The tyranny of meritocracy and elite higher education

Abstract

In The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel argues that the American society is not meritocratic, that belief that it is causes various social harms, and that some of those harms –in particular, the costs to social solidarity – would be caused even if society actually were meritocratic. He also explores the way that the structure of higher education is implicated in the ‘ethos’ of meritocracy. This article explores just how the ethos of meritocracy might undermine solidarity, argues that the structural changes needed to achieve actual meritocracy would be benign, even though meritocracy itself is not very valuable, and identifies ways in which changes to the structure of public funding for higher education may inadvertently have undermined solidarity.