It Doesn't Add Up: The Truth About Merit
I didn’t plan to write this. For a long time, I stayed quiet, watching the conversation twist itself into a spectacle of rage and bad math. I believed, naively, that reason would surface, that facts would speak for themselves, that clarity would eventually win.
But lately, I’ve watched as people who once claimed to defend fairness and merit have twisted those words beyond recognition. What began as a legitimate critique of institutional excess has hardened into a campaign built on false assumptions and bad math. The loudest voices calling for “pure merit” seem curiously uninterested in what the numbers actually show. Instead of questioning a system that can only admit a fraction of the qualified, they attack any outcome that doesn’t match their expectations.
It’s not about fairness. It’s about resentment. Or something far worse.
So rather than let that story go unchallenged, I want to offer another. Not theoretical. Personal. And grounded in something we rarely talk about in these debates: math.
Several years ago, I was teaching at an Ivy League university that’s been in the news quite a bit lately. When people found out, I’d often get the same reaction:
“Oh, I hate that school. My [son/daughter] didn’t get in because of affirmative action.”
Or legacy preferences.
Or international students.
Or athletes.
Or—insert your personal villain here.
Then would come the résumé: perfect GPA, top scores, varsity sports, volunteer work, debate team, musical instrument. The child had done everything right. They were “qualified.” And yes, maybe they were.
But here’s what I know, and what I tried to show my own students.
I once asked them to estimate what their class would look like if every form of affirmative action or diversity consideration disappeared. No race-conscious admissions. No geographic or gender balancing. No legacies, artists, athletes, or international students. Just “pure merit,” as those frustrated parents believed it should be.
It wasn’t a scientific study, just a class exercise. But the results, drawn from their own perceptions and assumptions, were remarkably consistent:
They predicted a class made up of roughly 55% white and Asian men,
35% white and Asian women,
and 10% everyone else—Black, Hispanic, Native American, LGBTQ+, first-generation, disabled, or otherwise underrepresented.
And here’s what I said then, and what I’ll say now:
If you think that reflects fairness or merit, you are wrong.
Not morally or politically. Mathematically.
Each year, about 4 million students graduate high school in the United States.
Rough racial breakdown:
50% White → 2,000,000 students
27% Hispanic → 1,080,000
15% Black → 600,000
6% Asian → 240,000
2% Native, multiracial, or other → 80,000
Let’s assume—conservatively—that only 10% of students in each group meet the most elite standards for college admissions. Top scores. Stellar transcripts. Exceptional activities.
That’s:
200,000 White students
108,000 Hispanic students
60,000 Black students
24,000 Asian students
8,000 students from other backgrounds
Altogether: 400,000 highly qualified students, competing for 1,650 spots at one Ivy League school.
Just one school. One year.
Even if you took the top 1% of those 400,000, you’d still have 4,000 applicants fighting for the same 1,650 seats.
And every group—every group!—would be overrepresented in that 1%.
So let’s stop pretending this is about fairness. Or that someone “took” someone else’s spot.
Colleges, especially elite ones, don’t just admit the top test scores. They never have.
They admit athletes because they need teams. Artists because they want culture. Legacies to honor tradition. Children of donors, celebrities, and politicians because of the power, prestige, and access those names bring. International students because someone has to help pay the bills.
These aren’t distractions from merit. They are part of how institutions have always defined value—strategically, competitively, and yes, often inconsistently.
And for generations, those decisions went unchallenged because the beneficiaries were overwhelmingly white and male. Now that those same tools are being used to open the doors more widely, and suddenly we call it unfair.
Let me put it plainly:
If that Ivy League school in question wanted to, it could fill its 2026 freshman class with 100% Black, 100% Hispanic, 100% Asian, 50% Native American, or 100% LGBTQ+students and still be choosing from the highest tier of academic excellence.
And if they wanted to make it feel “diverse,” they could reserve a few spots for white students. But they wouldn’t need to!
Because if you selected on merit alone, every group has more than enough excellence to go around.
So, imagine a freshman class made up entirely of students from one demographic or gender—Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native, LGBTQ+, Women. Some people would assume the school had lowered its standards, handing seats to the undeserving. But maybe the issue isn’t who got in. It’s who we assumed wouldn’t.
Because the numbers are there. They always have been. And excellence was never limited to one kind of student.
The real debate isn’t about merit. It’s about the discomfort some people feel when excellence shows up in places they didn’t expect.
And now, institutions that have worked for generations to build thoughtful, balanced, and inclusive communities are being punished for doing so.
Policies are being rolled back. Legal decisions are reversing decades of progress. And invaluable research money that funds medicine, engineering, science, and innovation is being cut under the false banner of “restoring merit.”
It doesn’t add up.
Not in logic.
Not in ethics.
And certainly not in math.