Yale law professor Daniel Markovits wrote The Meritocracy Trap, which examines the origins and persistence of economic and educational inequality in the United States. He cites research that the achievement gap between rich and poor students today is more extensive than between white and black students in the early 1950s during segregation. Families with wealth outside of the top 5 percent are increasingly left behind. Wealthy states such as Connecticut spend more than double on public education than poorer states such as Mississippi.

Private schools spend on average six times more per pupil and employ twice as many—and often more experienced and highly qualified—teachers than their public counterparts. Less than 2 percent of American students attend private schools, yet they occupy a quarter of the enrollment spaces at Ivy League universities. Some private schools send up to 50 students each year to Harvard.

Caitlin Flanagan of the Atlantic sums up the division between elite private schools and public schools in underserved communities. “Many schools for the richest American kids have gates and security guards; the message is you are precious to us. Many schools for the poorest kids have metal detectors and police officers; the message is you are a threat to us (emphasis hers).”

The number one question students ask is: Which factors matter most in my admissions chances? The answers they have in mind are their essays, academics, or resume. Those matter, but what matters most is your zip code.

A Harvard, Princeton, and Yale alumni survey found three-quarters live in zip codes that rank in the top 20 percent by income and education. Half live in the top 5 percent of zip codes.  People want to mix with and marry those from similar educational backgrounds and who hold common interests.

One benefit among many is that family networks connect students with prestigious seeming “internships” that aren’t accessible to less-privileged families. PTA donations and fundraisers support niche arts or sports activities. Admissions is less a reflection of a level playing field; instead, it tilts heavily in favor of wealth concentrated in a handful of zip codes.

Families earning more than $250,000 annually with parents holding graduate degrees are vastly overrepresented at elite universities. Forbes’s top-20 private high schools send 30 percent of their graduates to the Ivy League, Stanford, and MIT, which Markovits estimates as a tenth of the total available spaces.

Coming from wealth is a necessary condition for most incoming elite college students. However, given the increasing competition, affluence isn’t sufficient for getting in. Insecurities about getting in amplify affluent family anxieties.

Markovits estimates that students in the top income quarter outnumber those in the bottom quarter by 14 to one at America’s 150 most competitive colleges and schools. At America’s top 20 universities, that divide widens from 72 percent for top quarter students versus 3 percent for the bottom quarter. Less than 3 percent of students from Yale Law, where Markovits teaches, grew up in or near poverty.

He calculates that “the excess investments in human capital made in a typical rich household…today are equivalent to a traditional inheritance in the neighborhood of ten million dollars per child” (emphasis his).

Markovits concludes that “meritocrats may be made rather than born, but they’re not self-made.”

Harvard Professor Michael Sandel cites research that an applicant from the top 1 percent is 77 times more likely to gain admission to an Ivy League school compared with a student from the bottom 20 percent. Although universities are much more accessible for students from diverse gender, racial, and cultural backgrounds than at any time in history, the Ivy League and its equivalents collectively enroll more students from the 1 percent of American society than the bottom half. Financial-aid guarantees matter little if few low-income or first-generation students gain admission.

It’s ironic that British aristocracy’s traditional champions Oxford and Cambridge now enroll more socioeconomically diverse student bodies than their diversity-evangelizing American peers.

Access to substantially more resources gives wealthy students considerable advantages, the least of which is intensive exam preparation. Markovitz writes in the Atlantic article “How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition” that “only about one in two hundred children from the poorest third of households achieve SAT scores at Yale’s mean.”

The gap between wealthy and middle-class children is growing substantially faster than between the middle class and families living in poverty. Middle-class families who don’t make enough money or have the financial stability to save for college are increasingly priced out of elite educations. Yet, they earn too much to benefit from need-based aid schemes.

Middle-class millennials were the first generation in American history less likely to make more money than their parents. Gen Z seems to be following the same trajectory as they begin and graduate college during a global pandemic.

In practice, the American Dream is an illusion and the original sin of the meritocracy gospel. The United States is two to three times less socially mobile than “socialist” countries such as France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. If you’re born outside of the top quintile of wealth in America, there is an overwhelming chance you will die earlier and with the same or less wealth than your parents. Generation Z works harder than perhaps any cohort of teenagers.

Yet, society fails to provide them with adequate job prospects or pathways to earn college degrees that don’t entail a lifetime of debt. Harvard Professor Michael Sandel summarizes the lack of social mobility bluntly in his book The Tyranny of Merit: “Relatively few children of the poor rise to affluence, and relatively few children of affluence fall below the ranks of the upper middle class.”

Exceptions like Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance publish acclaimed memoirs because his experience of overcoming Appalachian poverty and graduating from Yale Law is so uncommon. If achieving the American Dream were the rule and not the exception, authors like J.D. Vance or Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth wouldn’t be a subgenre or crossovers into Netflix specials.

Valorizing anomalous and exceptional people who rise above poverty transfer the failings of inaccessible universities that cater onto the top 1% onto the supposed moral failings of millions of students who never stand a chance of earning a quality education. I agree when NYU Professor Scott Galloway remarks that “higher education in the US has morphed from the lubricant of upward mobility to the enforcer of our caste system.”