Work hard, play by the rules, and success surely will follow. This well-known promise has kept generations of students obediently studying and fretting over grades. But conventional knowledge hides a downside. This meritocratic parable advances individual will as democracy’s great social leveler, with talent and effort overriding bias or disadvantage. In the already-achieved equality of the U.S., anyone with enough drive can rise to society’s highest tier. Colleges have enthusiastically adopted this philosophy and present themselves as impartial judges of ability and determination. They use GPA’s as moral scorecards, standardized tests as scales of human worth, and class rankings predictors of future success. This merit machine functions so effectively that few question what is being measured or how the process began.
Only now are colleges and universities starting to see the problem. Students meeting every academic benchmark increasingly find achievements unreal and lacking practical benefit. Many feel scammed by promises that effort pays off, only to hit structural barriers from the start. The premise of fair and equal opportunity works like a shell game, held in place by invisible rules and roadblocks institutions pretend aren’t there. And while bad for nearly every student, the effects have been catastrophic in the highly charged post-DEI atmosphere of reverse discrimination, “racial exhaustion,” and the rollback of civil rights advances on nearly front.[i]
These contradictions now undermine the foundations of higher ed. While students may arrive on campus with a genuine desire to learn, the atmosphere around them quickly shifts from a common pursuit of knowledge into a zero sum game of individual achievement. The psychological effects of this are documented in a growing body of research showing spiking levels of anxiety, depression, and disengagement among students who otherwise should be thriving. Meanwhile, first-gen students, working learners, and those historically minoritized are overlooked by a system designed (and increasingly politicized) to support others with social and economic capital. The dichotomy is stark and relentless. Just as schools have developed metrics to quantify student outcomes, many conceal and often inadvertently intensify the inequities they claim to alleviate.
Of course, the problem is deeper than the broken promises and false starts. Long before any specific disappointment in college life, a foundational reshaping of student subjectivity has already taken place. Many arrive at college exhausted, their motivation and creative capacities already stunted by a narrowing of options set before them. Students may successfully complete every requirement and hurdle only to find themselves without any true sense of purpose. This is more than meritocracy’s failure to fulfill its promises. It’s a collapse of the very horizon through which learners imagine future possibility. Not only are students competing for resources. They now bring to campus a habit of relating to learning exclusively defined by external metrics, their perceptions of value or worth defined by systems constraining their subjective awareness and desire. The question is not whether the playing field is level. It’s whether the game was rigged before the contest even began. Understanding this means moving beyond individual psychology or institutional policy and into the mechanics of contemporary society in creating subjects it later passes judgment upon.
Drawing on the work of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato speaks of contemporary capitalism’s mutation beyond commodification in generating subjectivity itself.[ii] Schools are the perfect places for this shaping of consciousness. Education’s regulatory procedures and digital platforms do more than merely record and evaluate young people’s abilities and achievements. Rather, they produce subjectivities via automated processes that format expectations and desires, overdetermining what can be imagined or pursued. Before students sit down in a classroom, they’ve been conditioned by institutional forces of compliance and an objectified sense of self. Mechanisms for financial transactions, learning management, engagement monitoring, and predictive analytics all operate directly on the bodies and attention of learners, bypassing reflective thinking to influence behaviors and choices on micro-temporal levels. In this seemingly voluntarily educational process, subjectivity is shaped through proceduralized learning, as students’ perceptions of their own agency and future are constructed through the “machinic assemblages” of socio-technical systems.[iii]
What may appear to faculty as student apathy or laziness is to Lazaretto a symptomatic “paralysis of possibility” resulting in structural hopelessness.[iv] As learners are compelled to focus on the logistics of the system (institutional requirements) as opposed to the content of the curriculum (activities of learning itself), they find themselves driven by protocols rather than exploration, external control instead of internal agency. Gradually losing autonomy over their own thought processes, students grow increasingly subject to the technical and administrative operations of the school. A mindset of foreclosed possibility inheres in the very routines of everyday student life. In actuality, learner exhaustion results from an invisible plan in which obedience and self-blame conspire to maintain an economic agenda in which institutions themselves are also trapped. It’s no big surprise that this makes for hostility toward the university, and more insidiously toward other learners. Many see themselves as failed actors, constantly competing against peers for resources and opportunities, with faculty gatekeepers more than anything else. Worse still, this hostility is institutionally framed as a “personal” problem or pathology.
Clearly something fundamental has changed in the meaning of college, with student subjectivity an object of trade and learning its enabling currency. Rather than a source of knowledge and inspiration, higher education now operates as a fabricator of formatted selves, a machine churning out predetermined outcomes, while mystifying its operations in the guise of individual progress. This chapter looks at ways meritocracy divides and ultimately betrays students at all levels, how this unfolds in a competitive logic functioning as intended, and why students lose the ability to imagine alternatives. The emptiness and exhaustion students find even in achievement should not be read as personal failure or psychological deficiency. It’s the predictable result of higher education’s own unspoken agenda, which manufactures the subjectivities its assessments then claim to measure. Competition supplies the surrounding pressure, but the specific work of depletion happens inside the classroom, the transcript, and the letter grade. the
[i] Ralina L. Joseph, Racial Exhaustion: How to Move through Racism in the Wake of DEI (New York: NYU, 2025).
[ii] Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2014), 40-45.
[iii] Félix Guattari, “Integrated World Capitalism,” in Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2009), 227-269.
[iv] Signs and Machines, 85-92.