Reddit mentions of Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs

I remember reading "Pedigree: How Elite students get elite jobs", a book that describes how at elite banks, financial institutions and companies:

>at every step of the hiring process, the ways that employers define and evaluate merit are strongly skewed to favor job applicants from economically privileged backgrounds. She reveals how decision makers draw from ideas about talent―what it is, what best signals it, and who does (and does not) have it―that are deeply rooted in social class. Displaying the "right stuff" that elite employers are looking for entails considerable amounts of economic, social, and cultural resources on the part of the applicants and their parents.

>Challenging our most cherished beliefs about college as a great equalizer and the job market as a level playing field, Pedigree exposes the class biases built into American notions about the best and the brightest, and shows how social status plays a significant role in determining who reaches the top of the economic ladder.

But instead of reacting with horror and disgust at the proof that the entire economic system makes a mockery of meritocracy and any notions of earned status, the reviews treated it as a "How To" -

>"Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs is an academic book with the requisite references to gender theory and Marxist concepts of inequality. But read it carefully and it becomes something far more useful--a guide on how to join the global elite."

Of course, it's not a "how to" at all - nobody without that kind of money and connections has any chance of joining these clubs. That's the whole point of exclusionary sorting like they engage in. But people desperately want to think they can be the exception and the winner. Same as why they like to play monopoly.