ABSTRACT
Driving the public policies concerning higher education and the general economy is a set of myths regarding the fairness of the current social system. This chapter documents how the belief in the meritocratic system blinds people from seeing the ways higher education institutions are becoming more like aristocratic societies. The belief in the higher education meritocratic myth helps to rationalize and justify the inequality of the larger economic system. The ideal of an educational meritocracy is a myth many politicians and citizens repeat in order to justify their own privilege and remove themselves from any responsibility for building a more just society. Higher education is thus the engine of the meritocracy and a system that allows inequality to be rationalized as it sorts people into winners and losers. David Labaree argues in his How to Succeed in School without Really Learning that the main thing students learn in education is how to work the system.
