Dartmouth's Chosen Sons: A History of Admission and Exclusion

By Michael J. Ellis | Monday, January 9, 2006

BOOK REVIEW

The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
Jerome Karabel
Jerome Karabel, 2005

Editors' Note: This is the first in a series of articles this term examining the past and future of Dartmouth's admissions policy.

Admissions to the nation's most selective universities is not based on merit, and it never really has been. Rather, as Jerome Karabel, a sociology professor from the University of California-Berkeley, argues in The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, admissions standards have always been crafted by the Ivy League universities to admit the students the ruling classes wanted to admit and exclude the less-favored, regardless of their merit. In his exhaustive new history of admissions at the nation's three most selective universities, Karabel makes it clear that the standards for determining who is favored in the admissions process and who is left by the wayside are a broad reflection of America's broadly-defined intellectual and political elite.

The Chosen certainly does not lack thoroughness or detail: Karabel's sedulous craftsmanship is evident as he examines admissions at the Big Three. His prose is lucid, but too often the chapters devolve into exactly what the title implies—at every stage, he guides the reader through the history of admissions of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in exactly that order. Sometimes this provides an interesting comparative perspective, but far too often it is merely repetitive. Often, he is literally repetitive: the same quotes and statistics re-appear in different chapters. When the three universities are responding to the same social pressures in the same way, Karabel still explains each of their parallel reactions in intricate detail. At the same time, he gives short shrift to some more important changes, like how the emergence of co-education and affirmative action changed the character of the Ivies' campuses, choosing instead to remain focused on administrators' memoranda and reports. Inside the 600-page tome, however, there is a quite good 300-page book.

Karabel begins his story in 1900, when a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, scion of the New York establishment, entered Harvard. Entrance standards among the top universities were relatively homogenous: if a student graduated from an approved high school with the appropriate coursework, or had done well enough on entrance examinations, he was admitted. Dartmouth's own admission standards were not much different—an 1876 faculty resolution stated that only "students from such Fitting Schools as have a regular and thorough course of preparation for College, of at least three years, will be admitted by us hereafter, without examination here, on the Certificate of their respective Principals." The certificates, issued by headmasters of schools "approved for certificate admission to Dartmouth College," declared that the graduating senior was "of good moral character" and "has met the requirement of ten and one-half units of prescribed work for admission." For students pursuing an A.B. degree, the prescribed work included four years of Latin, three years of English, one-and-a-half years of algebra, a year of geometry, and a year of history. For the more scientifically-inclined pursuing a B.S. degree, the Latin requirement was dropped in favor of a modern language, and a year of science preparation was added.

As Karabel shows, such admission standards served their purpose of easily turning the WASP graduates of northeastern boarding schools like Andover, Exeter, Groton, Choate, St. Paul's, and Lawrenceville into the freshmen of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth. The admissions committees of the Ivy League only allowed certificate admissions for the bastions of the WASP establishment, and the entrance examinations proved strenuous enough (Yale, for example, did not drop Greek from its entrance examinations until 1904 and Latin until 1931) that public school graduates were incapable of passing them. Even the public schools of New York City, the country's largest city, did not offer the necessary courses for admittance to Princeton or Yale.

But as the nation's public high school population continued to grow and the classical language requirements were eliminated, more and more public school graduates started to pass the Ivies' entrance examinations. Much to the dismay of the WASP establishment amidst the racially-charged atmosphere of social Darwinism, the products of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia's top public high schools were more often than not Jewish. It is when discussing the rise of America's Jewish population in economic and social status, and their concomitantly rising numbers at the Ivies, that Karabel finds his forte. By 1920, Columbia University was 40 percent Jewish while Harvard's Jewish enrollment exceeded 20 percent. The reaction of the Ivy League establishment was not anti-Semitic in the simplest sense, for it was not the presence of Jews in the academy that they minded, but their number. As one Jewish student at Harvard wrote in the 1920s,

We learned that it was numbers that mattered; bad or good, too many Jews were not liked…It was the natural thing for these kindly-mannered men (the admissions committee), who bore not a trace of malice, to admit that a few good Jews were quite delightful at the club, or the hotel—but they must 'not for their own sake' accumulate, even though the accumulation be induced by the worthy feeling that Harvard was the best place in the world.

