was able to attend and thrive at Georgetown University and New York University without feeling as if he did not deserve his spot. “It provides a lifeline for people who need to improve their circumstances,” he said.

The egalitarians will never give up, but they failed to persuade Shannon Watkins, who concludes, “All in all, if the critics of meritocracy can’t present better arguments for ending it than Zaloom, Berg, and Douthat, maybe we should keep trying to let the hardest-working and most-talented people win, as best we can.”