we might lose our valuable meritocracy! wait...

Sara del Nido's generally well argued op-ed in today's D rightly criticizes the federal spending cuts on student loans, but when she raises a cry of alarm about the imminent destruction of our meritocracy, I have to raise an eyebrow.

"Let's fast forward five or 10 years down the road. How would Dartmouth's student body be different if students who required financial aid were no longer able to obtain it? What would America's college and university system look like?

The meritocracy that we have today -- already fragile and turning into an inherited meritocracy -- would have little chance of surviving. Instead of being selected based on test scores and grades, low-income students applying to colleges would self-select on the basis of whether or not their families can afford the strain that paying a high-interest loan would incur."

How does she think it works now? Anyone that came here from a public school can probably think of a dozen of their erstwhile classmates who deserved - in her meritocratic schema - an education like ours, but who decided to attend lesser universities because they simply could not take on the debt burden necessary to finance an ivy league degree. The proof that the meritocracy, if it ever actually existed, is already in shreds can be found in her own article. She cites the statistic that 56% of Dartmouth students are on financial aid. Think about that number for a moment. That means that almost half of Dartmouth's student body can afford to pay upwards of $40,000 per year without assistance. That puts them in the wee top percentages of our country's economic stratum. And as far as I can tell, this is nothing new.

And she's right, the federal cuts are pointing the country in the exact wrong direction. But let's not fool ourselves about where we are.