The problem, as Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania found out in the early 1920s, was that once the Jewish students arrived with their higher grades and more intellectual demeanor, the Anglo-Saxon elite left. Columbia, for example, attracted 16 percent of the sons of New York's elite between 1900 and 1909; in the next decade, the proportion dropped to just six percent. An anonymous observer of Columbia wrote that

Singularly absent is the grace, the swagger, the tall attractive sleekness which, if it does not always dominate the usual college group, at least always touches it importantly. These [Columbia] men, one senses at once, are not of the highest caste…seen quickly, there is even a certain grubbiness about them. One somehow expects them all to be Jews, for it is usually the Jewish members of such a group who lower the communal easy handsomeness.

Harvard's president during the 1920s, the tradition-minded A. Lawrence Lowell, was afraid his university would become another Columbia and lose its share of the Protestant elite to Williams and Dartmouth. As he himself put it, "the summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also." His response was to institute a measure that had already been at place at Dartmouth since 1921—quotas on the number of Jews in each freshman class. Harvard then set about classifying its applicants by three categories: J1 ("conclusively Jewish"), J2 ("preponderance of evidence suggests Jewishness"), and J3 ("possibility the student might be Jewish") and imposed limits on the number of students from each category.

Dartmouth's change of admission policies in 1921, from certificate admission to selective admissions was nothing short of revolutionary. The September 25, 1921 Sunday Herald's headline blared that "Dartmouth, 'Mother of Men,' Is Turning Men Away: Webster's College at Hanover Cannot Accommodate All Those Who Apply for Admission—Each Must Take His Turn." The idea that Dartmouth would only accept a certain number of freshmen, rather than all those who qualified for admission, was a "most radical innovation," according to the New York Times. Publicly, President Ernest Martin Hopkins stated that selective admissions were necessary because the College could no longer physically accommodate all those who applied. In part, this was true—but selective admissions were also another tool that could be used to exclude Jewish applicants without giving detailed reasons why they had been rejected.

Admissions office guidelines noted that scholarship was to be an important factor in the new selective admissions process, but not exclusively so: "character," as rated by the applicant's high school principal played a large role, as well as the principle of "geographical distribution," and additional preference for sons of alumni. While seemingly innocuous, geographical distribution allowed the admissions office to give preference to applicants who were "residents of New Hampshire, of districts west of the Mississippi or south of the Potomac and Ohio rivers." These geographical preferences, also adopted at Harvard and Yale, not only expanded the Ivy League's reach outside the northeast, but also enabled admissions officers to bring more non-Jewish applicants into the admissions pool. Privately, Hopkins confided in a 1934 application to an alumnus,

We haven't any barriers against the admission of Jews, and as a matter of fact, I should not like to see the time come when we were not including Jews in our undergraduate body in reasonable proportion. It is true, however, that in recent years the applications have increased from boys of Jewish blood that we acknowledgedly take a smaller proportion of the Jewish applicants than of the Gentiles….It is a problem full of difficulties, as far as being certain of our fairness is concerned, but after all it would be quixotic to allow ourselves to be overrun racially as it would be unfair to have a definite exclusion. Compromises are never satisfactory, but we are doing the best we can.

The admissions office therefore took a great deal of care to determine applicants' racial background—the 1934 application for admission to Dartmouth not only asked students to "describe briefly your racial inheritance" and "describe briefly your religious background," but also to submit a photograph and to write a "paragraph concerning your health during the past two years." On the forms that high school principals and alumni interviewers were asked to submit, applicants were rated on "intellectual curiosity" (ranging from "exceptional to "decidedly deficient"), but also on their "personality" ("extremely appealing" to "displeasing") and their "character" ("completely trustworthy" to "questionable at times").

Sheer scholastic ability was rarely a guarantee for admission—as president of Yale in the 1930s, James Angell, wrote in a letter to friend, "the credible passing of the entrance examination is a sine qua non, it is by no means the whole story." Yale was in search of "boys of really fine personality" and "sound physique is hardly less essential." The development of non-academic criteria for admissions to the Ivy League came not out of athletic recruiting or financial development reasons, but rather, a desire to keep out the "undesirable" elements of society, in the same manner any contemporary metropolitan gentlemen's club would.

But after the metastasizing effects of the Second World War and later the Cold War on the Ivy League, the barriers to Jewish entry slowly fell. After America had fought a war to rid Europe of genocidal anti-Semitism, it became socially unacceptable to systematically discriminate against Jewish applicants. And after the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the perception that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union proliferated, the admissions directors of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale found it harder than ever to justify non-academic criteria for admission. The rise of a more meritocratic admissions process was not long-lived, though, when the racially-charged conflict of the 1960s overtook American society.

