Have elite universities contributed to broken Britain?

This month’s The Atlantic, a US-based current affairs magazine, leads with a cover story by David Brooks entitled “How the Ivy League Broke America” with a sub-heading, “The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new.”

As the United States comes to terms with the re-election of Donald Trump, he who famously said that he loved the poorly educated, commentators are looking to the elites of the Ivy League group of universities as a (or one of many) causal links to a polarized culture war, stoking up “the people” with a populist backlash against the elites. In this case Brooks argues that the Ivy League elite universities have been complicit in establishing the cultural dominance of a new meritocratic social ideal which replaced an aristocratic hereditary norm.

As the dust settles and the reality kicks in that “the Donald” will be delivering his second inaugural in January 2025, the polarization on culture war battle grounds are being drawn around credentialed knowledge and expertise taught and learnt in the elite universities of the Ivy League which are the routes to the top professions as a new meritocratic class.

In short, under the leadership of our current meritocratic class, trust in institutions has plummeted to the point where, three times since 2016, a large mass of voters has shoved a big middle finger in the elites’ faces by voting for Donald Trump.

The cover illustration of The Atlantic article cleverly incorporates the eight college pennants of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Pennsylvania and Yale. The preppy persona of the US college graduate which once might have been seen as a key part of the American dream of achievement and mobility is now emerging as a social divide that is having a deep impact in electoral politics.

Welcome to the meritocracy

The key argument of Brooks’ article is that meritocracy, a foundational idea in the classic striving and achievement of the American dream, is responsible for creating a winners and losers social divide, through the narrow filtering and measurement of intelligence in Ivy League universities. Winners in the meritocratic ideal, are made through their own intelligence and hard work and make it to the Ivy League and onward success, and losers lack such endeavour and intelligence.

The article has struck me for several reasons: I like how Brooks models drawing on academic research to communicate with a wider social audience, but the idea that the current meritocratic system needs a rethink resonates with my own work at the University of Birmingham’s Education Equity Initiative where we have been critically discussing the concept of meritocracy.

Brooks shows how hereditary aristocracy of wealth was the dominant entry into elite universities and professions until the 1940s. The social contract that emerged in the US (and the UK) has been one of a meritocratic society in which capability, not wealth or birth determines your future. Post second world war and into the Cold War as new technologies emerged, new technical knowledge was needed by more of the population as countries competed for global advantage and growth. Universities, Brooks argues, became sorting systems for this growth using one dimensional intelligence testing to remove the aristocratic elite for a meritocratic one.

A move towards a more meritocratic society whereby achievement and positions of power are a product not of blood lines, but genuine measured ability, was a radical and long fought- for change. An aristocracy passes down power and position along family lines. Though the word “meritocracy” came into being as a satirical commentary from educationalist Michael Young in 1958, who quickly saw the risks of social division in a world divided into winners and losers, and in which winners can feel justified with their hierarchical advantage on the basis of their intrinsic merit and their hard work. As Young “scientifically” and satirically put it:

IQ + Effort = Merit.

This formula, of course ignores the privileges and good luck that have a significant role to play in educational achievement and social success, and failure to acknowledge these contributes further to social division and resentment.

The Robbins report of 1963 has has echoes of Young’s equation for meritocracy with the famous line “courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so.” If the graduate class sees itself and its achievements and success as meritocratic winners then, as Young warned in 1958, a social divide can emerge.

How broken is it?

Broken is a word that is being used a lot in this year of elections. While concerns about serious threats to democracy by artificial intelligence and other bad actors didn’t play out in 2024, a pattern has emerged that many citizens are not happy with their lot, with the majority of global elections resulting in incumbent governments being kicked out. The rise in populist and reactionary politics for many has been created by such a social divide educationally and culturally.

In the UK, Labour ran on the simple one word manifesto title of “Change.” The comms team certainly caught the global public imagination that the status quo just won’t cut it. “Broken” appeared eight times in the Labour manifesto of 2024 (and 16 times in the Liberal Democrats’ text). The Labour Change manifesto described a broken transport system, energy market, criminal justice system, the NHS, school inspection, the apprenticeship levy and a social contract of hard work leading to opportunity underpinned by Labour’s fifth mission to “break down barriers to opportunity.”

