Lemann is really concerned only with Mandarins, even as he recognizes that Lifers and especially Talents are not only more abundant but ultimately more important to the shape of American life. Indeed, even in the days of a relatively fixed Episcopacy, many--perhaps even most--of the entrepreneurs who radically transformed society started out as relative outsiders: Rockefeller, Du Pont, Ford, Guggenheim, Kennedy. This reality is disguised somewhat by the quickness with which such people move to the center of the establishment. It's also masked by the Mandarins' dominance of government and the media, where going to the right schools still seems to carry more weight than it does in many other areas of activity. But the prizes of the Mandarinate--especially status and regard among themselves--mean more to them than to the rest of America, who tend to mistrust them as busybody eggheads.
More to the point, that emphasis on the Mandarin path explains why the SAT looms so large--disproportionately large--in Lemann's success scheme. If you want to advance the Mandarin way, you really do need to do pretty well on the SAT (less well if you can take advantage of affirmative action). As important, you need to know that you should do well on the SAT. Interestingly, the means to boost your scores--prep courses, guide books to the prep courses, and libraries and bookstores that contain the guide books--are more widely available than ever, suggesting a certain democratization of the testing process.
The gains realized through such methods can be quite substantial. The Princeton Review, for instance, claims that its typical student posts a 140-point gain on his combined SAT score; if you see less than a 100-point jump, you can retake the course for free. Still, it's a given that some people will always do better than others--and that those relative performances will have real effects on what sorts of schools people attend and what sorts of jobs they'll get after graduating.
But contrary to Lemann, the real problem isn't the emphasis our society puts on the SAT--or even on academic performance in general. It's the emphasis that people like him put on that college-dominated Mandarin path. While it's true that the lifetime financial returns to bachelor's, professional, and advanced degrees continue to grow, they are hardly preconditions for having satisfying, interesting, and remunerative careers. Indeed, in a country where only about one-quarter of people have a bachelor's degree--a percentage that is growing far more slowly than most people recognize--Harvard-trained lawyers such as Molly Munger are perhaps less representative of American life than Lemann presumes. Not all Americans need Mandarin credentials to succeed and thrive. Most Americans can be perfectly happy building their own businesses, or working for others, being creative and hard-working without an impressive diploma--or any diploma, for that matter--on the wall.
Yet in The Big Test's afterword, Lemann presents a policy prescription that implies that the Mandarin path is the only viable way to a worthwhile and rewarding life: He wants everyone not simply to go to college but to graduate from college. That would be an enormous waste of the time and resources for many people who would prefer to be elsewhere. Nor would it even level the playing field of success that much: An overwhelming social consensus that everyone has to attend college would just make a bachelor's degree as meaningless as an earlier social consensus has made a high school diploma. It wouldn't stop social sorting; it would simply bump it up to a higher level.
More to the point, and despite Lemann's myopic focus, America still has, as much as ever, those other venues to success: the vibrant, idiosyncratic Talent track and the more systematized but also more open Lifer track. Of course, as The Big Test shows, the Mandarin track is alive and well, too, with fine people from good schools--Lemann himself is, unsurprisingly, a Harvard graduate--striving to manipulate the social order to create their utopia.
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