Education, John Dewey said, is “the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow men.” Educated people know themselves and the world, and they have skills and inclinations to make the world a better place. Getting an excellent education takes effort and resources—including the ability to take time away from working to make ends meet—so wealth makes education easier to acquire. But education in Dewey’s sense remains essentially democratic rather than hierarchical, and certainly isn’t competitive. Ideas and the library books that contain them are free; you and I and everyone else can in principle all come, through study and conversation, to know ourselves and the world and to learn the skills that can help improve it. The college plot, in which education serves as an all-purpose tool for acquiring income and status, works differently. Even though nobody elected the College Board or U.S. News, they have become our society’s de facto social planners, deciding who gets ahead. To rationalize and justify their enormous power, the planners wrap their assessments of educational quality in technocratic precision—in statistically validated standardized test scores and GPAs and carefully calibrated rankings formulas. The “science” behind testing and ranking legitimates the hierarchies that the planners construct. Students and schools then orient themselves around scores and rankings, performing their eliteness much as Austen’s gentry sustained its privilege through elaborate manners.