Many Americans like to believe we live in a meritocracy. But it's not a view that holds up if you look at the data. Like the graph below, on how students perform on the SAT, by family income:
The SAT is crucial to getting into many colleges, and the performance gap cannot be explained by anything as simple and direct as test prep courses. It's about a deeper, more pervasive form of inequality. It's
not just the SAT, either:
Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively.
Add that to data showing that rich kids with below-average test scores are
more likely to graduate from college than poor kids with above-average test scores, among other research and statistics on
how rare upward mobility really is, and meritocracy is revealed as one of the great myths of American culture.