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Nov. 28, 2005
BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Chosen’ Explores Barriers to Admission at Harvard, Yale,
Princeton; ‘Big Three’ Today Still Lack Economic Diversity, Despite
Affirmative Action Efforts
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
Hinton, WV (HNN) – Jerome Karabel brings an experienced sociologist’s
(University of California at Berkeley) perspective to the mystifying subject
of who gets to study at Harvard, Yale and Princeton – the so-called “Big
Three” of America’s selective universities – in “The Chosen: The Hidden
History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton”
(Houghton Mifflin, $28.00, 711 pages, illustrated, annotated, indexed).
Karabel largely avoids academic jargon in this very comprehensive look at
admissions procedures, from the days when passing tests of ability in Greek
and Latin by private school students was the ticket to ride, through the
exclusion of bright Jewish boys – the three schools were essentially all
male until the 1960s – through the racial turmoil of the 1960s to the
present day where anxiety is the marker as affluent parents do everything
they can to get their children into prestigious schools.
Of course, for the vast majority of parents, getting a child into a far less
selective school is the goal, since only a few thousand can attend Harvard,
Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Chicago and other selective private and public
universities, including Karabel’s Berkeley. Coming from a generation born in
the Depression, I received a superior education at Northern Illinois
University from 1957 to 1961, with all my classes taught by professors – no
instruction by a graduate assistant or teaching assistant.
Karabel points out early on that our system of choosing who matriculates is
unique to the U.S. among advanced industrial nations; in Japan and France,
for example, strictly academic requirements have always been used to select
students at the University of Tokyo and Ecole Normale Superieure. The system
we see today was developed to keep out Jews, especially those of Eastern
European origin and especially those who studied at selective public schools
like the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, Karabel points out.
Universities denied they were using quotas, but the use of subjective
measures instead of test results and grades served to limit the percentage
of Jewish students. Harvard, Yale and Princeton wanted to avoid what
happened at fellow Ivy League member Columbia, where in the early 1920s,
Jews accounted for as much as 40 percent of each freshman class, Karabel
notes. By 1922, about a fifth of Harvard’s freshman classes were Jewish, far
in excess of the proportion of Jews in the overall population.
Instead of using test results alone, admissions officials at the Big Three –
starting at Harvard under an anti-Semitic president named A. Lawrence Lowell
– used measures of “manliness,” “character,” and other extremely subjective
indicators and put emphasis on prep school athletic ability to pick the
freshman class. They also used questions about the applicant’s mother’s
maiden name and if an applicant had used another name – an obvious attempt
to root out Jews who changed their names to avoid persecution in a deeply
anti-Semitic society. They avoided recruiting students in states like New
York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which had relatively populous Jewish
communities.
They also selected “legacies” – students like John F. Kennedy and George W.
Bush, Harvard and Yale respectively, whose fathers were graduates – in far
greater percentages than non-legacies. There’s a photo of “W” playing rugby
as a Yale undergraduate, with a note that his grades and extracurricular
activities at his prep school, Andover, were so meager that an admissions
officer suggested he apply at another school. These factors led to a
situation that still prevails today, with children of working class
background underrepresented in the nation’s selective schools.
Karabel, himself a Harvard graduate (B.A. 1972, Ph.D. 1977) covers the
terrain explored in Nicholas Lemann’s 1999 book “The Big Test” on how the
SAT became an integral part of the application process. But Karabel
emphasizes that SAT scores alone do not determine who gets in. Princeton,
especially, was unfriendly to Jews, thanks in large part to its system of
discriminatory “eating” clubs like the Cottage and Ivy; the New Jersey
school also heavily favored legacies and totally banned blacks. Karabel
tells of a black student, who later became a high-ranking judge in New York,
who was pulled out of a Princeton admission queue and told to apply at
another college. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), a member of the Cottage
eating club and a Princeton dropout, called the school “the pleasantest
country club in America.”
Harvard and Yale were not as hostile toward blacks as Princeton, but
African-American students were a minuscule percentage of the student body
until the racial unrest of the 1960s, when efforts were made – particularly
by Yale’s Kingman Brewster – to recruit blacks. By so doing, Brewster
avoided the unrest that plagued Harvard and Columbia, among other schools,
and paved the way for the admission of women and the end of the Jewish
quota.
In the late 1980s, Asian-American students at The Big Three began
complaining that they were the “new Jews,” subject to an informal quota.
Karabel points out that Asian-Americans have the highest SAT scores of any
group, even though they resist the appellation “the model minority.”
Karabel’s own university, UC Berkeley, has been accused in recent years of
restricting Asian-American enrollment by subjective measures, since their
test scores are above Anglos, Hispanics and blacks.
This aspect of Jewish exclusion could be overdrawn and Karabel often does
this. Prestigious schools like MIT and the University of Chicago used grades
and test scores to select their freshmen classes, which offered excellent
opportunities for those excluded by Harvard, Yale or Princeton. The
University of Chicago, once a legendary football power, even dropped
high-pressure intercollegiate athletics in the 1930s to concentrate on
academic matters.
The major issue today, the author notes, is the lack of class diversity,
with working class kids woefully underrepresented in the Big Three and other
selective schools. Surprisingly, among the best schools for offering poor
but bright students opportunities are the top University of California
campuses and extremely selective Cal Tech in Pasadena.
Especially at Princeton, alumni resisted the admission of women, Karabel
notes in his chapter on how co-education came to the Big Three. The older
the alumnus, the greater the resistance, he observes. Many older, wealthier
alumni withheld contributions to Princeton, but Karabel suggests that we
shouldn’t shed tears for Old Nassau: the school has the highest endowment on
a per capita basis. With about 7,000 students, it’s also the smallest of the
Big Three.
This is a feast of a book, invaluable for anyone studying the culture of a
nation that claims to be egalitarian. As the author points out, today this
is hardly the case at The Big Three, even after the revolutionary admissions
changes of the 1960s and 1970s.
Publisher web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
