LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.

College is not for all.

Under the twin banners of “equal opportunity” and “upward mobility,” we continue asking our public schools to identify the most academically talented children and prepare them for leafy academic enclaves, from whence they can be sorted into well-paying jobs in the globe’s most prosperous cities. In our zeal to optimize this system for extracting each diamond from the rough, we willfully neglect everyone else.

That zeal might validate the people who have been prepared from day care to land on the partner track in investment banking or high profile law, in part by expanding the pool of people who are called, but not chosen. The costs might be substantial.

And heaven forbid someone who could have become a prestigious management consultant in New York City instead becomes a successful general contractor and leader in the community where he was raised. This offends the meritocratic sensibilities of an elite that sees its own pathway as uniquely worthy and wants to believe that opening the same pathway to all will validate the game it has won. So education reformers focus religiously on test scores and college admissions, treat everyone as a prospective college graduate, and when that fails for most, well, they promise to keep trying.

This is doubly wrong. It overestimates the cost of some people failing to maximize their academic potential. Building a decent life in one’s own community is hardly a prison sentence.

No, I was not being outrageous about expanding the pool, and the frustration.

Our current approach also underestimates the cost of failing to serve the vast majority of young Americans. They are guilty of nothing but lacking the academic aptitude and career ambition that constitute “merit” according to those blessed with plenty of both. Yet we fail to prepare them for success, often burden them with debt, tell them they are inadequate, and then wonder why they fail to find good jobs, build strong families, or participate effectively as citizens. So many of our nation’s major problems—rising inequality, geographic concentration of wealth, deindustrialization, labor-force dropout, declining family formation, “deaths of despair”—derive in part from an education system dedicated to strip-mining talent out of communities rather than supporting talent in them.

That's quite apart from the failure of those meritocrats to deliver the kind of leadership they congratulate themselves over.