Quotes & Sayings About Merit Students

One may reject such proposals as something that will hurt merit but the ground reality is students from such sections do not have the same access to quality education that rich students enjoy. — Uma Bharti

In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in. — Bill Gates

An education system where student selection is based on credit capacity and not merit capacity and where graduating students are no longer indebted to the nation, but increasingly indebted to the Australian Taxation Office - that's no way to improve the quality of education. — Gough Whitlam

By comparing various sources of data, moreover, it is possible to estimate that the average income of the parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000, which corresponds to the average income of the top 2 percent of the US income hierarchy.32 Such a finding does not seem entirely compatible with the idea of selection based solely on merit. The contrast between the official meritocratic discourse and the reality seems particularly extreme in this case. The total absence of transparency regarding selection procedures should also be noted.33 — Thomas Piketty

Affirmative action benefits NO ONE. It discriminates against Asian American and White students, while promoting negative stereotypes about the competency of African American students -- that they only got in because of their race, not merit. — Vijay Jojo Chokal-Ingam

In May 2012 - a year after the Arab awakening erupted - the United States made two financial commitments to the Arab world that each began with the numbers 1 and 3. The U.S. gave Egypt's military regime $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets. It also gave Lebanese public school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program, putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. Having visited both countries at that time, I noted in a column that the $13.5 million in full scholarships bought the Lebanese more capacity and America more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever would. So how about we stop being stupid? — Thomas L. Friedman

Black newspapers and their readers wasted no time in making the link between America's inadequacy in space and the dreadful conditions facing many black students in the South. "While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools," opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its "Mississippiitis" - that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption - the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership. An editorial in the Cleveland Call and Post — Margot Lee Shetterly

My message to students is that if you want to become an entrepreneur and save the world, definitely don't skip college. But go to a school that you can afford. You'll be freed from the chains of debt and succeed on your own ambition and merit. — Vivek Wadhwa

Hence a report from Harvard's own "Committee on Raising the Standard": "Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily - Grade A for work of not very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity ... One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work." Except that report was written in - you saw this coming, didn't you? - 1894. — Alfie Kohn

Japanese universities have a chair system that is a fixed hierarchy. This has its merits when trying to work as a laboratory on one theme. But if you want to do original work you must start young, and young people are limited by the chair system. Even if students cannot become assistant professors at an early age they should be encouraged to do original work.
... Industry is more likely to put its research effort into its daily business. It is very difficult for it to become involved in pure chemistry. There is a need to encourage long-range research, even if we don't know its goal and if its application is unknown. — Kenichi Fukui