It’s pretty interesting to read about the history of selective admissions at Ivy League schools. Having grown up in Princeton, I had many Jewish and half-Jewish friends, so I’d heard about the history of Anti-Semitism in admissions but didn’t know exactly how they’d implemented their screening process. And I especially didn’t realize that they began giving preference to geographical diversity as a way to avoid letting Jews test into too many open slots. It always seemed odd to me that I’d meet Princeton students from Oklahoma or Alaska who were smart but who wouldn’t have been in the top echelon of students at Princeton High School. They got in because of where they were from, whereas countless Princeton High students didn’t get in because of where they were from. If you were from Princeton, you needed to be one of the top five students or so to have any chance to get in, so most people with Ivy-level credentials looked to Harvard, Yale or Columbia, where they had a better shot. So, ironically, kids in my generation (at least) were losing out to kids from out west or down south because of a system put in place to prevent too many Jews from attending Columbia or Harvard.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Meh whatever the history, its present implementation definitely exists outside of private Ivy League or schools their equivalent such as Stanford.
The University of Virginia is very difficult to get into if you’re from Virginia. It already has a low acceptance rate, especially for a public university (in the 20’s). Probably the only harder public schools to get accepted are Berkeley and UCLA. If you live here? Heh…
CA public universities (prefer) and recruit out-of-state and out-of-country students that can pay the higher full cost.
Same with Virginia. It’s much more noticeable at UVA, however, because it’s selective to begin with. The other “known” Virginia schools range between the 30’s (William and Mary) and 70’s (Virginia Tech). However, some programs are more selective than others. The engineering program at Tech is probably as difficult to get into as UVA proper, but if you apply as “University Studies” you can then transfer to an engineering program.
The other factor, for public schools, is loss of funding. They’re making it up by concentrating on out of state and especially foreign students. At the University of Washington, a majority of the undergrads now are from Asia, especially China, also Japan and Korea. They pay more. In-state students are shuffled off to secondary public schools – Western, Central, and Eastern Washington, and community colleges. And this is becoming increasingly common in other states as well.
All up and down the status hierarchy of universities, college is becoming less accessible and less affordable for American students from non-wealthy families. At the same time, an undergrad or even a graduate degree means less in the job market than ever before.
It’s all part of the calcification of class mobility in this country. Conservatives like to talk a lot of shit about hard work, self-reliance, and meritocracy, but the cold fact is that policies they’ve championed have already resulted in less class mobility in the US than in any other western democracy, and it’s getting steadily worse. Economically, we look a lot more like a banana republic than a democracy. That’s a feature, not a bug.
My son, a white Jewish kid, started at University of Washington and transferred to Western Washington University. The cost was the same at both schools.
You’re correct that public funding has dropped precipitously. We were paying $20k per year. But I’m not seeing a difference from one state school to another.
From the UW Registrar’s Office Quick Stats for the Seattle Campus Spring 2014:
Washington Residents–65.8%
Other US — 19.9%
International — 14.3%
Also:
Caucasian — 48.0%
Asian — 22.8%
International-14.3%
from https://depts.washington.edu/reptreq/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Quick_Stats_Spr2014_Seattle.pdf
It included undergraduates, graduates and professional students (MD, JD, DDS)
Also, I’m pretty sure than international students (those who need a student visa) aren’t included in the statistics for ethnicity. They’re just counted as “international” whether they’re from Vancouver, BC or Asia or anywhere else.
Also, Princeton really does do legacy admission in a fairly big way, although the admissions office doesn’t admit that.
For Princeton’s class of 2015, 33% of legacy applicants were admitted. The overall admissions rate for that class was 8.5%. hat’s a huge advantage!
(http://www.businessinsider.com/legacy-kids-have-an-admissions-advantage-2013-6)
The legacy system also helps preserve religious and racial inequities since kids are typically the same race and religion as their parents.
