At the New Yorker, a Canadian looks at the mystery of Ivy League admissions. Along the way, he looks at a recent sociologist's history: - - - As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.” The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. - - - [Systems evolved; by the 1960s, quantitative methods were supplemented by the pursuit of the ineffible.] By the nineteen-sixties, Harvard’s admissions system had evolved into a series of complex algorithms. The school began by lumping all applicants into one of twenty-two dockets, according to their geographical origin. - - - More important, academic achievement was just one of four dimensions, further diluting the value of pure intellectual accomplishment. Athletic ability, rather than falling under “extracurriculars,” got a category all to itself, which explains why, even now, recruited athletes have an acceptance rate to the Ivies at well over twice the rate of other students, despite S.A.T. scores that are on average more than a hundred points lower. And the most important category? That mysterious index of “personal” qualities. According to Harvard’s own analysis, the personal rating was a better predictor of admission than the academic rating. http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/051010crat_atlarge
The piece above concludes on this note: "Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience. - - - "If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears."
Well, at least amongst the Harvard Law Faculty, there ARE too many "parlor pinks". They created a bogus theory of Jurisprudence called "Critical Legal Studies". It's essentially a Marxist class warfare view (except that they don't understand Marxism, either) which is funny, coming from a bunch of very well paid private school law professors dedicated to serving the wealthy and their equally wealthy children... CLS is a symptom of the major deficiency in American legal education today; lack of rigorous scholarship (IMHO).
