David Brooks is right. Elite colleges are harming America.

Not by how they admit students, but by how they fail to educate them.

In an article for The Atlantic, David Brooks contends that “the Ivy League broke America.” Many conservatives probably agree with this sentiment, if not the hyperbole. We believe that America’s progressive elites have lost their way and that the nation’s top colleges share a large part of the blame.

But for Brooks the culprit isn’t what gets taught and inculcated at elite colleges. Rather it’s who gets admitted to them. In Brooks’ view, meritocracy in college admissions has broken America.

The argument is hard to square with the timeline. As Brooks says, meritocratic admissions standards have been in place since the 1960s. In fact, admissions were more meritocratic back then.

Sure, the children of alums got preferences, as did gifted athletes (a different kind of merit). But that’s still true.

On the other hand, race-based preferences were not in vogue; nor were colleges falling over themselves to bring in the sons and daughters of celebrities. These are more modern developments.

If meritocratic admissions systems are ruinous to America, we should have seen the ruin a long time ago. But we didn’t — not like we’re seeing it now. It’s no accident that Brooks wrote his Atlantic piece in 2024, not 1994.

Peter Berkowitz delivers a comprehensive takedown of Brooks’ article. But first, like all reliable critics, he gives a full airing of Brooks’ thesis:

Brooks identifies “six deadly sins of the meritocracy.” First, it overrates intelligence and underrates character. Second, it falsely supposes that success in school promises a full and satisfying life. Third, it favors wealthy parents who provide their children the tutors and training to compete successfully for the scarce openings at elite universities. Fourth, it creates a caste system of its own in which elite-institution graduates lord their supposed superiority over the rest. Fifth, it damages the elites by teaching them from childhood that their worth revolves around mastery of the intellectual and self-presentation skills thought essential to professional success. And sixth, it provokes populist rage among those passed over by elite universities, who resent having been consigned by society to its lower tiers.

To cultivate a more tolerant, capable, and responsible elite, Brooks proposes three reforms of American meritocracy. First, he advises, change the definition of merit to include not only intellectual excellence but also good character, particularly curiosity, drive, cooperativeness, and practical wisdom. Second, high schools should emphasize “project-based learning,” in which students cooperate to produce work that is valuable beyond the classroom. Third, colleges and universities should assess a wider range of applicants’ accomplishments, going beyond grades and test scores to encompass candidates’ papers, speeches, and projects.

The flaws in this analysis are obvious. First, it overlooks what elite colleges are, or at least once were, primarily about — teaching students hard, important stuff. It’s not primarily the proper job of colleges (other than the military academies and maybe religious schools) to admit students with great character. The main objective should be to admit students who can do the work and learn as much as possible from top professors.

When MIT admits a super-intelligent nerd, it’s not supposing that he or she will have “a full and satisfying life.” It’s realizing, based on experience and evidence, that this student will likely do well at MIT and put the knowledge he or she obtains to reasonably good use after graduating.

Second, as Berkowitz points out, elite colleges have long taken character into account in the admissions process as a secondary factor. They consider applicants’ “curiosity, drive, cooperativeness, and practical wisdom.”

But these intangible (and, again, secondary) factors are difficult to gauge in a largely faceless applicant. And, in practice, colleges have used “character” as means of excluding white and (especially) Asian applicants and to favor blacks and Hispanics who lag far behind in demonstrated intellectual firepower. This sad and unpardonable reality was clear for all to see — even The New York Times — in the record developed in the Harvard case.

By favoring blacks and Hispanics in this manner, elite colleges more than offset the advantages Brooks says offspring of the wealthy obtain through tutors and training. A top tutor may be able to help a student pull up his or her SAT score by, what, 50-100 points? These same students can easily be denied admission granted to students from favored races with SAT scores 200 points lower than theirs.

Third, the unhealthy mindset of students at elite colleges— the ones they carry into life to the detriment of America — are far less the product of a sense of entitlement arising from admission in a merit-based process than they are the inevitable result of what colleges do to these students after they are admitted.

As Berkowitz says:

Elite universities corrupt students primarily through what they don’t teach and what they do preach. Elite universities neglect the teaching of American ideas and institutions; the West’s military and religious history and its literature, philosophy, economics, and politics; and the seminal ideas and events of other peoples, nations, and civilizations.

Meanwhile, elite universities encourage students to curtail speech; to judge based on race, ethnicity and sex; to believe that oppression of non-white people and women defines America and the West; and to think that progressives have all the answers. Small wonder that our elite universities have produced a haughty, bungling, grasping, illiberal, and anti-democratic elite.

Finally, Brooks’ claim the meritocratic admissions breed populist resentment is difficult to take seriously. Again, I’ll quote Berkowitz:

Few ordinary people resent that they lack Ivy League diplomas. However, they do dislike the scorn elites show them – professors, journalists, and entertainers – and efforts from the distant capital city to remake their beliefs, practices, and associations . . . .

For all his praise of curiosity and judgment, Brooks misrepresents the regular men and women whose outrage he claims to understand and wishes to reduce. He cites scholars at prestigious universities who study ordinary people, but he gives little appearance of speaking to those who live outside bright-blue enclaves like the greater D.C. metropolitan area and Cambridge, Massachusetts. They are seldom envious of high achievers like Brooks.

They do not often aspire to opine from the New York Times’ pages or hold forth in Harvard lecture halls. They don’t generally yearn to send their children to the Ivy League or see them chasing fame and fortune in Manhattan, Hollywood, or Silicon Valley. Most of the time, they prefer to be left alone by the people who think that their degrees from fancy universities and success in waxing eloquent for a living equip them to manage other people’s lives.

Donald Trump has a good grasp of populist resentment. He not only tends to select Ivy League grads (and he’s one) for top jobs, he often touts their Ivy League credentials when he praises these picks — for example, when he nominated Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

What provokes populist rage is when colleges admit students based not on merit, but on race (or “legacy,” but mostly race). That’s why, even in deep Blue states like California, laws banning race-based preferences consistently win when put to a popular vote.

Elite colleges have, indeed, harmed America. But the answer isn’t less meritocracy. It’s a return to the traditional values that should inform higher education: free inquiry, intellectual humility, emphasis on individual merit rather than group identity, and a decent regard for the West’s history, literature, philosophy, economics, and politics, along with the seminal ideas and events of other peoples, nations, and civilizations.