this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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In theory. But in practice what you're describing tends to be the licensure of corruption. Rather than paying off a guy for a no-show job, you pay a school for a degree to show the guy (getting kickbacks from the school) that gives you the no-show job.
Great example of this was Bob Jones, Liberty, and the assorted christian conservative schools injecting whole graduating classes into the '00s Bush Administration.
When your "meritocratic" institution really starts to pay off is when it looks more and more like an MLM. The modern Ivy League/Federalist Society-based judicial system looks a lot like this. You need to be a member of a school who joined a club to get access to the clerkship that qualifies you to join a firm that will fast-track you into the appellate judiciary. So these "elite" institutions get swarmed with applicants, and now you need to go to a particular prep school or join a certain social group to get into the school/club. Now those schools/groups get flooded. So you need to join a partisan organization or work your way into a country club hierarchy to get access to the prep school / social group, and they start assigning ranks for members and fees to climb the ranks.
Now "meritocracy" is just a massive web of patronage, with access to the inner layer predicated on outclassing all your peers in the outer layer. Whole industries exist to prove "merit" either through cheating explicitly (straight up buying accreditation) or implicitly (paying for study guides that contain the exact questions to be asked) and get you special access to the people doing manual selection of applicants. Its almost exclusively pay-to-play and a lot of it is scams.