My daughter is a freshman at Princeton now. Of course, SHE was admitted solely based on her own merit; the fact that I am a Princeton grad had NOTHING to do with it! 😉
Bigotry and racism creates a visceral response for me. I may hate nothing more.
But having gone to Princeton High with a very homogenous group of arrogant, over entitled and closed minded snots, if I had paid to continue my education at Princeton at $50K a year, I would have felt ripped off.
I deliberately sought out a geographically and socioeconomic diverse college ( at least hugely diverse from me) and that experience has served me very well ever since. I think everything else I learned in classrooms there would have been largely wasted if I didn’t also learn to apply it in the diverse world we all need to face as adults.
Despite the evil roots, selective admissions that produce diverse student bodies serve the students and society and the nation well.
I mean if it chose to attend Princeton and Princeton filled itself with the same snots I would have felt cheated
I didn’t have the grades anyway, but I also knew that there wasn’t really any way for me to get in, which kind of eliminated my desire to give it a go, which was partly why I didn’t have the grades.
There’s something a little depressing about getting a 99th percentile national score on all your aptitude tests and then seeing that you’re only in the 83rd percentile in your own damn school.
Or, how about the year I went to boarding school and the headmaster tried to get people to hate me by telling a large group of students that I was playing dumb and had the highest IQ score at the school, then coming back to PHS and being barely above average.
For me, at least, it was a little disheartening to know that I couldn’t be the best and that I wasn’t ever going to be considered good enough to get into PU.
It’s not like I wanted to stay in Princeton, or even New Jersey, but that was how I felt at the end of the process, not during it when it mattered.
Then, when I left that hyper-intellectual environment, it took me a long time to adjust to not being in it. I stood out like a sore thumb in most places. But, yeah, I learned most of things I value precisely because I didn’t stay in the Ivy League culture. I learned more in North Philadelphia than I would have learned at Princeton. And I needed to try other areas of the country to see how other kinds of people live.
Marquette, however, was a little extreme for me.
The so-called elite schools are a rip off for most kids. I went to Johns Hopkins. Was in the top 3% of my high school class and had similar SAT scores but couldn’t get into Princeton because, being from the Jewish ghetto otherwise known as Long Island, I would have had to be top 1%. Either that or move to Montana for a couple of years.
Looking back, Hopkins was not a good choice. I went there because it was the most elite school to which I was admitted. I should have gone to some small college that would have given me a full ride or just one of the SUNY (NY state colleges) and graduated without debt. It was nice walking on marble floor and looking out through stained glass windows, but the education was no better than anywhere else. Honestly, some of the best classes I’ve ever taken were at community colleges.
The elite schools have snookered people. Was at Princeton just last week. The campus is almost surreal, like being in a museum of elite 19th Century WASP education or in some medieval European village. It really is a town designed for princes, the sons of privilege. Even now, it reeks of entitlement. Very weird and I’m not entirely sure why any normal kid would want to go there.
My daughter went to the University of Arizona for undergrad and then was accepted to six of the top ten law schools. She was impressed with the Columbia campus, which is very much like Princeton, but chose NYU instead because the atmosphere and the kids seemed so weird at Columbia. Now she’s at one of the world’s elite law firms.
To me, that’s a smart way to pursue one’s education. She has $150k in debt from NYU but she’s earning $170k per year (on her way to much more if all goes well).
The bulk of my income-producing years were with an entry IT credential from a community college.
Because higher education has come to be only a ticket-punching exercise (masquerading as credentialing), it is where the ticket is accepted that is important.
Being a Hopkins grad and Northwestern masters was not saleable in South Carolina; most places preferred more local schools and treated someone like me as defective merchandise for not finding a job outside of South Carolina.
You make a good point. Even great schools have more pull in their own region. My daughter, with her NYU JD, landed a big job in New York. An old college pal went to NYU law and then moved to the west coast where he got on with a big firm but never rose above the middle ranks. A lot of that, he claims, had to do with not having gone to Stanford, Cal or UCLA.
