I'm okay with academia being an institution of the elite, as long as we stop pretending that their BS (or BA) will make everyone successful. We can't all be elite; that's not how that works.

Rich people are going to waste their time and money no matter what, but I didn't want them also wasting yours and mine. The man-hours and percent of the GDP (often paid for with taxes) we put into conflating cause and effect is absurd.

We dodn't need merit-base academia, we need merit-based employment that disregards elite and academic status.

When a Bachelor's degree became a proxy for "can show up and complete assigned work" for employers that was the start of its decline as an academic credential.

That's already happening with technical/trade/alternate school to career paths are rising up and some colleges are panicking with declining enrollment.

I am on a co-op board here in NY, pretty much all our young buyers the last 2 years are all gen-Z who went the non-college route and have saved up more than enough to put a downpayment on a home for themselves and have a mortgage instead of college debt.

> Rich people are going to waste their time and money no matter what

You don't become rich by wasting time and money.

> we need merit-based employment that disregards elite and academic status

We effectively already have middle management being used to school elites; they get tours in various companies in the network, which means they build impressive resumes that would "win" any competition based on merit/success history.

Indeed, this may be necessary: the baseline investors committed to a company keep all the free riders on board through growth volatility. Is it too much to show their people the ropes?

It may be necessary, but it's probably self-destructive: foreign investors are often most interested in new technologies, not to profit from them, but to learn enough to compete. So they'll out-bid investors without such strategic aims. They're very much aligned with open-source, because their people leave with knowledge and the company is left without IP protections.

So... it's complicated. Going all-"merit" helped with civil service in the 1870's - 1950's, but people learned any system can be gained, and we can no longer afford slack-maximizing.

When you are brokering deals with wealthy clients or executing trades with millions, the notion of trust is much more important than merit. And what better is a sign of trust that coming from the circles, and with nothing to stake but reputation?

How likely is it we'll have the one when we don't even have the other?

We'll have neither, of course. The wealthy will always be able to pay for what they want — merit be damned.

I agree that participation in the middle class shouldn't depend on borrowing six figures as a teenager. I dream of the day where any worker has economic security

"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy