Those who embraced the meritocratic project knew that true equality of opportunity required more than rooting out discrimination. It required leveling the playing field, so that people from all social and economic backgrounds could equip themselves to compete effectively in a knowledge-based, global economy. This led the mainstream parties of the 1990s and 2000s to make education the centerpiece of their response to inequality, stagnant wages, and the loss of manufacturing jobs. "Think about every problem, every challenge we face," said George H. W. Bush in 1991. "The solution to each starts with education." In Britain, Tony Blair, setting out his centrist, reform-minded agenda for the Labour Party in 1996, put it emphatically: "Ask me for my three main priorities for government and I tell you: education, education, and education." Bill Clinton expressed the importance of education, and its connection to jobs, with a rhyming couplet: "What you can earn depends on what you can learn." In the new era of global competition, he argued, workers without a college degree would struggle to find good jobs at decent wages. "We think everybody ought to be able to go to college, because what you can earn depends on what you can learn." Clinton invoked this couplet in speeches and remarks more than thirty times during his presidency. It reflected the common sense of the time and had bipartisan appeal. Senator John McCain, a Republican, often used it during his 2008 presidential campaign.

Thomas Frank, an author with populist sensibilities, criticized liberals' focus on education as the remedy for inequality: "To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you'll need in the society of the future." Frank found this response to inequality implausible and self-serving: It isn't really an answer at all; it's a moral judgment, handed down by the successful from the vantage of their own success. Frank argued that all the education talk distracted Democrats from thinking clearly about the policies that had led to inequality. "The real problem was one of inadequate worker power, not inadequate worker smarts. The people who produced were losing their ability to demand a share in what they made. The people who owned were taking more and more." But as a solution to inequality and the plight of workers who lost out in the decades of globalization, the single-minded focus on education had a damaging side effect: eroding the social esteem accorded those who had not gone to college.