Ron Unz has written a fascinating, and long, article on admissions to America’s elite colleges. Writing at The American Conservative, Unz notes that families have concluded the single best way to guarantee the financial success of their offspring is to gain access to one of our elite universities.
During this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America’s richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent.2 This situation, sometimes described as a “winner take all society,” leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their children will reach the winners’ circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges.3 On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas are handed out.4
Unz goes on to blow up the myth that admission to these schools is based purely upon merit. Test scores vary widely among those admitted. Trying to match up test scores of different ethnic groups with the percent actually matriculating at these schools shows that some groups are over and some under represented. To be fair, Unz touches upon the idea that it is difficult to define merit.How do you compare a 780 on an SAT achieved by a impoverished student with an 800 from someone going to a private school with extensive test prep? If you have two students with identical scores, do you take the one who speaks Mandarin because his parents could afford a private tutor? Unz attempts to mediate this problem by relying heavily upon National Merit Scholarship (NMS) scores. One becomes a scholar by scoring among the top 0.5% in one’s state. Unz also uses SAT scores, but his reliance upon NMS should be understood, along with the fact that it may lead to its own biases.
That said, when Unz runs the numbers, he finds that attendance at the top four institutions, which he defines as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and CalTech skews in ways not predicted by test scores or population. While much has been made of bias against Asians, he finds that while this does appear to exist, it is not as bad as claimed. While about 5% of the population is Asian, about 16% of students at the elite top three, excluding CalTech, are Asian. Coning down on Harvard, Unz finds that Asians are attending at about 63% of their expected rate, compared to 61% for whites. Asians are not being treated any differently than are whites by his analysis.
The story is different for the white protestants and catholics. While making up about 60% of the population, only about 20% of those attending the top three schools come from this group (about 55% at CalTech). Indeed, activities that might be favored by these groups, especially ones from less urban areas, decrease their chances of admission.
. One of Ephanshade’s most striking findings was that excelling in certain types of completely mainstream high school activities actually reduced a student’s admission chances by 60–65 percent, apparently because teenagers with such interests were regarded with considerable disfavor by the sort of people employed in admissions; these were ROTC, 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of America, and various similar organizations.87 Consider that these reported activities were totally mainstream, innocuous, and non-ideological, yet might easily get an applicant rejected, presumably for being cultural markers.
I find these numbers shocking. I think one can make a case that since it is difficult to exactly determine merit, schools should look at more than just test scores. In my own case, I have seen problems with the test score system. I have hired people with the very best test scores from highly regarded institutions. I have found that some of these people succeeded by being willing and able to spend 20 hours studying when others were spending just ten. However, now that they have to work, they need to get ten hours work done in ten hours, or maybe nine. If success was achieved via private tutors and longer hours, you don’t get to have those when someone is dying right in front of you and you have just five minutes to fix things. Still, merit must be part of the equation, and I don’t see how we justify a system that so heavily weighs against our population demographics. Tempering merit to achieve a class that looks a bit more like the rest of the country? We can argue the merits of that approach, but at least there are reasonable arguments to be made. Tempering merit to create a class that does not resemble our general population? I fail to see any reasonable argument for this case. This is not diversity or merit, just the exclusion of one group for no clear reason.
I have strong opinions on this one: I was not only a National Merit Scholar, but the top scoring student in all of New York state on the PSAT for my year. I was near the top of my class at one of the best public high schools in the country (not just my judgment, Horace Greeley High School makes national lists of good public high schools). And I went to Stanford University (with an admission to Harvard that I wound up not using because Stanford gave me a better deal on financial aid, and I needed that financial aid). (I’m also a legacy admission at Stanford, but wouldn’t have been so at Harvard.) I do consider Stanford roughly comparable, as an academic and research institution, to the four schools that Unz studies (and I have one brother who went to Caltech for undergraduate, and then MIT for graduate, one sister who was with me at Stanford undergraduate, and then went to Caltech for graduate, and one brother who went to Princeton undergraduate and then Columbia for law school, as well as other siblings who went to various generally good schools that aren’t among the four he lists).
