Research Papers

Different conceptions of merit are disambiguated to consider whether higher education in the United States is currently or could plausibly become meritocratic. We argue that contemporary societies are not meritocratic in the commonly popularized sense, and that because society is not meritocratic, college admissions could not be either––even if reformed to reward only grades and test scores.

Institutions of higher education have been criticized across the political spectrum for failing to be appropriately meritocratic, with recent demands from the federal government that elite universities reform admissions to be more merit-based. Yet it is not entirely clear what is meant by merit. Answering that question requires a more robust understanding of merit and meritocracy than public debate currently offers.

Calls for meritocratic admissions demand rewarding developed abilities, not native ones, which is impossible while the family exists in its current form. Even a nonmeritocratic society can produce harms described by critics because those harms arise from the false belief that society is meritocratic. A belief that reforming admission around “merit” risks deepening rather than correcting this problem.

I discuss the concepts of merit and meritocracy as they apply to college admissions in the U.S., paying particular attention to whether standardized tests should be regarded as measures of merit. I begin with a history of admissions testing, then discuss the role of tests in admissions decisions, and finally elaborate on differing perspectives on the meaning of merit within the college admissions context.

Several factors have led to a dramatic move away from test requirements, with most U.S. colleges no longer requiring admissions tests. Traditionalists have deplored this change, viewing test scores as a central pillar of meritocratic admissions, while critics argue other qualities better reflect merit.

The definition of merit is indeterminate without further specification: it depends entirely on an institution’s goals, and policies can be considered meritocratic if they further a societal good. Multiple meritocracies could coexist in academia, each reflecting distinct institutional missions, but even the most expansive definition would not eliminate the need to guard against unfairness and gamesmanship.

We speculate on the likely long-term effect of recent legal and political challenges to race-conscious admissions, using the concept of organizational opacity. We trace twentieth-century emergence of opacity in elite college admissions and identify five organizational levers admissions offices can manipulate to pursue both meritocracy and diversity.

The 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision ended decades of explicit race-conscious admissions. In 2025, executive orders went further, declaring the consideration of race in admissions unlawful and threatening colleges with investigations and loss of funding. These actions represent the most important challenge top schools have faced in half a century, raising the question of their long-term impact.

We argue the long-term impact on student body composition is likely limited at schools that continue to prioritize racial diversity, since opacity gives them many options to balance internal goals against external demands. But opacity also carries risks that could erode trust in elite universities.

We analyze prior surveys of U.S. workers and an original 2025 survey, conducted with YouGov, to assess pay beliefs. We bridge the inequality attitudes literature with the distributive and procedural justice literatures to examine what factors workers believe should determine their pay and what factors they believe actually do.

Cross-national research reveals widespread support for meritocratic pay criteria, but it remains unclear whether U.S. workers still hold these beliefs, and whether they feel their employers allocate pay meritocratically. How workers make sense of their pay has far-reaching implications in the workplace, yet existing research says little about what workers believe actually determines their pay.

Nearly half of workers believe individual performance should be the main factor determining their pay, and support is widespread. However, performance-based pay is largely a myth; few workers are actually paid this way. This belief has real consequences, including offering policymakers little political credit for the wage gains driving recent reductions in inequality.

We introduce the concept of “inhabited professions” to show how notions of professional merit play out among colleagues. Using data from 266 academic scientists within in 14 departments, we compare faculty’s personal concern for diversity promotion with their departmental colleagues’ beliefs about its importance to professional excellence, and examine the gendered consequence of that gap.

Seemingly meritocratic processes often reproduce and legitimize inequalities, but most research on this focuses on gatekeeping at entry. Little is known about how professionals who have already been selected into a field negotiate its cultural ideals of merit day to day, or what happens when their own commitments diverge from them.

Women with a substantial gap between their personal concern for diversity and their colleagues’ beliefs about its importance are significantly more likely to report chilly climates, feel disrespected, and intend to leave the university than men with the same gap. While women defenders of diversity are treated as less worthy, men diversity proponents are buffered from these negative consequences.

