Yes, in theory, a shoeshine boy from a poor provincial town in Peru can go to Stanford and do a PhD, as the former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo has done, but for one Toledo we have millions of Peruvian children who did not even make it to high school. Of course, we could argue that all those millions of poor Peruvian children are lazy good-for-nothings, snice Mr. Toledo has proven that they too could have gone to Stanford if they had tried hard enough. But I think it is much more plausible to say that Mr Toledo is the exception. Without some equality of outcome (of parental income), poor people cannot take full advantage of equality of opportunity.
i really liked this passage, but wish he had taken it a step further, with a thought experiment: imagine if, by some fluke, a bunch of his peers had also been super brilliant and would have excelled at Stanford. or even not by some fluke--imagine he and his friends made a study group and helped lift each other up despite all the obstacles in their way. imagine if his entire high school graduating class were brilliant and all worthy of Stanford--maybe even more worthy than any other applicants. Does that mean Stanford will accept them all? No, of course not. Stanford can't accept more than a few token brilliant, poor Peruvians in any given year. The goal of institutions like Stanford is not to meritocratically allocate spaces to the most deserving or most promising students. The goal is to use these so-called meritocratic stories as a shield while, covertly, allocating spaces predominantly to children of alumni and others who fit the ideal that Stanford has created over the years. This facade of meritocracy is what allows people to pretend that the system is fair and thus override their natural squeamishness around inequality.
also ties into exceptionalism re: Obama