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Understanding the elite schools...
From Sunday's Post, a book review:
The Ivy Curtain
How meritocracy in higher education arose from a system built to keep WASPs in and Jews out.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kittay
(Sunday, October 30, 2005; Page BW03)
THE CHOSEN
The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
By Jerome Karabel
(Houghton Mifflin. 711 pp. $28)
an excerpt from the review:
Proof of extracurricular activities, leadership qualities, letters of recommendation -- we take all these as natural, necessary and even enlightened elements of the college application process, though they cause us endless anxiety. Actually, they don't resemble in the least the way people in Europe or Japan get into college. They're a result of a particular American challenge at the turn of the 20th century, which President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard then characterized as follows: how to "prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews."
Prior to the 1920s, Harvard, Princeton and Yale accepted all applicants who met their academic requirements. Adjusting the size of each university's incoming class was not a problem since there were very few such qualified candidates, mostly because only a handful of elite northeastern private schools -- such as Groton and Andover and St. Paul's -- provided the kind of classical education (including Latin and some Greek) that the universities required. Since admissions were not "selective" in any substantial sense, none of the Big Three needed an admissions department.
The Chosen is an exhaustive account of how we got from that efficient and cozy arrangement to where we are today. It's particularly fascinating because there is such a growing stake -- and so many stakeholders -- in the process of selecting who gets access to higher education in general and elite education in particular.
But beware and rejoice. Beware because this story, alas, is not one about a group of presidents and deans steadily becoming enlightened to the virtues of equal opportunity. And rejoice in the details that Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel reveals and the patient analysis that he deploys; he shows how, in spite of an applicant's proven academic performance, the Big Three favored in overwhelming numbers the sons of the Protestant moneyed class because the institutions determined that it was in their self-interest to do so. The way these universities have sometimes answered but mostly resisted societal demands to open their doors turns out to be a juicy story indeed. And "juicy" is not the kind of adjective one customarily uses to describe a book with 557 pages of text and almost 3,000 footnotes.
By the end of the 19th century, Harvard, Yale and Princeton were committed not primarily to refining the intellect but to welcoming the well-bred, athletic, public-spirited and sociable scions of the privileged -- young men who may not have performed well academically but were destined to be the leaders of the next generation. "By the 1890s, 74 percent of Boston's upper class and 65 percent of New York's sent their sons to either Harvard, Yale, or Princeton," Karabel notes. Things took a new turn when Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, concerned that his school was educating just the wealthy, and his successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, took measures to attract more boys from good public schools. Though hardly egalitarians, Eliot and Lowell modified the university's entrance requirements -- including dropping Latin and Greek requirements -- to encourage more schools to prepare their students to compete for Harvard slots.
The result of such measures, at Harvard and elsewhere, was a horrific surprise: too many Jews! Jewish enrollment jumped to then historic highs of 4 percent at Princeton (1918), 9 percent at Yale (1917) and a distressing 20 percent of the freshman class at Harvard (1918). Though most of these students were more than academically competent, they didn't fit the usual definition of "gentlemen." And their numbers were continuing to increase. A meeting of New England deans in 1918 put the question squarely: How could they limit the growing Jewish presence?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/27/AR2005102701733.html
and a live online discussion with the author:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2005/10/31/DI2005103100369.html?sub=AR
The Ivy Curtain
How meritocracy in higher education arose from a system built to keep WASPs in and Jews out.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kittay
(Sunday, October 30, 2005; Page BW03)
THE CHOSEN
The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
By Jerome Karabel
(Houghton Mifflin. 711 pp. $28)
an excerpt from the review:
Proof of extracurricular activities, leadership qualities, letters of recommendation -- we take all these as natural, necessary and even enlightened elements of the college application process, though they cause us endless anxiety. Actually, they don't resemble in the least the way people in Europe or Japan get into college. They're a result of a particular American challenge at the turn of the 20th century, which President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard then characterized as follows: how to "prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews."
Prior to the 1920s, Harvard, Princeton and Yale accepted all applicants who met their academic requirements. Adjusting the size of each university's incoming class was not a problem since there were very few such qualified candidates, mostly because only a handful of elite northeastern private schools -- such as Groton and Andover and St. Paul's -- provided the kind of classical education (including Latin and some Greek) that the universities required. Since admissions were not "selective" in any substantial sense, none of the Big Three needed an admissions department.
The Chosen is an exhaustive account of how we got from that efficient and cozy arrangement to where we are today. It's particularly fascinating because there is such a growing stake -- and so many stakeholders -- in the process of selecting who gets access to higher education in general and elite education in particular.
But beware and rejoice. Beware because this story, alas, is not one about a group of presidents and deans steadily becoming enlightened to the virtues of equal opportunity. And rejoice in the details that Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel reveals and the patient analysis that he deploys; he shows how, in spite of an applicant's proven academic performance, the Big Three favored in overwhelming numbers the sons of the Protestant moneyed class because the institutions determined that it was in their self-interest to do so. The way these universities have sometimes answered but mostly resisted societal demands to open their doors turns out to be a juicy story indeed. And "juicy" is not the kind of adjective one customarily uses to describe a book with 557 pages of text and almost 3,000 footnotes.
By the end of the 19th century, Harvard, Yale and Princeton were committed not primarily to refining the intellect but to welcoming the well-bred, athletic, public-spirited and sociable scions of the privileged -- young men who may not have performed well academically but were destined to be the leaders of the next generation. "By the 1890s, 74 percent of Boston's upper class and 65 percent of New York's sent their sons to either Harvard, Yale, or Princeton," Karabel notes. Things took a new turn when Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, concerned that his school was educating just the wealthy, and his successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, took measures to attract more boys from good public schools. Though hardly egalitarians, Eliot and Lowell modified the university's entrance requirements -- including dropping Latin and Greek requirements -- to encourage more schools to prepare their students to compete for Harvard slots.
The result of such measures, at Harvard and elsewhere, was a horrific surprise: too many Jews! Jewish enrollment jumped to then historic highs of 4 percent at Princeton (1918), 9 percent at Yale (1917) and a distressing 20 percent of the freshman class at Harvard (1918). Though most of these students were more than academically competent, they didn't fit the usual definition of "gentlemen." And their numbers were continuing to increase. A meeting of New England deans in 1918 put the question squarely: How could they limit the growing Jewish presence?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/27/AR2005102701733.html
and a live online discussion with the author:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2005/10/31/DI2005103100369.html?sub=AR
posted by annie | 1:17 PM
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