We like to tell ourselves that education is an elevator. If you have talent and show effort, you go up. The path may be steep, but the rules are clear and apply to everyone. For a long time, that story held some truth. In places like Flanders, education did function as a powerful engine of social mobility. The idea of meritocracy still runs deep in education policy and public debate. Meritocracy promises that power and rewards are distributed on the basis of talent and effort rather than family background or wealth.
But a new large-scale study from Chile shows how misleading that image can be. Not because talent no longer matters, but because the road upward turns out to be full of missing steps.
The article by Alejandra Mizala, Luis Herskovic, Alejandra Abufhele, and Florencia Torche, published in the American Educational Research Journal, starts with a simple yet unsettling question: what happens to students who clearly have the cognitive ability to progress but do not do so in practice? In the literature, this phenomenon is known as undermatching. Students who, based on their academic performance, could succeed in higher or more selective education, yet end up elsewhere or drop out of the pipeline altogether.
What makes this study particularly interesting is that it does not limit itself to the familiar question of whether high-achieving students attend elite universities. Instead, the authors follow an entire cohort of Chilean students from fourth grade into higher education using population-level data. They examine five critical transitions: completing upper secondary education, taking the university entrance exam, enrolling in higher education, enrolling in university, and enrolling in a selective university.
Chile is not a random case. The country has a highly standardised and ostensibly meritocratic admissions system, with little room for informal selection or subjective criteria. If meritocracy were to work anywhere, this would be a strong candidate.
And yet the system leaks at every stage. Around 13% of students who, based on their school results, should complete secondary education fail to do so. The losses increase at the transition to higher education. Nearly one in four students with scores high enough for university never enrol. Selective universities reject more than one-third of qualified students. These patterns are not isolated cases or statistical noise; they reflect a systematic loss of talent.
That loss follows clear social lines. Students whose parents have lower levels of education are undermined far more often than students from highly educated families, even when their academic performance is similar. In other words, students with comparable cognitive capacities do not take the same exits. Meritocracy does not lift everyone upward at the same speed. It works like an escalator with missing steps, and those who step on earlier are more likely to lose their footing.
The study becomes most revealing when it traces the origins of these inequalities. One might expect financial barriers, information gaps, or individual family characteristics to drive most of the difference. These factors play a role, but they explain surprisingly little. Instead, schools account for the largest share of social inequality in undermatching. Once the analysis controls for school-level effects, much of the socioeconomic gap shrinks. Schools sort students. They shape expectations, distribute information, provide or withhold support, and connect students to role models and networks. In the end, context, not talent, determines whether performance turns into opportunity.
This is what makes the findings relevant far beyond Chile. Institutional details differ across countries, but the underlying mechanism is familiar. School choice, segregation, and differential expectations early in the educational career leave traces that are difficult to undo later. Equal admissions criteria at the gate of higher education are not enough if the road leading to that gate is already uneven.
The article also shows why simple stories about boys versus girls fall short. Boys from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to undermatch in earlier transitions, while girls are more likely to undermatch when it comes to entry into selective programs. Inequality does not follow a single, linear pattern and therefore cannot be addressed with slogans.
The lesson is uncomfortable, but important. Anyone who takes meritocracy seriously has to do more than ensure equal rules at the finish line. We need to look at the entire escalator: which steps are missing, for whom, and why. And above all, the role schools play in amplifying or mitigating inequality. Talent is not scarce. The opportunities to turn it into real educational trajectories are.
Image made by AI for once.