Yale and Harvard (and Stanford to a slightly lesser degree) law schools cast national shadows, but when one moves down to the fourth, fifth, sixth school and beyond, that changes really fast.
As an undergrad, there’s very little upside in the elite colleges. They cast a bigger shadow with grad and professional programs but, competing against other top students, a lower GPA may more than offset any advantage. But they’ll continue to get their piles of applications.
People want to give their children every possible advantage. It’s something of a compulsion, borne mostly of anxiety. We want our children to succeed in life and be happy. It’s laughable to think that ivy league admission would correlate with happiness. I question whether it’s a cause of success (though one would be insane to question to correlation between privilege and achievement).
College kids are driven by their own insecurities to want to associate themselves with institutions that will, theoretically, make people think highly of them. Going to Princeton would certainly have been a huge ego boost. A ripoff nonetheless, but so much of what people do is to boost ego.
On the subject of all the crazy things parents do for their children, this TED talk is not to be missed:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/jen-senior-ted-talk-video.html
My co-worker got into every law school top 6 and down (NYU, Georgetown, UPenn, UVA, Duke, etc).
He went to Alabama. It’s “only” top 25, but he graduated with $40k in debt. He got an offer with a local firm for $195k (patent law does pay more), but turned it down.
He’s like, “A lot of debt to work in Big Law and hating myself…or little debt for a great work life balance? No question.”
Let’s see if I can remember. My daughter got into NYU, Columbia, Chicago, Michigan, UPenn and Duke. She was turned down by Yale, Harvard and Stanford. Also turned down, rather surprisingly, by the University of Washington (which has a very weird admissions policy). She had full scholarship offers from a few fallback schools such as the University of Arizona.
She’s lucky she didn’t get into Yale or Stanford because she would have hated it. NYU was perfect for her. Harvard probably would have been a decent fit, but I think NYU was perfect for her, particularly since her goal all along was to wind up in a big firm.
She would have accepted any of the top three had they admitted her. Those schools open doors for things like teaching and clerking, but she had no interest in those things. I think she was very fortunate that things turned out as they did.
My SUNY Oneonta education got me into the law school of my choice. I have absolutely no complaints. I’m also from Long Island and remember the student competition to get into the best schools. I wouldn’t change a thing. In fact, I’m encouraging my teenager toward a SUNY school.
Me too. Both of my older children went to state schools. My current wife is pregnant with her first. When the time comes, if I’m lucky enough to be alive and well, I’ll encourage him to make the wisest economic choice. If he gets scholarships to schools like Princeton, great. But if not, there’s no reason to sweat it. With hindsight, I wish I had gone to SUNY Binghamton. That would have made the most sense for me.
there is a weird difference in how we perceive things, and I don’t think the 10 year difference in age can fully explain it.
Yes, there were some very entitled snobby close-minded people at PHS. But, they are not very homogenous.
When I look at my closest friends, they weren’t from backgrounds like ours, at all.
The Elliotts- Irish-Catholics from Boston and California, via Manhattan.
Dan- Jewish parents
Ben- Jewish dad, English mother with Baptist missionary (Far East) parents
Lanes- Jewish father, Italian mother (Kansas City mob)
Ashley- English father, Swedish mother
Tulloss- Virginian protestent father, Jewish mother
I could go on, but I don’t think most kids went to school with kids from Taiwan and Pakistan and the Philippines and Pakistan and Iran and Ethiopia and South Africa and Ecuador, etc. When I look at class pictures from my Elementary School, at least 40% of the kids were not white, and probably half the white kids were Jewish or Catholic.
Princeton is one of the least homogenous towns of its size in the country, and comparable to urban areas like Philadelphia.
Now, Marquette is homogenous…Kalamazoo is homogenous.
None of them ever went hungry or had a single fear about money or the security of their future.
All of them were subject to a culture that values always being right and having a better answer than anyone else.
