Merit's Demerits.

The article reports that in the U.S. higher education is coupled with the idea of meritocracy. Academe screens the worthy and bestows credentials that, in turn, lead to worldly success. The meritocratic ideal exercises a powerful grip on the collective imagination and nowhere more so than at Harvard. Jerome Karabel suggests that the admissions process is not arbitrary at all; that it is instead based on concrete, and constantly evolving, institutional interests. Delving into annual admissions reports, internal memoranda, administrative correspondence and other previously private documents, Karabel produces an irrefutable record of those shifts.