Karabel is particularuly strong when describing the way in which university administrators were pressured by a combination of popular opinion, civil disobedience, and the threat of outright armed force from black student groups to recalibrate the admissions process. Though some administrators, notably Kingman Brewster and R. Inslee "Inky" Clark of Yale, genuinely believed in instituting affirmative action, many others simply gave into militant pressure. At Harvard in April 1969, administrators feared that militant black students would take over administration buildings as they had at Cornell a few weeks earlier. The crisis was only resolved when the administration agreed in "an academic Munich" to create a Department of Afro-American Studies and fundamentally alter the admissions process by hiring black admissions officers, approaching students from inner-city schools, and giving special preference to black applicants in an effort to reach a "critical mass" of black students.

The conclusion at which Karabel arrives quite logically after nearly six hundred pages is that merit has never been the sole criterion for admission to the Ivy League, and that furthermore, merit has always been defined by the social groups in power in America as what they wanted it to be. When the WASP establishment ruled politics and business in the first half of the twentieth century, their criteria of athletic ability, strong moral character, and "clubbishness" held sway; when Jews moved up in the nation's social order after World War Two, pure intelligence and academic ability became more important; and after blacks, women, and other "historically disadvantaged" groups joined the elite in the 1960s, preferences for minorities became paramount. The admissions process itself, then, deteriorated to nothing more than a squabble between favored groups—athletes, legacies, minorities, etc.—over the slots at elite institutions. As John T. Osander, a former director of admission at Princeton (where more than 40 percent of spots in the freshman class are reserved for applicants with some sort of "hook" from a favored group) described the process,

The pressures on the admission office from various special interest groups continue somewhat uniformly: faculty, alumni, coaches, parents, school principals or headmasters, may lobby from different points of view, but all do so against each other in competition for a set number of places. There has not been a year when the admission office has suddenly ignored any one of these special interests. In fact, the weaving pattern from year to year suggests that even a slight dip one year brings a kind of pressure that pushes up that measurable item the next year at the probable expense of some other variable. In other words, the patterns suggest that what is referred to admissions 'policy' is actually a slowly evolving set of practices that more or less seem to balance, or at least satisfy, a variety of pressures.

What Karabel ignores, however, is the sea-change in the philosophy of pre- and post-1960s admissions: the shift from admissions policies that sought to reinforce the social status quo to those, still in place today, that attempt to dramatically remake it by lifting a new class up to elite status. Instead of recognizing those who have made it to the top of the social ladder by rewarding their children's high standardized test scores and formidable high school training, our elite institutions like Dartmouth attempt to engineer a freshman class that looks "more like America."

A telling statistic that Karabel notes is that the difficulty of admitting highly-qualified minority students comes not one of overcoming prejudice or reaching out more thoroughly to inner-city students—rather, the problem lies with the acute shortage of such students. According to the College Examination Board, in 2004, there were just 2,962 black students with SAT math scores above 650, and just 3,039 who scored above 650 on the verbal section—this when the average SAT score for the class of 2009 at Dartmouth was 1461 combined. Despite minorities' lower test scores, though, admissions officers do their best to find qualified minority applicants. The result, though, is a freshman class that looks decently like America in terms of skin color—Dartmouth is six percent black and six percent Hispanic—but that does not even come close to mirroring it economically. Just three percent of students at the most selective colleges and universities come from families in the lowest income quartile nationally.

The intrinsic problem of an admissions process that attempts to holistically create a representative class is that it conflates equality of opportunity, a principle that Americans overwhelmingly support and believe in, with the much-less popular equality of outcome. Instead of scouring the country for the best and the brightest and bringing them to Dartmouth in a Jeffersonian pursuit of natural talent, the admissions department is pursuing a doggedly idealistic path dedicated to forcibly redistributing privilege.

Furthermore, today's decreasingly meritocratic admissions process risks destroying the very qualities that make Dartmouth what it is, that drove it to the top of the American educational system. As heinous as the admissions policies of the 1920 were in their exclusion of Jews, they were at least successful in their goal of training the nation's political, economic, academic, and social leadership—the graduates of the Big Three from the first half of the twentieh century undoubtedly controlled the reins of power for much of the second half. It is almost a variant of the chicken-and-egg phenomenon: did Dartmouth become an elite institution by instilling values and qualities that made her graduates succeed after they left Hanover, or did they succeed because these students came to Dartmouth smarter, more hardworking, and better-connected than their counterparts at other schools? By self-assuredly choosing to believe that it is Dartmouth itself, rather than its students, that creates success in life, our admissions officers are placing their bets on a relatively untested hypothesis. Let even those of us who are ideologically opposed to such a proposition hope that they are right.

Dartmouth's Chosen Sons: A History of Admission and Exclusion

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