More on Elite College Admissions

The Dodger notes this is about the fifth time this book has been reviewed or summarized, starting with Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker and working through the WaPo, Times book review, now the times.

This publication is important because of the struggle over race conscious efforts by university admissions policies to reflect the diversity of the American population.

This time, the reviewer appears an asian rather than a Jew. Although the main force of the policies of the 20's was to exclude Jews, there is certainly a current effort to exclude asians.

The review is a series of quotes from the book, less than great. All reviewers have complained that Karabel includes too much data, making for boring reading. [Had he skimmed it over, he would probably be racked for no documentation.]

That said, the Dodger liked this quote:
Mr. Karabel reports that on the eve of President John F. Kennedy's election, the three schools were "still de facto segregated institutions - less than 1 percent black and, in the case of Princeton, enrolling just 1 African-American freshman in a class of 826." And while anti-Semitism was officially taboo, he notes, "Harvard rejected three-quarters of the applicants from the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant that year (compared to just 31 percent from Exeter and Andover) while Yale limited the Jewish presence in the freshman class to one student in eight."

The Dodger gives personal testimony to the accuracy of these numbers, but it's super to have some numbers. Further quotes from the review say Karabel affirms that things have changed radically. The Dodger concedes that letting women in, a change of the later 70's, and some better recruitment among African Americans has changed the atmosphere some from the old boys club.


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Books of The Times 'The Chosen'

The Course of Social Change Through College Admission

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: November 25, 2005

Houghton Mifflin

Jerome Karabel, author of "The Chosen."

The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton
By Jerome Karabel
Illustrated. 711 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $28.

In his informative but often vexing new book, Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, looks at the admissions process at the so-called Big Three and how the criteria governing that process have changed over the last century in response to changes in society at large. His book covers much of the same ground that Nicholas Lemann covered - a lot more incisively - in his 1999 book "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy," and it also raises some of the same questions that Jacques Steinberg, a reporter for The New York Times, did in his 2002 book, "The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College."

Mr. Karabel reports that on the eve of President John F. Kennedy's election, the three schools were "still de facto segregated institutions - less than 1 percent black and, in the case of Princeton, enrolling just 1 African-American freshman in a class of 826." And while anti-Semitism was officially taboo, he notes, "Harvard rejected three-quarters of the applicants from the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant that year (compared to just 31 percent from Exeter and Andover) while Yale limited the Jewish presence in the freshman class to one student in eight."

...

"By the mid-1970's," Mr. Karabel writes, "the formula - that is, the new admissions criteria and practices - used by the Big Three had been fully institutionalized: need-blind admissions, no discrimination against women or Jews, and special consideration for historically underrepresented minorities as well as athletes and legacies."

...

Although Mr. Karabel's narrative becomes mired, in its later pages, in a Marxist-flavored philosophical questioning of the very idea of meritocracy, his account of changing admissions policies at Yale, Harvard and Princeton serves a useful purpose. It puts each school's actions in context with the others' and situates those developments within a broader political and social context. While at the same time it shows, in minute detail, how the likes of Nick Carraway, Oliver Barrett IV and Amory Blaine went from being typical students at the Big Three to being members of just one segment of coed, multicultural and increasingly diverse student bodies - if, that is, they could even manage to be admitted today.