The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (.) (Hardcover)

by Jerome Karabel (Author)
Key Phrases: alumni revolt, traditional elite constituencies, admissions pie, New York, United States, World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The emphasis in college applications on balancing grades and extracurricular activities appears benignly positive at first glance. Yet, as Karabel explains, the top Ivy League schools created this formula in the 1920s because they were uncomfortable with the number of Jewish students accepted when applicants were judged solely on their grades. The search for prospective freshmen with "character" was, with varying explicitness, an effort to maintain the slowly declining Protestant establishment. At one point, Karabel says in this stimulating study of admissions policies, Harvard codified a policy of accepting applicants with weak academic credentials who could better appreciate the school's social opportunities, while Princeton promised to accept any alumnus's son with even the faintest hope of graduation. Karabel, a sociologist who once served on UC-Berkeley's admissions committee, extensively covers the "Jewish problem" at the Big Three colleges, but also tackles the cultural shifts that lowered the barriers for African-American students and ultimately led to the admission of women. The detailed analysis of the role of university presidents and other campus administrators in first stifling, then abetting ethnic diversity in the student body is so comprehensive, however, that his final remarks on the remaining lack of socioeconomic diversity feel like tacked on. (Oct. 26)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Proof of extracurricular activities, leadership qualities, letters of recommendation -- we take all these as natural, necessary and even enlightened elements of the college application process, though they cause us endless anxiety. Actually, they don't resemble in the least the way people in Europe or Japan get into college. They're a result of a particular American challenge at the turn of the 20th century, which President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard then characterized as follows: how to "prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews."

Prior to the 1920s, Harvard, Princeton and Yale accepted all applicants who met their academic requirements. Adjusting the size of each university's incoming class was not a problem since there were very few such qualified candidates, mostly because only a handful of elite northeastern private schools -- such as Groton and Andover and St. Paul's -- provided the kind of classical education (including Latin and some Greek) that the universities required. Since admissions were not "selective" in any substantial sense, none of the Big Three needed an admissions department.

The Chosen is an exhaustive account of how we got from that efficient and cozy arrangement to where we are today. It's particularly fascinating because there is such a growing stake -- and so many stakeholders -- in the process of selecting who gets access to higher education in general and elite education in particular.

But beware and rejoice. Beware because this story, alas, is not one about a group of presidents and deans steadily becoming enlightened to the virtues of equal opportunity. And rejoice in the details that Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel reveals and the patient analysis that he deploys; he shows how, in spite of an applicant's proven academic performance, the Big Three favored in overwhelming numbers the sons of the Protestant moneyed class because the institutions determined that it was in their self-interest to do so. The way these universities have sometimes answered but mostly resisted societal demands to open their doors turns out to be a juicy story indeed. And "juicy" is not the kind of adjective one customarily uses to describe a book with 557 pages of text and almost 3,000 footnotes.

By the end of the 19th century, Harvard, Yale and Princeton were committed not primarily to refining the intellect but to welcoming the well-bred, athletic, public-spirited and sociable scions of the privileged -- young men who may not have performed well academically but were destined to be the leaders of the next generation. "By the 1890s, 74 percent of Boston's upper class and 65 percent of New York's sent their sons to either Harvard, Yale, or Princeton," Karabel notes. Things took a new turn when Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, concerned that his school was educating just the wealthy, and his successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, took measures to attract more boys from good public schools. Though hardly egalitarians, Eliot and Lowell modified the university's entrance requirements -- including dropping Latin and Greek requirements -- to encourage more schools to prepare their students to compete for Harvard slots.

The result of such measures, at Harvard and elsewhere, was a horrific surprise: too many Jews! Jewish enrollment jumped to then historic highs of 4 percent at Princeton (1918), 9 percent at Yale (1917) and a distressing 20 percent of the freshman class at Harvard (1918). Though most of these students were more than academically competent, they didn't fit the usual definition of "gentlemen." And their numbers were continuing to increase. A meeting of New England deans in 1918 put the question squarely: How could they limit the growing Jewish presence?

Lowell worried that living on campus with a significant number of Jews would poison the social experience of the members of the Protestant elite and cause it to send its sons elsewhere, just as the New York City social set turned away from Columbia in the century's first decade. In 1923, Lowell finally came up with a politically palatable solution: He limited the size of the incoming class to 1,000 (an innovation), which meant incorporating an evaluation of each candidate's nonacademic qualities into the admissions decision. How "manly" was the candidate, for instance? How congenial and "clubbable"? What promise, what potential for future leadership? "The key code word here was 'character' " -- a quality, notes Karabel, "thought to be frequently lacking among Jews but present almost congenitally among high-status Protestants."

