Most Americans, across the political spectrum and every demographic, embrace and hold dearly the idea of meritocracy. And the question of how we determine academic merit has been thrust into the forefront by President Donald Trump with his recent executive order requiring colleges to disclose data regarding applicant race, test scores and grade-point averages to the federal government. The order states, “Greater transparency is essential to exposing unlawful practices and ultimately ridding society of shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies.” The reception to the executive order has been mixed, with some claiming it will help curtail racial discrimination in college admissions and others saying it may increase it.
The question “Who deserves this opportunity?” is and always will be subjective.
The question we ought to be asking, though, is would data regarding race, test scores and grade-point averages tell us everything we need to know about applicants and their academic qualifications? The debate around merit, which I have previously written about and will revisit in this essay, isn’t about merit per se but about how merit should be judged. Because the question “Who deserves this opportunity?” is and always will be subjective.
Americans should accept that the hard truth is that there is no objective standard to determine merit regarding academic qualifications. You may be thinking that grade-point averages and standardized test scores are objective metrics, but you would be correct only to a degree. Because a second hard truth is that GPA and test scores exist within the context of an American K-12 education system that is profoundly unequal between and within the states.
In 1973, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked, “Did Texas’ public education finance system violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by failing to distribute funding equally among its school districts?” The court answered, “No, because there is no constitutional right to an equal education, and the funding scheme does not discriminate against poor people as a group.” It’s fine, the court ruled, for students in rich school districts to have access to the sort of curriculum to prepare them for highly selective universities while students in poor districts are left out because of where they live.
The next year, in Milliken v. Bradley, the same court severely restricted school busing when it ruled that that segregation by law was unconstitutional but segregation by custom was legal. Taken together, the decisions in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez and Milliken v. Bradley have helped maintain a K-12 school system that is highly segregated by race and economic class in the United States. This is the reality of elementary and secondary education and, thus, must be the context for all debates about what college admissions officers should be looking for when staring at each year’s pile of applications.
Let’s say a student from a poor district in Mississippi is competing for a spot at a highly selective university against a student from a wealthy district in Connecticut. The students have similar grades, but the student from Connecticut, who had access to a standardized test preparation course, has better test scores and was able to participate in extracurricular activities unavailable to the Mississippi student.
Which applicant deserves and would benefit more from admission to the highly selective university in question? The student who had access to everything they needed to make their application appealing to the Ivy Leagues or the student who did the best with what was available to them?
My omission of race from that hypothetical is intentional. While there is a correlation between race and economic class in the United States, that obviously doesn’t mean all members of a race are poor or wealthy. This hypothetical focuses on a frustrating reality of K-12 education in America: that a student’s district and state can determine the quality of education, test preparation and extracurricular activities they can access. It’s necessary for us to debate how we should judge academic credentials. And any system that forces universities to treat GPAs and test scores as if they’re the only things that matter will have an unfair and devastating impact on students from poor school systems. It’s necessary for us to debate what constitutes academic merit and to debate how we should judge academic credentials. As the outcome of those debates will determine who is (and who isn’t) granted access to the transformative curriculum that higher education provides, the stakes couldn’t be higher. But such debates demand our candor and our caution. We must be wary of reducing academic merit to the best credentials money can buy and then calling it objective. Our profoundly unequal K-12 system shouldn’t force us to follow it with a profoundly unequal system of higher ed.
Nicholas Mitchell
Nicholas Mitchell is an assistant professor of curriculum studies at the University of Kansas. He is a curriculum theorist whose scholarship focuses on the intersection of education theory, policy and practice. He is the author of "On Bigotry" by Bloomsbury Publishing. 
