Within my lifetime, the Ivy League schools admitted students because of birth right, aristocracy and wealth.
Then the idea of denying admission to the feckless fortunate sons and daughters took hold and the glittering prizes of admissions to "elite colleges" which were thought to be where individuals could "get your ticket punched" to a life on easy street, with jobs in banks, brokerage houses, the medical profession, the higher reaches of the legal profession.
The idea was the cream would rise to the top and the weak children of wealth would have to either swim or sink.
It was the idea of being fair.
But then the University of California at Berkeley instituted a ruthlessly "merit based" system and they found their campuses filled with 43% students of Asian immigrants and white students dropping to 28%.
Oops--not what the scions of Harvard University wanted to see.
You read articles like the one in a recent New Yorker, describing a 17 year old applicant who sounds like a the ultimate in achievement and merit: A grade point average of 4.67, which sounds like, as the author notes, a typo, exceptional college board and ACT scores, accomplished musician, community service--turned down at Harvard, Princeton and Yale and wait listed at Stanford.
What more could H/P&Y have wanted?
Well, it turns out Harvard has a score for personality, kindness, courage and amiability and this ultra competitive--ASIAN--kid must be a grade grubbing grind, focused on beating the system. In short, undesirable.
So, if he excels, he's the modern version of the Jew--must be despicably unsocial. If he fails to excel, no dice. Catch-22.
The real problem is, of course, Harvard clearly has a quota, just as Yale, Princeton and Harvard once had quotas for Jews, who in their time out competed the entitled, titled and complacent sons of WASPs.
What this does on the macro level is evident, but consider the micro effects. When I was applying to college, in 1964, a classmate had all the attributes that rejected Asian kid had, but none of the disadvantages: He was not a Jew, not Asian, not Black. A white bread kid who got rejected from Yale. The kids who got in scoffed at him saying, "Well, obviously Yale knew something about him."
And I thought, no, obviously Yale did not know enough about him.
There was this magical thinking that the Ivies, god like from Olympus, passed the ultimate judgment and kids we thought we knew were either far superior to our assessments or far worse.
Such faith in the process of meritocracy.
As it turned out, I snuck into the Ivy League myself and spent 10 years at Brown, Cornell and Yale.
Most of the students (and faculty) I encountered at these ivies were bright enough. Not knock your socks off bright. Not intimidatingly bright. Some were hypercompetitive, cut throats who tried to do well by making you do poorly--the guy who cut out the assigned pages in the library book held for students so those after him could not complete their assignment. There were those rare students who were clearly functioning on a higher plane than everyone else--but they were as rare on those campuses as they were elsewhere.
What I'm saying is those elite institutions, those playgrounds of the gods, those playing fields of Eaton where the next generation of leaders were trained were not peopled with students (or faculty) any more meritorious than elsewhere.
In fact, when you look at where our stars of science, technology, art, literature were pullulated, it was no more likely they would spring from the Ivies than from lesser planets.
Current leading intellectuals are more likely to be like Jill Lepore, who did her undergraduate work Tufts, than to be from Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
Captains of industry, many innovators in science came not from the elites, but from state schools.
Even Gates and Zuckerburg, who were freshmen at Harvard, left after one year, apparently concluding those institutions had nothing more to offer them.
You may say, well, those institutions were smart enough to know talent in those two, but you have to say those two could have gone anywhere, chose Harvard and then rejected it.
For my money, I'd think a better way for the Ivies to pursue the best and the brightest would be to establish a lowish bar based on grades, test scores and then put all the names in a hat an draw lots.
That would be a meritocracy of the gods.
Then the idea of denying admission to the feckless fortunate sons and daughters took hold and the glittering prizes of admissions to "elite colleges" which were thought to be where individuals could "get your ticket punched" to a life on easy street, with jobs in banks, brokerage houses, the medical profession, the higher reaches of the legal profession.
The idea was the cream would rise to the top and the weak children of wealth would have to either swim or sink.
It was the idea of being fair.
But then the University of California at Berkeley instituted a ruthlessly "merit based" system and they found their campuses filled with 43% students of Asian immigrants and white students dropping to 28%.
Oops--not what the scions of Harvard University wanted to see.
You read articles like the one in a recent New Yorker, describing a 17 year old applicant who sounds like a the ultimate in achievement and merit: A grade point average of 4.67, which sounds like, as the author notes, a typo, exceptional college board and ACT scores, accomplished musician, community service--turned down at Harvard, Princeton and Yale and wait listed at Stanford.
What more could H/P&Y have wanted?
Well, it turns out Harvard has a score for personality, kindness, courage and amiability and this ultra competitive--ASIAN--kid must be a grade grubbing grind, focused on beating the system. In short, undesirable.
So, if he excels, he's the modern version of the Jew--must be despicably unsocial. If he fails to excel, no dice. Catch-22.
The real problem is, of course, Harvard clearly has a quota, just as Yale, Princeton and Harvard once had quotas for Jews, who in their time out competed the entitled, titled and complacent sons of WASPs.
What this does on the macro level is evident, but consider the micro effects. When I was applying to college, in 1964, a classmate had all the attributes that rejected Asian kid had, but none of the disadvantages: He was not a Jew, not Asian, not Black. A white bread kid who got rejected from Yale. The kids who got in scoffed at him saying, "Well, obviously Yale knew something about him."
And I thought, no, obviously Yale did not know enough about him.
There was this magical thinking that the Ivies, god like from Olympus, passed the ultimate judgment and kids we thought we knew were either far superior to our assessments or far worse.
Such faith in the process of meritocracy.
As it turned out, I snuck into the Ivy League myself and spent 10 years at Brown, Cornell and Yale.
Most of the students (and faculty) I encountered at these ivies were bright enough. Not knock your socks off bright. Not intimidatingly bright. Some were hypercompetitive, cut throats who tried to do well by making you do poorly--the guy who cut out the assigned pages in the library book held for students so those after him could not complete their assignment. There were those rare students who were clearly functioning on a higher plane than everyone else--but they were as rare on those campuses as they were elsewhere.
What I'm saying is those elite institutions, those playgrounds of the gods, those playing fields of Eaton where the next generation of leaders were trained were not peopled with students (or faculty) any more meritorious than elsewhere.
In fact, when you look at where our stars of science, technology, art, literature were pullulated, it was no more likely they would spring from the Ivies than from lesser planets.
Current leading intellectuals are more likely to be like Jill Lepore, who did her undergraduate work Tufts, than to be from Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
Captains of industry, many innovators in science came not from the elites, but from state schools.
Even Gates and Zuckerburg, who were freshmen at Harvard, left after one year, apparently concluding those institutions had nothing more to offer them.
You may say, well, those institutions were smart enough to know talent in those two, but you have to say those two could have gone anywhere, chose Harvard and then rejected it.
For my money, I'd think a better way for the Ivies to pursue the best and the brightest would be to establish a lowish bar based on grades, test scores and then put all the names in a hat an draw lots.
That would be a meritocracy of the gods.
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