The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?

While the main objective of The Tyranny of Merit is to outline the main issues with a meritocratic culture and society, one of the principal antagonists is the current system of higher education. The paradox of the situation is that meritocracy conceives of education as being of the utmost importance—a sentiment with which the author broadly agrees—but that it is precisely the education system that needs to be radically overhauled. The very system that the modern meritocratic regime championed in the institutions of higher education is the system by which meritocracy has most manifestly eroded and destroyed the ideals to which it aspires.

The goal of the meritocracy is to improve access to higher education in order to produce consumers and creators that can participate in the global economy: “If equality of opportunity was the primary moral and political project, expanding access to higher education was the overriding policy imperative” (87). The problem is that the excessive value of an education that was founded to find and propagate the best and brightest minds has become so coveted that people are willing to game the system, gaining access to the educational system and subsequent credentials in nefarious ways.