Diversity to me is not defined by DNA but by the values and experiences we bring.
In that regard marquette is very diverse based on how people respond to the challenges in their lives
If you mean by “none of them” none of the friends I listed then you’re right. I mean, of course, some of us worry about money, but not when we we’re growing up.
But there were plenty of kids I grew up with who weren’t so well off. As you know, the black community in Princeton was descended mostly from servants at the university. They were mainly herded into the area around John Street or into one of two low-income housing communities. Some of them excelled going to universities like Lafayette and Middlebury, while others got degrees at Rutgers or Trenton State. But a lot of them didn’t get college degrees.
I think those same kids from your generation didn’t fare as well as they did in mine. Racial tensions were bad when you were there, but pretty infrequent in my time.
Looking back, I think one of the huge differences in our experiences is that you arrived when you were eleven, and I was only one year old. You had experience living somewhere else, so you had a real sense of being an outsider that I never experienced. Princeton is something you basically endured, while it was my whole life.
You think everyone in Princeton valued always being right and always having a better answer. That’s funny, because I always attributed that to our father and, to a lesser degree, our mother.
That’s why every Thanksgiving ended with someone trying to settle a point with a dictionary or encyclopedia. Better to die than to be proven wrong. And never let anything slide.
But, intellectual combat is part of the culture, and honing your brain like a fine-tuned instrument is what’s expected. There’s a real almost erotic pleasure to the joists, but I agree that it’s a lot of peacock feathers and pretentiousness that I eventually grew to disdain.
More than anything else, it simply DOES NOT TRANSLATE into other cultures. You come off as a know-it-all arrogant prick who takes pleasure in making other people feel stupid.
It’s not fair, since people grow to do what’s expected of them and what gets them rewards and prestige, but that’s what it looks like from the outside.
People from Princeton have to learn humility in a great big hurry once they venture out into the world.
“People from Princeton have to learn humility in a great big hurry once they venture out into the world. “
Exactly.
But not just because otherwise they will come off as a prick but because they likely will be doomed to an unhappy and unhealthy life and accomplish far less than they are capable of.
Universities full of these pricks would do no one or the nation any good.
○ Timeline of Judaism in Greater Boston
Interesting story: Numerus Clausus.
Looks as if a few readers here could learn some interesting things from Gladwell’s “David and Goliath.”
That’s a very interesting conundrum in a branded meritocracy. I think that Chris Hayes laid out the issues rather well in his The Twilight of the Elites.
As Southerner who no doubt got a geographical diversity preference to a “consolation Ivy”, I now wonder what the fuss is about Ivy League schools. There were “state Ivies” even in the 1960s–Berkeley, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example.
The scramble, it seems to me, is not the best teaching, the most in-depth academics, or the most rigorous research skills. It is which schools have the best alumni network into elite positions of power and privilege and status.
Even at the university I was at, there were professors who were treated like rock stars–the up-and-coming Stephen Ambrose for example. And some who were already national figures–John Barth. The President of the University was the brother of a President, which attracted political science and international relations students.
And the folks who were clued in were networking like a son-of-a-gun. Clueless Clems like myself focused on academic survival, and in my case, learning how to use the resources like libraries of a “great university”.
What I learned is how elites thought and acted and how the job system in politics and international relations actually worked. And mostly how much of your soul you would have to sell in the midst of the Vietnam War in order to get into the competition. That was a very informative, if hard education. One of my best friends there was a Jew who was preferenced out of Columbia (not that either of us understood admissions systems then). There was anothr friend who was a Harvard professor’s son who was preferenced out of Harvard.
I think that geographical preferences are useful in liberating Southerners and Westerners (though that region has changed dramatically) from schools that then were no more than football schools or party schools for the already established local elites.
One of the other preferenced groups then were foreign students who were either relatives of diplomats or sent for technical degrees under various people-to-people programs. From the first I learned a lot about how diplomacy and national statistics actually work. The latter were much in the same academic scramble as myself. I got an education in the middle-class view within their countries through our conversations.