I identify three mechanisms through which elites sustain their dominance in seemingly merit-based systems: consecration (power to define and evaluate merit), adaptation (unequal capacity to cultivate valued traits), and co-optation (use of meritocratic ideals to resist challenges to privilege). Drawing on existing research, I argue these outcomes are constitutive features of meritocracy, not failures of it.

Meritocracy is often celebrated as a fair system in which social positions are distributed according to ability rather than inherited privilege, yet meritocratic systems routinely reproduce inequality. Social scientists often explain this as a problem of measurement error on the assumption that measuring ability more precisely would produce a true meritocracy. I argue this misses the larger picture.

The underlying premise of meritocracy that some individuals are more deserving than others legitimizes social hierarchies and can result in the dehumanization of marginalized groups. Even the drive to find less biased measures of merit pushes the locus of merit toward intrinsic traits. Genuine fairness requires not only less biased measures of merit but deeper structural transformations that reduce stratification.

We use colonial censuses and several rounds of India’s National Sample Survey, covering the 1987-2011 period, to document the caste gap in education and occupations. We then examine two mechanisms that could explain the observed convergence between upper castes and the scheduled castes and tribes since the 1980s: affirmative action and caste networks that foster social mobility.

The caste system made the Indian economy distinctly unmeritocratic, and evidence from early twentieth-century colonial censuses shows large gaps in literacy and occupation between the highest and lowest castes. While the general view in the literature is that convergence has occurred since independence, the mechanisms and limits behind that shift is not well understood.

Since the 1980s, education and occupation gaps between upper castes and the scheduled castes and tribes have narrowed, a sign that the Indian economy is slowly approaching a meritocratic equilibrium. Still, quotas for senior-level jobs remain unfilled, and substantial heterogeneity persists within and between castes. These findings should therefore be applied cautiously at the population level.

We draw on exam performance data across national examinations in the Qing dynasty (1644-1905) to trace who rose to become top officials. We examine the interplay between exam performance and candidates’ ties to powerful examiners, and track how this relationship persisted or shifted across the dramatic political changes of the 1840s.

Institutions that claim to reward merit often also serve as engines that drive the formation of social networks. However, systematic empirical evidence on how these two forces interact and evolve remains scarce. China’s imperial examination offers a useful case study: one of history’s longest lived systems of meritocracy, with unusually well-defined archival records linking exam performance to subsequent careers.

Since performance and ties to powerful examiners were strongly complementary, individuals’ success appeared to rest on merit even as social networks played a decisive role. This complementarity can legitimize patronage by cloaking it in the language of merit. The findings help explain why meritocratic systems retain legitimacy even when networks, not just performance, substantially shape who advances.

We examine emotions children encounter in educational materials. Using LMMs, we classify eight emotions across text and images in three decades of California and Texas public school textbooks and a century of award-winning children’s books. We examine heterogeneity by context and character identity, validate results against non-generative methods and human annotators, and merge book emotions with purchasing data.

Emotional intelligence is a key component of human capital, yet little is know about childhood inputs (e.g., textbooks and children’s media) that shape emotional norms. It is not obvious ex ante whether educational materials expose children to broad emotional range or reproduce narrower, socially rewarded displays, and evidence on emotions across text and images together is limited.

Text exposes children to a broad emotional range, but images overwhelmingly show happiness and calm regardless of the text on the same page. Purchasers are less likely to choose books with “negative” emotions on their covers, suggesting market forces narrow the emotional landscape. Results point to the value of more intentional emotional diversity in children’s materials.

We construct a framework for measuring distributional between two groups that compares their full distributions directly, letting researchers build normative judgements into the measure. Defining inequality as the smallest cumulative effect of transfers to a state of equality, we derive tractable measures via optimal transport and apply them to the gender wage gap using 2005-2024 ACS data.

Researchers typically summarize group distributions with a mean or quantile and compare those, but this ad-hoc approach can obscure important dissimilarities between distributions and lacks principled grounding. No existing framework directly compares full distributions while allowing researchers to build their own normative judgments about inequality into the resulting measure.

Difference between group means can mask important differences between distributions and is not a valid measure of distributional inequality in general. For Black men and women, the CDFs cross throughout 2005-2024, and the measure exceeds the difference in means. Varying the sensitivity parameter emphasizes different parts of the distributions, extending to racial and ethnic disparities in health and education.