Meritocracia no acesso às universidades da elite americana

Interessante o artigo sobre o acesso às universidade da "Ivy League" na New Yorker desta semana.

Não leia se vc for daqueles incapazes de interpretar a palavra "elite" sem preconceito... A discussão é interessante e bem informada, mas traz coisas do tipo...

I once had a conversation with someone who worked for an advertising agency that represented one of the big luxury automobile brands. He said that he was worried that his clientà€™s new lower-priced line was being bought disproportionately by black women. He insisted that he did not mean this in a racist way. It was just a fact, he said. Black women would destroy the brandà€™s cachet. It was his job to protect his client from the attentions of the socially undesirable.

This is, in no small part, what Ivy League admissions directors do. They are in the luxury-brand-management business, and à€œThe Chosen,à€ in the end, is a testament to just how well the brand managers in Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton have done their job in the past seventy-five years. In the nineteentwenties, when Harvard tried to figure out how many Jews they had on campus, the admissions office scoured student records and assigned each suspected Jew the designation j1 (for someone who was à€œconclusively Jewishà€), j2 (where the à€œpreponderance of evidenceà€ pointed to Jewishness), or j3 (where Jewishness was a à€œpossibilityà€). In the branding world, this is called customer segmentation. In the Second World War, as Yale faced plummeting enrollment and revenues, it continued to turn down qualified Jewish applicants. As Karabel writes, à€œIn the language of sociology, Yale judged its symbolic capital to be even more precious than its economic capital.à€ No good brand manager would sacrifice reputation for short-term gain. The admissions directors at Harvard have always, similarly, been diligent about rewarding the children of graduates, or, as they are quaintly called, à€œlegacies.à€ In the 1985-92 period, for instance, Harvard admitted children of alumni at a rate more than twice that of non-athlete, non-legacy applicants, despite the fact that, on virtually every one of the schoolà€™s magical ratings scales, legacies significantly lagged behind their peers. Karabel calls the practice à€œunmeritocratic at best and profoundly corrupt at worst,à€ but rewarding customer loyalty is what luxury brands do. Harvard wants good graduates, and part of their definition of a good graduate is someone who is a generous and loyal alumnus. And if you want generous and loyal alumni you have to reward them. Arenà€™t the tremendous resources provided to Harvard by its alumni part of the reason so many people want to go to Harvard in the first place? The endless battle over admissions in the United States proceeds on the assumption that some great moral principle is at stake in the matter of whom schools like Harvard choose to let inà€”that those who are denied admission by the whims of the admissions office have somehow been harmed. If you are sick and a hospital shuts its doors to you, you are harmed. But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experienceà€”an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite à€”and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.