Why Michael Sandel Thinks Universities Should Change Their Admissions Models
On October 7, a crowd of Duke students, faculty, and community members filled the Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center to the brim to hear from Michael Sandel, a leading political philosopher and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University.
In an event organized by the Department of Political Science and co-sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Provost’s Initiative on Pluralism, Free Inquiry, and Belonging, Sandel spoke about “The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?” — his 2020 bestseller in which he offers different ways of thinking about success and who deserves it.
Sandel opened by explaining what he means by the “tyranny” of merit. He agrees that there is a level of merit necessary for a surgeon to successfully perform an operation on a patient. However, he argues that this merit doesn’t belong to the surgeon alone, but also to the many community members, mentors, and others who supported the surgeon along the way.
This runs counter to many of our popular assumptions about what merit means.
“An ethic of hard work and personal responsibility leads us to see ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, which, after all, is a persistent temptation that’s in our common culture,” Sandel said.
According to Sandel, “a fully realized meritocracy is corrosive to the common good because it leads to hubris among the winners and to humiliation for those who lose out.”
In other words, so-called “winners” see themselves as deserving while looking down on those who they view as less successful. Perceiving this attitude, lower-income Americans feel resentful, deepening the social and political divide between the two groups.
One of the biggest contributors to this divide, according to Sandel, is higher education.
“In the age of meritocracy, colleges and universities have come to be central institutions in the public culture,” Sandel said, “because they are the institutions that define the merit and confer the credentials that a market-driven meritocratic society honors and rewards.”
Sandel describes college as an elevator that higher-income people enter from the top floors, noting that higher-income applicants have much stronger chances of being accepted into the top twenty universities in the United States. However, despite these advantages, admission is still not guaranteed, so privileged kids are pushed to achieve high grades and test scores and participate in extracurricular activities to better their chances. Sandel said this dynamic creates “wounded winners” — privileged young people suffering from stress and burnout — while top colleges continue to be inaccessible to many lower-income students. Both end up harmed in the process.
Sandel then proposed a lottery system for college admissions. After narrowing candidates down to a pool of qualified applicants, students would be selected at random to receive offers of admission.
Some might argue that this makes the process overly reliant on luck. But Sandel says that luck already plays a big role in the admissions process — for example, a student born into a family with wealth and resources has a clear advantage going in.
The lottery system distributes luck in a more egalitarian way. It also makes it more visible. Since admitted students know that luck played a role in their admission, they don’t assume that they got in simply because they were better than the candidates who didn’t.
According to Sandel, this system benefits lower-income students by taking legacy admissions and expensive extracurricular activities out of the equation, while also removing some of the pressure for wealthy students to overcommit and overachieve.
Along with Sandel, the event featured two respondents: Duke Professor of Law Jedediah Purdy and Danielle Sassoon, the former U.S. Attorney in the Southern New York district — who came to prominence recently due to her resignation from the high-profile Eric Adams case amid political pressure to drop the charges.
Sassoon came to the podium to offer a response based on her experiences. She said that her maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews who came to America as refugees after surviving the Holocaust. Her grandfather provided for the family by working in a factory, where he was promoted to manager. Sassoon said that despite the many challenges he faced, his hard work helped her believe in the meritocratic system in America.
Although she agreed with several flaws in the college admissions system that Sandel highlighted in his opening remarks, including legacy admissions, Sassoon said she is not ready to abandon meritocracy. She pointed to the erosion of national unity and civic duty as the root cause of the divisions Sandel described.
In Purdy’s response to Sassoon, he discussed her role in the Eric Adams case. When Sassoon faced political pressure to drop the charges, she refused and resigned. Purdy complimented Sassoon for her actions. He connected this to the debate on meritocracy, arguing that her merit and sense of responsibility were not rewarded — instead, she was shunned by powerful institutions that opposed her decision.
Purdy also responded to one of the major points in Sandel’s book, which is that meritocracy obscures how globalization has led to widening wealth inequality, leaving many Americans behind. Sandel had earlier said that meritocracy provides “the rationale [and] specifications for the inequalities that photoshop [neoliberal] policies.”
Purdy agreed that meritocracy has brought us to a place which it is now difficult to untangle ourselves from. He concluded by emphasizing the need for cohesion and solidarity that reaches across class differences.