What I learned that I would not have had I not transferred from football U. was how to deal with killer syllabi, how to manage time so that I had some degree of social life and decompression, how to deal with a reading load of over 1500 pages a week, and how to craft my own education to my own interests within a rigorous curriculum. I, and many of my peers, had to do a crash course on the history and policy in Vietnam, which never was a formal offering in the curriculum.
So the admissions whining from elites does not impress me and in discrimination against Jews, the Ivies show themselves no different from the Southern colleges and universities that were doing the same with blacks or the Western colleges and universities who doing the same with Hispanics or Native Americans.
But this is a sideshow. Chris Hayes has nailed the problem. It is the elite capture of education for its own purposes of controlling who gets into the elite so as to provide a veneer of upward mobility in an essentially hereditary aristocratic system.
It is which schools have the best alumni network into elite positions of power and privilege and status.
Nailed it!! Because if you look at government, as one example, that’s all that matters. Look at the Supremes. They all went to Harvard or Yale Law. It’s so much bullcrap. There aren’t people worthy from other schools?
Assume ex hypothesi they were all from other schools. What difference would it make?
I can’t comment on whether the motivation was anti-semitism – I have no knowledge on that either way.
But I can comment on the value of geographic diversity. For most of my adolescence I attended the public schools in a small, very rural town on the western slope of Colorado. For complex reasons I spent the first semester of my senior year in a public high school in Illinois ranked second or third (can’t remember now) in the state in terms of testing and college placement. The Illinois school probably wasn’t quite Princeton High, but well over 90% of their graduates went on to college and the number of top tier placements was amazing, too. By contrast, my small town Colorado school sent less than 20% of the 185 graduates to a 4 year college – and this after only about 60% of our entering freshman class even graduated. 5 of us went to schools that would have been considered “selective” – and if you subtract Colorado College then it was only one (me).
I give you that background because it is essential to understand the different environments involved. My Colorado school had only one AP – English – and had never had a student get a “5” until my friend did our senior year. The Illinois school had countless AP courses – probably all that were available at the time – and this was part of why I went there for that semester. Annually they had a sea of “5” ratings on AP tests. And it wasn’t just the course offerings and AP test ratings. Having attended both I can very much attest that the Illinois school was much more rigorous in what they expected from the kids than the Colorado school was. As you might guess, the SAT and ACT scores at the two schools also reflected that kind of difference – with the Illinois school scoring much higher than the Colorado school.
So, why the difference? Were the kids at the rural school basically dumber on average than the Illinois school, or was the different primarily due to the much poorer quality of education available? This is the classic nature vs nurture debate. Based on my experiences it was a mixture of both – to some degree people who are smarter and more adventurous intellectually aren’t going to settle down in small rural towns with crappy school districts – but there were quite a few smart kids in that Colorado school who scored well on their college entrance tests but who I’m convinced would have done much better given a great educational environment.
Frankly I thought the attempt at geographic diversity was a boon back then – a way to get the different regional “classes” of the country to interact. Of course, back then most top colleges had “aid blind” admissions policies and federal subsidies allowed a student like me to attend any school in the country with only a reasonable burden of student loans at the time of graduation. Today, in the 2nd gilded age, that no longer is the case, so if you meet someone who is a geographic diversity admission from Oklahoma or Alaska there is a good chance that she or he is the child of one of the town’s local robber barons – and no longer a particularly good chance that she or he was the smartest/best kid in his or her class.
A lot of elite high schools won’t allow the student to take AP courses if they can’t be expected to get a four or a five. My gf’s high school (the high school of Russell Wilson and Eric Cantor) was that way. Wouldn’t let her take AP English. She took AP Calc and got a five. I got a two, but I can tell you that I know a lot more calculus than she does.
Sorta says the College Board is a bit of a sham and becoming moreso as it drives “education reform” into more testing by private testing firms.