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What happens if selective colleges change their admission policies? We answer this by analyzing the world's first introduction of nationally centralized meritocratic admissions in the early twentieth century. We find a persistent meritocracy-equity tradeoff. The centralized admissions process admitted more high-achieving applicants, consequently producing more future top bureaucratic elites from the exposed cohorts. But this impact came at the distributional cost of urban-born high-achievers crowding out rural-born students from elite higher education and career advancement. Several decades later, the meritocratic centralization enlarged the urban advantage to produce top income earners and other career elites.