You don't deserve to be here: Merit and admissions

One glorious September, not so many years ago, I was among the fortunate few freshmen to arrive at an Ivy League campus, one very much like our own here today. A world of opportunity had been opened up to me, and I was eager to take advantage of all that it had to offer. There was only one problem: I was certain that I didn't deserve it.

Nor was I the only one to be plagued with such thoughts. Every new arrival at a selective university is convinced he or she is the admission office's one great mistake. "There is no way I could have gotten here," one reasons, "on my meager merits alone."

Nor are these inevitable insecurities always unfounded; the crucial factor which gets a potential Princetonian past the committee can include a whole host of things other than one's academic merits, from being the child of an alumni to being the beneficiary of affirmative action. Conservatives who oppose this latter policy are happy to exploit such worries. Turning a blind eye to preferences given to legacies, athletes, those from under-represented geographical areas, and so on, such critics claim that minorities on college campuses today are burdened with a special stigma — the possibility that they simply don't deserve to be where they are.

But it's not just the beneficiaries of affirmative action, or the jocks, or the legacies, or even the Alaskans. No one "deserves" to get into Princeton, at least not in any moral sense of the term. Not even the select few who actually were admitted based on what we misleadingly call their own merit.

When we think about someone deserving some special privilege, we picture this person as somehow responsible for the talents or behavior being rewarded. You practiced hard, got in shape, and that's why we're going to let you onto the team. You studied endlessly, aced the SATs, and that's why we're going to let you into Princeton. The privilege is merited for work well done, and if you hadn't put in the time and effort, you wouldn't have gotten the goodies.

But, then again, no matter how hard you work, it is quite possible you will still never "merit" much of anything special. Although I got into college, for example, I always knew that I would never make the rowing crew, no matter how many hours I practiced. (Heck, I would probably never even make the marching band.) As someone terminally flabby since infancy, I understand that real athletic excellence is something I will never achieve; un-pumpedupedness is probably written right into my DNA.

Academic ability is little different. While psychologists continue to debate whether an adult's intelligence is more a matter of nature or nurture, there is nothing you can really do about either. You don't choose your parents, after all; you have no more control over the way they raise you than you do over the genes they gave you before birth.

It would take a strange sort of faith in predestination to say that people deserve the unique cocktail of genetics and TLC that allows an infant to grow into a Princetonian. A just and benevolent deity would have to look into the moral worth of every adult and preemptively decide — presumably at conception, if not far earlier — who is deserving of four years at Old Nassau.

It's much more plausible to say no one deserves to be here, since no one is ultimately responsible for the talents that admissions committees so cherish, any more than he is responsible for the racial or ethnic factors that these committees also consider.

That's not to say we should switch from a select admissions process to a simple lottery, giving everyone an equal chance at the benefits a school like Princeton confers. For one thing, societies only function when, with limited exceptions, those who are best able to do a job are the ones rewarded with the right to do it, as well as the education necessary to do so. Having excellent, selective universities is a crucial part of a system which, despite the undeserved inequalities that result, experience has nonetheless shown to be vastly preferable to any possible alternative.

In other words, while you don't deserve Princeton, Princeton quite possibly deserves you, and the world certainly deserves Princeton. Treat the privilege of your presence here accordingly. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.