Education Quote by Roy Romer

Meritocracy has always loved a good input-output story, and Roy Romer is leaning hard on it here. He frames educational quality as a kind of manufacturing logic: start with “better caliber” raw material, and the finished product should be superior. It’s a reassuring argument for anyone who wants to measure universities by prestige and selectivity, because it turns a complicated civic institution into a simple expectation. If the students are already strong, the school can take credit for their eventual success.

The intent is managerial and political: justify scrutiny of outcomes, implicitly defend the idea that selective institutions should outperform open-access ones, and suggest that underperformance is evidence of institutional failure rather than structural constraint. Romer’s language (“ought to”) carries a governor’s impatience with excuses. It’s also a subtle nod to accountability movements that were cresting in education policy: compare, rank, reward, punish.

The subtext is harsher. By treating student “caliber” as a fixed trait “going in,” he naturalizes inequality and makes it easier to ignore what selectivity really captures: prior schooling, family resources, test-prep, stability. In that frame, a less selective campus looks doomed from the start, and the hard work of teaching, mentoring, and remediation becomes secondary to admissions gatekeeping.

Context matters because Romer wasn’t a campus pundit; he was a politician speaking from the world of budgets, benchmarks, and public confidence. The quote signals a broader shift: higher ed asked to prove “value” the way a state agency does, while the human messiness of learning gets recast as a performance metric with winners preloaded at the door.