Disillusionment With Meritocracy During the Transition to Adulthood: Longitudinal Change in Belief Systems and Depression in China

Nonmeritocratic beliefs rise among Chinese college students; greater increases correlate with steeper rises in depressive symptoms.

For decades, young people have been offered a simple route to a good life. Work hard, get into college, find a good job, and money, stability, and success will follow. Behind this promise lies meritocracy: success comes from individual effort and education—not from family background, social connections or luck. This promise reaches across cultures. It echoes in the Protestant work ethic in the West and Confucian ideals of effort and self-cultivation in the East. At its best, it gives young people the sense of control that they can shape their own destiny.

Yet signs of growing unease with the meritocratic promise can be seen in debates about quiet quitting in the West, lying flat in China, and Japan’s so called low desire society. These labels often invite a familiar accusation: young people are lazy. Yet another possibility deserves attention. What if they are not rejecting effort itself, but questioning a promise that once made effort worthwhile?

The question matters especially during the transition to adulthood, when young people are expected to become independent, pursue ambitions, and begin building careers. Feeling that the rules are beyond your control can make an already uncertain period more difficult. And when that feeling spreads, its consequences may reach beyond individual wellbeing to how a society develops and retains talent.

We wanted to know how young people’s beliefs about success actually change as they grow up. Do they lose faith in effort and education? Do they increasingly see family wealth, social status, personal connections, and luck as decisive?

Using nationally representative longitudinal data from China, we followed young people from early adolescence, when they were aged 10 to 13 in 2012, to emerging adulthood, when they were 18 to 21 in 2020. We compared those who attended college with those who did not.

The findings complicate the usual story of disillusionment. In both groups, effort and education became less important in young people’s explanations of success. But they remained important. More strikingly, only among college attendees did the perceived importance of factors beyond individual merit, including family economic circumstances, social status, connections, and luck, rise substantially. Among college attendees, this growing recognition was associated with a steeper increase in depressive symptoms.

Meritocratic and nonmeritocratic beliefs are not simply two ends of one scale. A young person can still believe in effort while becoming more aware of the advantages that effort cannot buy. Think of effort as a diamond in a crown. Its shine has not disappeared. What has changed is that college students are noticing the other jewels around it and realizing how brightly they can shine. Their disillusionment may come not from abandoning the old rule, but from discovering that it was never the only rule of the game.

Ongoing thread. More from Shuming Fan and Filip De Fruyt to follow.