Commentary To get into the elite in America today—and for the last few decades—you need good grades, high test scores, a bachelor’s degree from a top institution, and often a graduate degree as well. The advent of the Information Age rewarded people with a talent for handling words and numbers, and school and college is where you learned those talents and proved that you’d done so. The requirement has stuck, and it’s more binding than ever before. In the past, the education one acquired in those select places gave you a set of abstract skills, the kinds of cognitive aptitudes that don’t have a politics or a religion or morality. Good people and bad people both possess them, atheists and believers, too, libertarians and leftists and conservatives. The pipelines of accreditation historically understood that. They didn’t ask aspirants for whom they voted, where they stood on matters of race and …