We can see social division play out in a realignment of political partisanship in both the US and the UK. College graduates were a large constituency of voters in the US voting for the Democratic Party in 2024. This development is chronicled in the recent book on US politics, Polarized by Degrees which tracks social, cultural and economic changes and how from the 1980s onwards a re-alignment of graduates being conservative voting to a swing to the left has changed the electoral map of the US under the name of the “diploma divide”. For Brooks, meritocracy has created a caste system in the US. A similar story can be seen in the demographics of graduates voting behaviours in the UK with a clear preference for Labour.

In the early decades of the new millennium the notion of innate ability and merit was softened to an extent by acknowledgement of the various barriers that could cause those possessing “merit” not to realise it – but the underpinning idea remains untouched.

In 2001, Tony Blair said:

I do not conform to the traditional political stereotypes because I don’t believe in them. We are not crypto-Thatcherites. We are not old-style socialists. We are what we believe in. We are meritocrats.

Blair was also the architect of the target of 50 per cent of young people entering higher education in the 21^st century, ambitious and progressive at the time but now a divide of meritocratic winners and losers. The current Labour government cabinet it is claimed is the most working class and state educated ever. Yet most, Angela Rayner apart, credentialed their achievement through attending elite Russell Group universities – so could be susceptible to the meritocratic trap and hubris of their own meritocratic rise.

Nor does the adoption of the meritocratic ideal divide along party lines – in the 2017 Conservative manifesto the word “meritocracy” appeared 15 times and included this proposition:

If we want to overcome Britain’s enduring social divisions, we will need to give people real opportunity and make Britain the world’s Great Meritocracy. That will require government to take on long-ignored problems like Britain’s lack of training and technical education, as well as long-lasting injustices, such as the lack of care for people with mental health problems, and the inequality of opportunity that endures on the basis of race, gender and class.

How to fix it

Brooks argues that what the whole education system needs a broader way to assess merit that includes curiosity, drive, social intelligence, agility and a pluralism of opportunity and maximum opportunity. This, arguably, translates to discussion in England of a move to a tertiary system with diverse pathways across institutions and levels. Opportunity pluralism adapts equality of opportunity to the multiple rather than the singular.

In The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, Michael Sandel critiques the modern meritocratic ideal, arguing that it fosters inequality, arrogance among the “winners,” and resentment among the “losers.” He advocates for a reimagined sense of the common good, emphasising humility, solidarity, and recognition of the role luck and collective effort play in individual success.

In The Crisis of Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War, Peter Mandler explores how Britain shifted from an elitist education system to one emphasizing mass participation. He highlights the tensions between meritocracy and egalitarianism, revealing the challenges of balancing opportunity, equality, and social mobility in education policy.

Have universities broken Britain? Of course not, but there is something to be said about the singularity of Oxbridge and the Russell Group being the elites to be followed, competed with, matched, and aspired to be educated at. As the UK equivalent of the Ivy League, a singularity of a certain kind of higher education as full-time (as opposed to part-time and flexible options), three year residential undergraduate degree in a research-intensive environment is the aspirational route to meritocratic achievement. That three year, full-time, residential Russell Group model for meritocratic success can be rethought, particularly when it creates binary winners and losers where the winners feel meritocratically deserving of their status and losers deserving of theirs.

With “brokenness” dominating political and education discourse, 2025 feels like a time of change. We are at the emergence of a new stage of technological revolution. Skills England and the Lifelong Learning Entitlement are being further established and Education Secretary Bridget Philipson has asked in return for the modest increase in tuition fees for reforms in the sector aimed at “the very best outcomes for all students and the country as a whole, including regional and national growth.”

Tackling the narrowness of the current meritocracy ideal is key to this; if much of the population is cast aside as deserving losers by the meritocratic deserving winners, both the Reform and Conservative parties will see an opportunity for a political wedge issue to be exploited. Much of society, and a majority of the less well off, believe in the concept of meritocracy. Moreover, when it comes to higher education access, public opinion strongly backs meritocracy. That being said, aristocracy was once broadly accepted as the natural order. But it should be possible for the concept of meritocracy to offer a plurality of opportunities and options to the largest possible numbers of people.