1) People often talk about “affirmative action admissions” as if not particularly bright people got into Ivy and comparable schools by being the right race. My experience is that this isn’t true (obviously it isn’t the argument Unz is making, he’s better than that, but it’s important to point out, because I’m not confident it isn’t the argument some other people make). As a Stanford alum, based on my experience there, my observation of my fellow students and their skills and accomplishments before and after Stanford, and the statistics Stanford maintains regarding their admissions, I’m adamant that this is false, for Stanford. No one gets into Stanford without being brighter than the average bear. In fact, no one gets into Stanford without being considerably brighter than the average bear. This includes black people who get into Stanford. It includes star football players who get into Stanford. It includes legacy admissions who get into Stanford. If you don’t have the brains, you don’t get in. Stanford cares too much about its academic and research reputation, and the big research money that hangs on that reputation, to do otherwise. I think that the same is true of other elite private institutions, similar to Stanford, like the four Unz studies. And I get angry when people like the people I went to Stanford with get dismissed that way, because in my mind, if you dismiss people out of hand as affirmative action admissions, by implication you’re dismissing people like my former college housemate Andre Braugher, who, whatever his SAT scores may or may not have been, was as smart as anyone I’ve met, and has darn well proven the value of his Stanford admission in his subsequent career (number one in his graduation class at Juilliard, Emmy winning actor, etc.). (Again, this isn’t an argument against Unz. I already know that Unz doesn’t buy broad dismissals of black people’s intelligence; in fact, he had a good series rebutting Lynn’s arguments from his own data.)
2) Saying that you don’t get into Stanford (or other similar schools) without merit isn’t, though, the same thing as saying that you get in by merit alone, or that the people who get into whatever schools may be ranked as the top three are truly the best students in the country. It’s clear to me that there are lots of things besides merit involved. A system where access to good jobs is based on admission to elite schools is more merit based than some possible systems (such as one where admission to good jobs is based on being born into nobility or into a certain caste), but it’s not a pure meritocracy by a long shot.
3) Working with computers, I come from a field where having a degree from Stanford is, yes, an advantage (especially starting out – where you graduated from matters less once you have a work history to judge), but where good people from a lot of schools can find work. I gather that the fields of law and finance are much more skewed to a few schools (which I think also explains the overrepresentation of Ivy Leaguers among Presidential candidates). And I also see that some of the best people in my field don’t have name brand degrees. You don’t get into a school like Stanford without some sort of merit, but you can have plenty of merit, and not have gone to a school that’s particularly name brand.
4) I’ve also seen people from Stanford who crashed and burned. Those people aren’t confined to any particular race, and they aren’t necessarily from any other category you’d expect to be admitted with lower scores (Stanford has high graduation rates for its athletes, for instance). Generally what they have in common is either issues with alcohol or drugs or personality factors that lead them to shoot themselves in the foot.
5) Some things (like legacy admissions) seem perfectly justifiable if you think of the institutions in question as private businesses looking after their bottom line (other businesses offer family specials, so why shouldn’t private colleges?), but sound less fair if you think of these particular private schools as a sort of public good, because they’re where a lot of our top law, finance, and political jobs get filled from. Similarly, once you’ve allowed legacy admissions, you sort of have to tweak your admissions in a way that gives a lesser chance to non-legacy white people with comparable scores, if you even want your student body to reflect the general population. It’s hard to argue that it’s fair to have legacy admissions and not affirmative action admissions. (This argument doesn’t apply to state institutions, which shouldn’t be doing legacy admissions.)
6) I don’t think there’s any good reason why, say, membership in Future Farmers of America should be a negative in getting into Harvard.
7) Smart people are stupid, too. Pretty much everyone, including people from name brand schools, is capable of being creatively stupid in order to believe things that they really, really, really want to believe. This is true in people’s personal lives, and in their general beliefs. However Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Caltech adjust their admissions, it’s worth remembering.