Such subjective judgments allowed Harvard to discreetly reject "undesirables," and Princeton and Yale followed suit. Yale's admissions chairman, Robert Corwin, had grumbled in 1929 that the list of names of recently admitted students "reads like some of the 'begat' portions of the Old Testament and might easily be mistaken for a recent roll call at the Wailing Wall." The next year, he limited Jewish enrollment to just 8.2 percent -- a result he hailed as having been attained "without hue and cry and without any attempt on the part of those chiefly affected to prove that Yale had organized a pogrom." The Chosen contains dozens of such staggeringly candid remarks.

Newly established admissions departments gathered increasingly large amounts of "background" data on each applicant. In 1922, applications to Harvard posed a new set of questions. Race? Color? Religious preference? Birthplace of father? Previous surnames used by the family? One question that still pops up everywhere today had its flowering in this period: "Mother's maiden name?"

The need for letters of recommendation was born; so was the interest in extracurricular involvement. Photographs were required, and personal interviews were encouraged, particularly with local alumni who would be most eager to perpetuate the muscular and sociable undergraduate image dear to them. The mechanism was similar to that of self-perpetuating private social and country clubs where new candidates were admitted only if members vouched for them. Interviewers for Yale had to fill out a checklist of each candidate's physical characteristics, a practice that was eliminated only in the 1960s. The new opacity and flexibility easily allowed the continued admission of enough "legacies" to mollify crusty alums. As late as 1951, Harvard admitted an astonishing 94 percent of its legacies.

Since the number of admission slots was being limited while more and more applicants were meeting the Big Three's academic criteria, the various nonacademic criteria and "intangible qualities" became decisive. One logical alternative -- raising academic standards even higher to get a more brilliant, intellectual class -- was hardly a consideration. The 1920s was the period that first saw, as Karabel puts it, "the denigration of applicants whose sole strength is academic brilliance." To raise scholarly standards for admission, the old guard warned, would just produce a preponderance of "neurotics," "effeminates," "sophisticates," "esthetes" and "introverts." By contrast, it was the well-bred students of average intelligence who university elders insisted were more likely to end up as leaders in business and politics -- and to become loyal, generous alumni. Most university leaders made no bones about limiting the "super-bright" to only 10 percent of each class.

Astonishingly, this subjective college admissions system -- designed in the 1920s to discreetly exclude as many "social undesirables" as possible -- is the system we continue to use today. And the central irony of The Chosen is that the very flexibility that was designed to exclude nontraditional students and placate the alumni up to the middle of the 20th century was subsequently available to administrators to accomplish essentially opposite goals.

As the century unfolds, Karabel reviews successive demands for more sophisticated scientific research and for more international competitiveness, both of which compelled the Big Three to value brilliant students more highly. In particular, he looks at the open political and social conflicts stemming from demands for civil rights and equal opportunity in the 1960s and '70s. Facing those crises, universities saw themselves as the country's most visible demonstration of the reality of upward mobility.

Karabel analyzes how each of his three schools had to process these demands in terms of its own internal constituencies: faculty pressuring for "more brains," students and the press demanding diversity, and alumni in open revolt against any such changes.

Having decided to change the make-up of their student body in this new direction, each school was successful in doing so because from the 1920s on, admissions officers had at their disposal a variety of nonacademic criteria by which to evaluate applicants. And as Karabel notes, moves to include previously excluded groups were not terribly radical since the Big Three, in fact, "had never been pure academic meritocracies."

Dramatic as these developments appear, they hardly constitute a sea change in how universities make such decisions. University administrations still view a move to completely meritocratic selection as neither in their self-interest nor realistic. Instead, Karabel convincingly shows this new institutional behavior to be the result of constant administrative shifts in order to maintain an uneasy balance among competing demands.

For Karabel, as a good sociologist, class matters. And his book draws on sociological theory, such as Pierre Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital and a quote from Max Weber that illuminates much of the Big Three's behavior: "The fortunate is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune." And as idealized as the push toward meritocracy is seen throughout the book, the author does not let us forget that meritocracy functions to confirm the existing social order. Inspired by the work of Michael Young, Karabel argues that meritocracy merely deflects "attention from the real issues of poverty and inequality of condition onto a chimerical quest for unlimited social mobility."

But the author deploys his academic expertise with a light hand -- which he can afford to do, having amassed so many telling details and vivid anecdotes. The special value of The Chosen lies not in the way it formulates sociological insights but in its stories, its prolific and always apt statistics, and its analysis of backroom university politics. Finally, there are memorable biographical sketches of pivotal figures, such as Princeton's President Woodrow Wilson, who painfully learned that, in his own words, "university policy had become the victim of entrenched wealth"; Harvard's James Bryant Conant, whose rhetoric was highly meritocratic but whose admissions policies continued old patterns of discrimination; Yale's Kingman Brewster and particularly his dean of admissions, R. Inslee Clark Jr., "who presided over the most radical transformation ever witnessed in an Ivy League institution"; and Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., the swing vote in the Supreme Court'!

s 1978 Bakke decision. (In this ruling, the court sided with a white University of California medical school applicant who had sued over what he considered "reverse discrimination" favoring minorities in the admissions process. The court also defended a university's autonomy by allowing it to take race and other nonacademic factors into account when making admissions decisions.)

