Meritocracy doesn't exist for the poor. Before getting my job at The Atlantic through a random personal connection, I experienced job discrimination on the basis of not having graduated from a "prestigious" institution. Obviously this is coded language for being poor. To add insult to injury, I had actually aced a couple engineering courses that University of Michigan had provided to my high school class. You don't get to put that on your resume though. Even though I've always been honest to fault, I would never judge a poor person for skirting the rules of society. At the end of the day, if hiring managers can't tell whether candidates have fake credentials, all that does is prove that credentialism is not about merit.