What would your explanation be for the current under representation among white protestant/catholic students? If schools are still using diversity goals, shouldnt they end up with a a class that looks more like the general population? It seems to me that whatever metric they are using besides pure merit, it is one that selects against the WASPC group. I can see your point about the minority students being bright. Harvard also, I suspect, wants to maintain its rep.
Steve
I’m not sure. This is the point where generational differences (my Stanford degree is 30 years old) and differences between one elite university and another (I see from Unz’ article that Caltech, unsurprisingly, looks to be more meritocratic in its admissions than Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) matter.
Another, shorter and less detailed, review of Karabel’s book The Chosen: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2005/10/ivory_tower_intrigues.single.html (Of the explicit thumbs on the scale, “the degree of preference granted legacies was only slightly less than that given to black candidates, who in turn received less of a thumb on the scale than did athletes.”)
I followed the footnotes to see how Unz determined his top four (percentage of National Merit Scholars): http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/10/elite-universities-and-human-capital.html (Stanford is number five, MIT number 6. Caltech is clearly at the top.)
On the one hand, all of these elite schools keep enough of an academic/test score component (much stronger for Caltech and MIT because of their math/science orientation, more diluted by subjective criteria for the others) that all of their admissions wind up being people with significantly above average SAT scores, and they get to keep their academic reps. On the other hand, the subjective component (both Unz and Traub describe Karabel’s book as showing that this component was introduced in the 1920s to keep the Jewish percentage down) allows lots of room for biases to creep in, whether intentional (as in the case of the earlier attempt to keep the percentage of Jews down) or implicit (probably what’s going on with the Future Farmers of America). My guess is that there’s some unplanned bias in whatever non-academic selection criteria they’re using (I can’t imagine someone’s deliberately trying to admit the WASPC group at a lower rate). For instance, I’ve heard that in the bad old days of trying to keep Jewish represention at Ivies down, one of the ways that was done, without explicit quotas, was to adjust the proportions of students with urban vs. rural backgrounds. Jews tended to have more urban backgrounds, and so their representation declined if you restricted urban admissions, without your actually having openly put a Jewish quota in place. I’d guess that either some geographic mix or some favoring of one sort of extracurricular activity over another is happening that disadvantages the WASPC group.
Trivia: The new President-Elect of Yale University (for four years Yale’s Provost) is someone I was friends with at Stanford. I remember him as one of the top students in the Psychology Department at Stanford.
It occurred to me, after I wrote my reply, that there could be a simpler explanation for some of what Unz reports. Among other things (skipping, for instance, the whole part about Asian-Americans and college admissions), Unz says that:
1) Jews get, and have for some time gotten, higher test scores that the WASPC group.
2) Despite getting higher test scores, Jews now are overrepresented in Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, relative to the WASPC group, even in relation to their higher test scores (e.g. make up a higher percentage of the student body than of National Merit Scholars).
3) Though Jews still get higher test scores than WASPCs, their test score advantage has narrowed.
Given 3, the explicit legacy thumb on the scale that gets applied could explain a significant proportion of 2. Maybe the admission rates reflect, not current test score gaps, but a mix of current test score gaps and those of a generation ago (for those groups that don’t get any explicit diversity adjustment).
Or not. Unz raises the possibility that a higher proportion of Jews than of the WASPC group apply to the big four (though he doesn’t think that’s it). And it’s also possible that, once character gets introduced as a criterion, it can wind up being biased for or against anyone, as soon as a different set of people are judging character. Maybe the character tests like essays and recommendations and interviews and extracurricular activities, originally brought in to keep Jews from overtaking the old Northeast WASP elite coming to Harvard/Yale/Princeton from Andover/Exeter/Groton, now acts (ironically, given the original reason these measures got introduced) in reverse, as whoever is evaluating the admissions now, without even much thinking about it, views “character” through a lens that just happens to find the essays, extracurricular activities, etc. that Jews are more likely to have to be more compelling than the ones that WASPCs are more likely to have.
