There's a version of "merit" that sounds clean: you work hard, you score well, you earn your spot. But the new paper on admissions policies messes with that tidy story, and honestly, it's about time someone did. The data here is blunt: wealthy students with high test scores dominate the most selective universities, and those same schools spend way more on instruction than everyone else. So when we talk about merit, we're not just talking about effort or ability. We're talking about who already has the resources to turn effort into a score, and who gets the privilege of being called "qualified."
For WSU students, this hits close to home in a practical way. We're not all trying to get into Harvard, and most of us aren't pretending to be. But the assumption that selective schools are simply rewarding the best and brightest? That's a comfortable myth for the people it benefits. And it's the same logic that shows up in smaller ways: which internships are paid, which networks you have access to, which clubs can afford to fly you somewhere. It's not about being bitter. It's about being real. The paper basically says what a lot of us already suspect: the system is rigged toward people who were already ahead, and then it calls that fairness. That's worth naming, especially when we're all trying to build something for ourselves.
What I'd tell a friend who reads this and feels discouraged is simple: don't confuse the game with the goal. The point isn't to opt out of working hard. The point is to stop treating someone else's privilege as your personal failure, and to stop letting a university's brand tell you what your potential is worth. There's a reason we talk about belonging and community here, and it's not just a slogan. It's a survival tactic. When you know that the playing field is uneven, you can stop knocking yourself out trying to prove you deserve to be on it, and start focusing on building skills and people who actually move you forward. That's the same spirit behind WSU Can Learn From Cornell: Rebuilding Trust Through Purpose and Finding Home & Honors: Building Community at Sac State: real progress comes from creating spaces where people can belong and grow, not just from filtering out the ones who didn't get a head start.
Here's the concrete thing to watch: if selective schools keep leaning on test scores and "merit" while ignoring how much money follows their students around, they're going to keep getting the same result, and they'll keep calling it excellence. That's not a system that rewards potential. It's a system that rewards proximity to wealth. So the next time someone hands you the "work hard and you'll make it" line, you can nod, and then ask them who else got to play. Because the real lesson from this paper isn't that hard work doesn't matter. It's that hard work only counts when someone else decides the rules are fair. And we're not obligated to pretend they are.
