Affirmative Action for the Rich

Those of us supporting affirmative action in elite college admissions have been given significant new data on which to base understanding of the current controversy. This study focuses on the skewing of admissions based on secondary school performance - not necessarily "merit" - in order to limit the number of Jews in the Ivy League. It's about affirmative action in reverse.

In the 19th century, the Dodger expects that anyone [who was male] whose family could pay for Harvard could go to Harvard. Contrary to the book's thesis, rather than a democratization of admissions requirements by Eliot and Lowell, the surge of Jews [and other undesirable immigrants] at Harvard was more likely a surge of families able to pay tuition.

Harvard, Yale and Princeton - the other Big 3 - aimed to dominate the culture of the United States by admitting sufficient sons of the ruling class to rule the country and fund the university, while also admitting sufficient sons of the rising middle class to indoctrinate the future leaders of those communities.

Into the mid '60's, the Ivies were virtually all white, with a few east asians and fewer african americans. Then, the progressive demand to open the university to african americans also met the ruling class need to influence those communities by indoctrinating their future leaders.

At this point, Jews got to be white, and the mostly chinese asian community got to be white as well.

Affirmative action came to be a zero sum at the fringe: jews and asians faced off against blacks and hispanics [victims of more systematic societal discrimination in the face of less cohesive communties.]

The college admissions battle is not being fought among the Ivies, who are private. It's being fought at the "Public Ivies" - Michigan, Berkeley, North Carolina, and lead state schools like Texas-Austin.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/27/AR2005102701733.html

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

Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005 3 p.m. ET
By Jerome Karabel
Houghton Mifflin. 711 pp. $28

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.

...... "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?

Lowell worried that living on campus with a significant number of Jews would poison the social experience of the members of the Protestant elite and cause it to send its sons elsewhere, just as the New York City social set turned away from Columbia in the century's first decade.

In 1923, Lowell finally came up with a politically palatable solution: He limited the size of the incoming class to 1,000 (an innovation), which meant incorporating an evaluation of each candidate's nonacademic qualities into the admissions decision....

Yale's admissions chairman, Robert Corwin, had grumbled in 1929 that the list of names of recently admitted students "reads like some of the 'begat' portions of the Old Testament and might easily be mistaken for a recent roll call at the Wailing Wall." The next year, he limited Jewish enrollment to just 8.2 percent -- a result he hailed as having been attained "without hue and cry and without any attempt on the part of those chiefly affected to prove that Yale had organized a pogrom." ... As late as 1951, Harvard admitted an astonishing 94 percent of its legacies.
... Most university leaders made no bones about limiting the "super-bright" to only 10 percent of each class.
Astonishingly, this subjective college admissions system -- designed in the 1920s to discreetly exclude as many "social undesirables" as possible -- is the system we continue to use today. And the central irony of The ...