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Everyone seeks status, and the more unequal, more diverse and more fractured a society is, the more important status is. In Denmark, status is relatively less important than it is in America, where it is in turn less important than it is in India (which is not to say that there are not surely many social-climbing Danes, but their struggle is less desperate).
Status is security, it’s freedom, it’s opportunity, above all it’s protection. At the floor, an undergraduate degree from Harvard in a major with decent employment prospects is the surest guarantee of a comfortable life in America’s upper middle class. At the ceiling, it’s a pathway into the true ruling class (return for a JD, clerk for a SCOTUS judge, get set, go).
The Harvard degree acts as a proxy for status in the U.S. It is not perfect, and it is far from the only indicator, but it is widely accepted by everyone from employers to your fiancé’s parents to dinner party companions and clients. It is not necessarily Harvard’s “fault” that this is how it is, but when a single institution becomes a core bestower of status in a country, scrutiny is always justified.
Right, what I'm asking is why it's so obvious that the decision rule we use to decide who gets that status should be based on who got a 1600 on their SAT in high school, or some similar measure of pre-college merit. Why shouldn't it be based on our best estimate of who will benefit most from that status? Maybe these things overlap, but it's not obvious that they do.
Are the people who 'need' more status the ones best equipped to reap it from higher ed? There's some data that suggests shoehorning such candidates into positions that are beyond their level of merit or capabilities only ill serves them and increases the rate of drop-outs and failures. Maybe 'Harvard flunkee' has more status than a community grad, but ehh.
You say more work needs to be done to connect the dots and explain why merit-based ascent is the way to go. While I'll admit this model is fuzzy and imperfect, I am having trouble imagining the alternatives and what their decision-making matrix even looks like, or how it would be any less abstract or illegible than the status quo.
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