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The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900-1970 (Contributions in American History)

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This book illustrates the value of studying history. All aspects of the current debate on university admissions policies were debated heatedly in the first half of the twentieth century. Before World War I no American university considered using any non-academic criteria for admissions. Diversity, character, leadership, etc were introduced to save elite American universities from becoming mostly Jewish, because their traditional clientele - upper-class, private-school educated Anglo-Saxons - could not compete academically with the children of poor, Yiddish-speaking immigrants who attended slum schools.
For the same reason, the standardized aptitude and achievement tests of the College Board were not fully utilized. They make the ethnic discrimination (at that time in favor of upper-class Anglo-Saxons) glaringly obvious.