Anyone who has seen the staggeringly low admissions rate for United State’s Ivy League Schools might think that this is the epitome of competitiveness. If you got into Harvard this admissions cycle, you’ve basically bested 96% of the rest of the world – or so it feels, and one cannot wait to get to rub shoulders with the crème de la crème. Well, here’s my hot take: Ivy League schools are actually anti-competitive and compromises on the excellence we are in pursuit of in our higher education.
Fairness
The idea of competitiveness underpins any structure of meritocracy. Core to meritocracy is the principle that competition separates winners from losers and can guide resource allocation. Competition in its healthy version betters us and produces excellence. The particular brand of meritocracy in the US, the fabled “American Dream”, is a system which premiums a high barrier to entry. Think of the polished resume most Ivy Leagues are looking for, the perfect GPA, and recently to a lesser extent good SAT results. The competition exists even before the race has begun; it is about jostling to the best position at the start line and a little extra financial resource cannot hurt. You won’t even get to compete on the rest of the race without winning this brawl at the start that is vulnerable to the influences of too many anti-competitive riggings.
It might all sound unsurprising to a lot of kids who came out of pressure-cooker Asian environment – competition is mundane and the bloated size of the tuition industry testifies to the prevalence of the attitude to one-up another kid in this rat race of life. However, there is a key distinction to be made, which had blown my mind when a professor first told us about it. Harvard Law School used to be the institution which encourages process competitiveness; admissions were relatively easy – there were no requirements for joining law, you could be studying pre-med for all that matters – and the intake exceeded capacity by a third. The competition starts after entering the school – the starting pistol sounds kinda unique, a little like the legendary “look to your left, look to your right, because one of you won’t be here by the end of the year” speech to incoming students – and the cut throat competition leads to a third of the cohort being cut by graduation. This model has expired for very valid reasons, mainly because it created such a toxic environment that kills any seed of cooperation and everyone hates each other. However, it serves to highlight just how far our standard for measuring merit has evolved: nowadays (and from my very unrepresentative experience) getting into an Ivy League is probably the most competitive part of the process, and though classes are still difficult, I never think about my graduation being in jeopardy because of the people to the left and right of me. Once you’ve proven your worth, that’s it, the game is set.
The engines of competition and meritocracy in Singapore resembles the initial Harvard Law School model of focusing more on process rather than the high barrier to entry. It’s the high-stress all-or-nothing exit exam that we have been training for all our lives. It’s the PSLE, or O-levels, or A-levels; it’s the entire British education model. It never really is about the intense work we have to put in through application processes – all we had to do was to rank our school choices. This model is not without its own problems: why should everything rest on a single performance; what about the hard consistent work for the other 364 days of the year (not that we work all year round, but you get the point)? Most crucially, our idea of meritocracy brings with it other kinds of anti-competitive problems and creates inequality in society too. Viewing exams as defining points of our lives becomes a hard habit to shake off (oh how the Asian kid mindset plagues us all). Those who are unable to fully commit to education process, be it due to part-time work or family circumstances, also lose out, hence the complete erasure of the “non-traditional” student. It also becomes a sort of baggage we can never really disentangle ourselves from – each new stage in life is built on the foundations of the outcome of the previous. Our anxieties that children’s PSLE scores determines and stratifies their future reflects this fear.
The small but key difference to note is that though both models ultimately aim to get people into success (in this case measured by a college education), the Ivy League meritocracy’s inequality comes from the ability to participate in activities that pad our initial applications, whereas the Singaporean model creates inequality in the ability to participate in tuition that pad our final result. It might seem like semantics, but I do believe that understanding this helps create coherence in educational philosophy behind our policies. For example, the reason why Singapore’s kiasu culture is so difficult to untangle despite our education reforms is because we have unfortunately mixed the two systems of meritocratic logic – the exams are key for us to get into a good secondary school/tertiary education, which signals to us “get tuition for the process and end result” but throw in there the Direct School Admissions (DSA) and IP programmes, and we are shown alternative ways to secure a spot before we even take exams and we get the signal “get extracurricular lessons for the start line advantage”. Instead of encouraging society to embrace different forms of intelligence, the reality is that there are now two separate spheres of competition created, parents therefore prepare children for both (why enter the raffle once when a second ticket increases your chances?) and it doubles the stress, and the nature of inequality regulations are trying to address becomes unfocused. Simply removing exams in primary schools cannot curb the problems – the very principles underpinning our meritocratic competition has been compromised, and the doubt towards the fairness of our system requires more corrective response than that.
It is clear that both models of meritocracy are undermined by its own anti-competitive mechanisms. However, if I were to prefer one model, I would still choose the process-competitive model, because there is a special brand of complacency that is bred by the start-line model. Recently, I have been disproportionately affected by my contact with the side of Harvard that epitomizes what everyone hates about these elite ivy leagues – the people who brag about not to do work, who reek of entitlement and have already kicked up their legs with the self-assuredness that life ahead is set with a shiny Harvard brand. It disturbed me that some portion of the crème de la crème I had fantasised about crossing paths with disregarded work ethics, scorned hard work, and expected to stay winners by virtue of the meritocratic system. It fundamentally challenged my belief in diligence and good work ethics. While these students are not the majority, I think a sizable population has validated that this is a path to success too. It seems that we are competing on completely different ideas of merit.
