By Ting Lian
Every spring, a ritual plays out in the affluent suburbs of the Bay Area. High school students, bleary eyes from months of Advanced Placement coursework, standardized college-admission exams, and writing personal insight responses, refresh their email inboxes at 4 p.m Pacific Time. Behind them stand parents who have invested tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars into tutoring, test preparation, summer programs, and research mentorships. The prize: admission to Stanford, Berkeley, or any Ivy League school.
The ritual is the apotheosis of American meritocracy. The hardest-working, most talented students earn their places. But a growing body of research suggests that this narrative is incomplete and a carefully maintained fiction. The American higher education system, particularly as it operates in the Bay Area and other affluent areas, has become a machine for converting wealth into academic advantage, and then laundering that advantage though the language of “merit.” The system is structurally rigged, and it’s only intensifying.
In a 2026 paper, economists Zachary Bleemer and Jesse Rothstein document the “meritocratic consensus”: the belief that students with greater pre-college academic achievement should attend better-funded, higher-quality institutions. The consensus sounds egalitarian, but its consequences are not. At America’s most selective colleges, students from the richest 1 percent outnumber all students from the bottom 40 percent combined; at Ivy League schools, roughly two-thirds come from the top income quartile. Those institutions also spend vastly more on instruction—a gap that tripled between 1961 and 2019—not because of superior teaching but because tuition revenue, private donations, endowment returns, and government research contracts flow disproportionately to them.
The Bay Area’s particular version of this national problem has its own distinctive characteristics. The region’s hyper-competitive culture, its concentration of highly educated tech workers, and its extreme wealth disparity have produced an educational arms race that begins before kindergarten and never really stops.
Across California, the number of UC applicants with perfect 4.0 GPAs has doubled in recent years, even as standardized test scores have declined. Grade inflation has become so pervasive that a 4.0 may no longer signal what it once did. At the same time, the UC system has gone “test-blind,” entirely not reviewing SAT or ACT scores. The metrics that colleges use to allocate opportunity have become less meaningful even as competition for those opportunities has intensified. The students who benefit most from this ambiguity are those who can afford to game the system, grade-grubbing, expensive extracurriculars, and carefully curated narratives of “passion” and “impact.”
If standardized testing is the formal currency of meritocracy, extracurricular activities are the informal parallel. And like any informal economy, it is governed by access to capital.
Parents begin planning their children’s “passion projects” in middle school. A typical trajectory might include a selective summer program at an elite university for up to $10,000, a research mentorship with a PhD student or professor for maybe up to $7000, a nonprofit or startup founded with parental seed funding, a competitive athletic career sustained by private coaching, and a carefully curated portfolio of “leadership” roles.
The parents who pay tens of thousands for such programs are not villains, they can only respond rationally to a system in which the returns to attending elite colleges are enormous and the pathways are increasingly narrow. But their rational choices produce collectively irrational outcomes, what Singaporean sociologists have described as a “parentocracy” based on local patterns similar to America, a system in which family wealth is the strongest predictor of educational opportunity, and in which “merit” is little more than a socially acceptable name for privilege. The “ticket to an Ivy” is not the root of the problem but its most visible symptom, as long as elite universities reward the kinds of achievements that only well-resourced families can afford, the “feeder schools” and summer programs will continue to thrive, and the meritocracy will continue to be a mirror for the families that can afford to stand in front of it.
Admissions officers consistently say that attending a high-cost summer program marketed as an admission advantage ultimately confers no advantage, precisely because it signals family wealth rather than individual merit. Likewise, research programs don’t confer any advantage. One parent on a college admissions forum notes, “because admissions offices KNOW that a student would only be able to participate in something like that if their family had sufficient financial means to afford it.”
Yet the race continues. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma: if everyone else is spending extensive sums of money on extracurriculars, not spending puts your child at a disadvantage, even if the spending itself doesn’t actually return much. The families with the most resources can afford to run the race, and those without can only fall behind.
One could argue that even if the system is unequal, it is at least efficient, that directing more resources to high achieving students maximizes social welfare. Bleemer and Rothstein examine three potential economic justifications for this “meritocratic” allocation: q-complementarity (the idea that high achieving students benefit more from resources), convex social returns (the idea that human capital of top achievers is disproportionately valuable to society), and high school incentivization (the idea that rewarding college achievement encourages high school effort). Their conclusion is that “There is no compelling evidence that it is efficient to direct the most resources to the most highly prepared students.” The evidence, such as it is, suggests the opposite, that resources can substitute for preparedness, and the overall learning would increase by shifting resources to schools enrolling lower-achieving students. In other words, the meritocratic consensus is not just unjust, it is inefficient. It allocates resources to students who need them least, while underfunding the institutions that serve the students who need them most.
To understand what is distinctive—and what is not—about the American system, it helps to look at another educational procedure: China’s gaokao(高考).
The gaokao, China’s national college entrance examination, is often held as the purest meritocracy in the world. It is a single, high-stakes test administered simultaneously across the country. Cheating is severely punished; exam questions are guarded like state secrets. For millions of Chinese families, it is the only path to social mobility.
But the gaokao’s meritocratic reputation obscures the profound structural inequalities. Regional quotas and the hukuo(户口) household registration system that classifies citizens by residential location and rural or urban status advantage urban students long before they sit for the exam. In 2003, only about 7% of rural youth from poor counties were admitted to any college, compared with 48 percent of their urban peers. Elite college access gaps between the wealthiest and poorest quartiles are 2.3 fold in China, better than the 11 fold gap in the United States, but still substantial.
What the gaokao does provide, however, is transparency. The rules are clear and the test is standardized. The correlation between family income and test scores, while significant, is weaker than in the United States. A poor student from a rural village who scores well on the gaokao can gain admission to the elite Tsinghua or Beijing University. The same cannot be said of a less fortunate student from Oakland applying to Stanford.
The meritocracy is not broken because it fails to reward merit, it is broken because “merit” has been defined in ways that track wealth and access. The metrics, test scores, GPAs, extracurriculars, research projects, feeder school pedigrees, are all correlated with income. The system’s apparent neutrality is its most effective disguise.
Reformations abound eliminating legacy admissions, reinstate standardized testing as a transparency measure, cap the influence of extracurriculars, increase funding for community colleges and open-access institutions, and crack down on the “pay to play” environment that allows elite private schools to monopolize elite college admissions. Each of these would help at the margins, but none addresses the fundamental problem: as long as education is a positional good, and as long as families can convert wealth into educational advantage, the meritocracy will remain a mirror for privilege.
The American students––the ones refreshing their inboxes at 4 p.m., the ones whose parents spent hundreds of thousands on their preparation, the ones who attended a private school with $64,800 in tuition or their public school equivalents––are not the villains. They are only participating in a game whose rules were written before them. The question is not whether they deserve their success, but whether the system that produced it deserves to be called a meritocracy at all.