Much has changed in who now constitutes "the chosen" -- the elite prep schools, for example, can no longer count on a high proportion of their graduates getting into the Big Three. "As a consequence, deep apprehension about college admissions now extends to the highest reaches of the upper class," Karabel writes. But much remains the same. "At the same time, the children of the working class and the poor are about as unlikely to attend the Big Three today as they were in 1954. It is no exaggeration to say that the current regime in elite college admissions has been far more successful in democratizing anxiety than opportunity."

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kittay
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 720 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (October 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618574581
• ISBN-13: 978-0618574582
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #103,000 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 stars, absolutely stellar!, March 2, 2006

By	Maddi Hausmann Sojourner "madhaus" (Silicon Valley, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was absolutely riveted to this book for 3 weeks. I read every single one of those footnotes that was more than a bibliographical entry, as well. Why? Because Jerome Karabel has taken a fairly esoteric subject and made it interesting, important, revealing, "juicy" and downright enjoyable.

Karabel shows how the current admissions policies of the Big Three (Harvard, Yale and Princeton) came about in trying to restrict admissions by the "wrong kind," namely Jews, in the 1920s. He follows the policies, unstated rules, and goals of the three colleges' admission departments to the end of the 20th century, covering outright racism, minority outreach, coeducation, the restrictions on Asians that paralleled the earlier ones on Jews (that never quite went away), and most of all, the search for academically qualified students who were capable of paying their way.

Karabel' discovered that the Big Three worried over the number of students with high SATs who also had family income sufficient to pay their tuition. Coeducation was not done in the name of women's liberation but to increase the limited wealthy applicant pool, and also to prevent desireable male students from attending other co-ed schools.

As one of The Chosen (Princeton '82), I often wondered why the Admissions Office made the decisions they did. Karabel went into the nuts and bolts of how all three of the college's Admissions Offices worked their way through an increasing number of applications. Why were 6 applicants admitted from my college-prep school but only 1 or 2 from the nearby public schools with four times the class size? Was Princeton still engaging in their "Docket" game, where all the public schools throughout New York and New Jersey were only alloted the same number of admissions spots as just Andover and Exeter?

And I was alternately delighted and shocked to find Karabel had unearthed quite a bit on the gatekeeper to our admissions. John Thatcher was the Alumni Schools Committee rep who not only interviewed every one of 300 applicants from my county, but also was one of the "alumni in revolt" who joined together to form Concerned Alumni of Princeton. Thatcher served as their pointman on Admissions issues, especially noting the decline of legacy admits.

Letters from CAP members to the official alumni magazine suggested nostalgic bigots who could not deal with the influx of Jews, minorities and women to what they still thought of as a private country club. The CAP publication Prospect, distributed to all campus residents, beat those drums for years. It took them almost 10 years to realize that coeducation meant that alumni could have their daughters attend and this could be a good thing. It is unfortunate this book was published right before Samuel Alito's CAP scandal hit the news, as Karabel gives some great background on this group and a similar group at Yale.

This is investigative journalism with detailed history, inspired conclusions, and enough context for six different disciplines. Absolutely brilliant.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book, October 24, 2005

By	Beatrix Potter (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews

I agree it was a little long, but still think it was a great book. For anyone who thinks they wouldn't be interested in the history of admissions to Yale, Princeton and Harvard, I would encourage them to approach it rather as a cultural/social history. What I found most compelling and interesting is the reflection of our own American society as it manifested itself (and no doubt continues to manifest itself) in university admissions policies. I was particularly surprised and disturbed by some of the overtly discriminatory policies implemented by persons of substantial education and keen intellect.

39 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb social history of America's 20th Century, October 31, 2005

By	John Osander (Author: "Country Matters" & "Call Me Kick!") - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Never met Karabel, though I did admissions way back a decade after mid-century, and know most of the folks he quotes and profiles, and know the issues faced. I saw the atrocities and hints of better paths to social equality, as practiced in the three colleges he uses as a focus. Jerome Karabel, younger a bit than I, has compiled what stands as a full "social history," an inside look at how what we prefer not to call a class system (with bias, bigotry, discrimination, even virtues rewarded) characterized our recent past--and continues. Karabel's precise and factual; the good and bad show up in the work of selecting students for a college some while rejecting very strong other students (a pretty crazy practice, justified with much defensive rhetoric). But the good and bad practices have persisted, ebbing and flowing, very bad in the 1920s, not very academically oriented in mid-century, perhaps peaking with the positive movements in the late 60s and early 70s, only to level and then decline at century end.
Without indexing "Iraq," "CIA," "WMD," "blue and red states," Karabel provides enough material to initiate the needed National Public debate that might push at least one of political parties toward, indeed, a reasonable and enlightened 2008 Presidential Platform. We can hope.
John Osander, Director of Admission, Princeton 1965-1971