Excellence
So why did Harvard Law School make that transition into the crazy low admissions rate today then? How did the hyper competition of process turn into a landscape where we work hard for admission, and then learn the complacency cruising through college life mentioned above? What killed our desire for the pursuit of excellence? I think that the death of excellence is marked by a grade inflation problem (which is exactly what it sounds like, imagine having too many people getting As becoming a bad thing) and as blasphemous as that sounds, having a biased grading system fundamentally dismantles our ability to learn and improve. In my opinion, the year in US has seen a backsliding in my writing and reading skills and a decline in my logical rigour because I am constantly doubting how much I am improving.
Note, that this is not my defence of the cut-throat bell-curved examination formats either. I don’t believe in professors who withhold giving As or restrict giving As to only 2 people because that is kills our motivation to improve and learn excellence as well. The main critique of inflated grades is that we no longer have reliable feedback systems that are fundamental to human’s capacity to learn (thus its anti-competitive nature), not that I believe in the need for a scarcity of As. The huge caveat going forward is also to note that I am a humanities student, in fields where grading is notoriously more arbitrary and “there is no fixed answer key”, but neither are the STEM fields exempt from the roots of the problems.
History first. The reason why Harvard Law School started adopting the anti-competitive practice of inflating grades is because Yale Law School started doing it first. The very common-sensical response to that as students is to prefer an environment where we can get prettier transcripts. Therefore, new admits flock to Yale despite the minimal differences in actual results, such as employability and pay thereafter. Ironically, the competition for students drove the implementation of anti-competitive grading systems. This same logic can be extrapolated to the general trend towards grade inflation in most Ivy Leagues – someone did it first, and so everyone else followed suit, exactly how free market mechanisms work.
The problems with grade inflation comes in two scenarios. First: when I get a B grade. To those uninitiated into this inflated system, people very rarely get Cs, Ds and Fs, and the “average” is a B grade, and I say “average” because the math doesn’t seem to check out. A B is also anything from 80-90, which in the A level system are scores that come by extremely rarely. I was honestly shocked to hear people still, at this age, complaining about not getting 100 marks the way I complained when I was in primary school. Cultural adjustments aside, I keep wondering what exactly condemned me into the B grade, and specifically, how bad is my B? Is this a genuinely alright average which signals to me I am keeping up with the class, or is this a grade that has condemned me into the last few percentiles of the class because getting an A is the norm? I will never know, even when going for consults. It might be another cultural difference thing, but the American style of feedback loads so many “nice” comments about the great work I’m doing, and then slips in maybe one sentence about an area for improvement that severely downplays the significance of that comment. I never really learn from my mistakes.
In the second scenario, when I get an A, the inverse doubts are true. Is this an affirmation that what I am doing is working, or am I getting it because everyone else is getting it? I have also heard of people who cruised through semesters worth of work without doing a single one but get an A because the professor cannot be bothered to track who submitted assignments and who did not. The grade is unconvincing feedback for excellence. In fact, I find myself feeling less motivated to put in as much effort now that I know that some As are low-hanging fruits.
Grade inflation and these anti-competitive mechanisms are a reflection of a much bigger issue that has been getting on my nerves recently. Higher education is increasingly being treated as a means to a job rather than an end in itself as the pursuit of knowledge, or as Harvard puts it the pursuit of truth “veritas”. The attractiveness of grade inflation is the resulting pretty GPA and graduation transcript which would serve well in the job market to future employers. To that end, higher education has become a stepping stone towards a successful job. While this problem is not uniquely caused by grade inflation – people have always viewed higher education as a vehicle to obtain the now devaluated degree – it does worsen the issue of anti-competitiveness.
There is no real drive towards excellence if our eyes are set on the next race instead of the one right beneath our feet. So many people – myself included – have subscribed to the idea that the “real lessons” in universities are not in the textbooks but the connections you make; more often we care about growing our social capital rather than finishing that 100 page reading, and that is investing our time in something that we believe will aid us in the future, the next race of adulthood, the next thing, always the next. I don’t think the wisdom of learning outside the classroom is wrong – we definitely need to get over the neuroticism surrounding studying – but to fixate on the networking value of universities feels problematic too. Not only does it imply a certain sense of elitism (only associating with circles who have power or might prove successful), it leaves me struggling with an existential crisis: why study hard? To get into a good university, but why a good university? To get a good job, but then why a good job? What comes next? Is it just the never-ending grind of labour all the way down? That is the danger of turning every experience into a means towards something else; eventually we have to find what is our ultimate end that will make us happy, and if Aristotle is to be believed, preserving our excellence and competitiveness is an answer to happiness.
Cool down
I have no idea how controversial these thoughts are, or how universally true they might be. They just sprouted out as an exercise in thinking about the topics we discussed in one of my favourite classes. As a final thought, on a slightly unrelated note, I feel like there is also a myth surrounding the diversity of intellect we fantasise about when it comes to an overseas education. I know for a fact that everyone who applies to the US will have some version of the diversity argument: I would contribute/benefit from the diversity of students and their perspectives on campus. Part of the side-effects of the anti-competitiveness in Ivy Leagues is that people tend to get along better instead of viewing everyone as competition. However, these improved “collaborations” are shrouded in their own social bubbles of very striking homogeneity. People overestimate our willingness to overcome differences and learn from diverse peers, myself included. The tendency to gravitate towards likes means that in our relatively diverse campus we simply form silos of homogeneity – be it in terms of intellectual leanings or our identities. Maybe that’s a thought for another time. For now, I’ll leave my thoughts unfinished, and I sincerely hope that these opinions can be changed by more experiences yet to come.
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