But the only way we’d know for sure whether one of the fuzzy metrics is selecting against the WASPC group would be if we found a way to calculate who the legacy admission effect is actually favoring these days. And also, if they’re still trying for some kind of geographic diversity (whether by state or by rural/urban divide), who that metric winds up favoring.
Unz doesnt compare WASPs and Jews. he compares Gentiles and Jews, which include catholics, muslims, etc. Also no reform vs, orthodox breakdown. tho reported elsewhere Israeli IQ is rather low compared to American Jews. On IQ data , Judaism does not rank highest [Unz] :
“Stratifying the white American population along religious lines produces similar conclusions. An analysis of the data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that Americans raised in the Episcopal Church actually exceeded Jews in mean IQ, while several other religious categories came quite close, leading to the result that the overwhelming majority of America’s high-ability white population had a non-Jewish background.68″
Episcopals are the quintesential WASP and have higher IQs than Jews. Southern Evangelicals culturally dont fit into the WASP cultural meme at all.
Stanford had more Reform and Conservative Jews than Orthodox back when I was there, but I did have one Orthodox Jewish friend, and I’ve heard through the grapevine that Peter Salovey’s brother, who like him attended Stanford, is now shomer shabat (Peter Salovey’s the guy I knew at Stanford who’s now President-elect of Yale).
Harvard chaplains: http://chaplains.harvard.edu/people (I see they include a Zoroastrian chaplain, among others)
The Episcopal Church has college organizations, as you’d expect, at all Ivy League schools and many other colleges as well (they’re pretty well organized as far as university chaplaincies go): http://archive.episcopalchurch.org/8020_53813_ENG_HTM.htm
I’d be surprised if Southern Evangelicals aren’t underrepresented, relative to their percentage of the American population, both at Ivy League schools proper and at elite colleges in general. But Intervarsity and Campus Crusade for Christ are pretty much everywhere, so there’s definitely some evangelical visibility on campus.
I don’t think there’s any good reason why, say, membership in Future Farmers of America should be a negative in getting into Harvard.
My guess is that it’s taken as a sign that the kid is a redneck and probably a conservative redneck. Heck, in my kids’ rural high school being in the FFA is viewed as redneck by many of the kids.
http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc6/249097_10150264170362349_4957068_n.jpg
The diversity these schools seek is mostly skin deep.
Yeah, there could well be an anti-redneck bias going on there.
Amazing how a Gas Sax can blow for many paragraphs and never actually make a point about the subject of the post, that is: there is systematic discrimination against gentiles by jewish admissions officers as they affirmatively boost their own.
More evidence for the mendacity of our elites.
???
Harvard’s account of its admissions for the class of ’16: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/03/2032-admitted-to-class-of-16/
A few articles on “feeder” high schools, public and private, that have particularly high admissions rates to elite colleges (but there’s also an effort to bring in good low income students):
http://observer.com/2011/11/the-2011-private-school-power-players/
http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/29/best-prep-schools-2010-opinions-private-education.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119638146482608732.html
Part of the problem with Unz is his reliance on names. Jewish names changed in response to discrimination, both by the nations, and by other Jews , or for commercial reasons. eg Kirk Douglas Issur Danielovitch, Benzion Mileikowsky (later Netanyahu) . Common German surnames may be Ellis Island inventions covering eastern european origins. In the American experience the goal was to appear mainstream, so Unz may be undercounting .
All of this would be cleared up if protestants, mormons, evangelicals, muslims, coptics and jews were disaggreagated in the counting of “whites” , but this would surely be resisted by the over-represented subsets.
Interesting to also note that WASP is a racial religious pejorative meaning swarming stinging insect, and does not likely originated in WASP communities but in outsider communities critisizing an elite majority. basically hate speech.
He also uses Hillel data, which one would expect to be pretty accurate. He notes the negative reaction in the press when there was a drop in Jewish students accepted at the big three. This suggests his numbers are probably pretty close.
Steve