Reddit reviews The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton

I'm very distrustful of such claims. What is considered a "jobless degree" today was a perfectly reasonable degree 30 years ago. We crack jokes about philosophy majors or english majors or history majors but there is nothing inherently bad about those majors.

We compare them to hard science majors or engineering majors without examining what exactly distinguishes them. Consensus on reddit appears to be that engineering majors are hard and liberal arts majors are easy. This is probably empirically valid in most US colleges but it wasn't always the case. We used to have a serious liberal arts program in this country and you could expect to devote a considerable amount of effort into getting a history degree or a philosophy degree (or any of the humanities). The idea was "liberal arts" meant rigorous preparation for life in general--critical faculties, writing skills, etc.

A few things happened on the way to the forum. In the late 20th century college ceased to be the limited preserve of the rich and dedicated. Rather for the first time a significant percentage of Americans would attend college--partially due to the GI bill but also due to the spread of secondary education. Go have a look at the percentage of americans with high school diplomas pre WWII. It's pretty amazing. This rise in enrollment coincided with a much less fortuitous change--the ascendance of the business school. Expanded from an original mission to produce (at the undergraduate level) book-keepers and (at the graduate level) managers, the business school has fashioned itself as a generalist trade school with a more expensive tuition. In doing so it has produced a much higher percentage of wealthy alumni (arguably the true goal of a university) who have in turn spent a great deal of money on the schools. Because of this cycle, the goal of business schools has metastasized to other departments--college must be considered a training ground for future employment.

The first thing to suffer in the training ground mentality is the humanities. Who needs to know about shakespeare or Weber (or Webster!) in order to manage a factory. Here we get to the last unfortunate coincidence.

At the time when liberal arts departments should have been mounting a concerted argument in their defense, they were engaged in internecine strife over cultural politics. The 60s (and really the 70s) marked a watershed in the humanities and social sciences. Colleges which had been segregating student bodies (yes, even into the 60s and even big, important colleges) now faced a huge backlash from students and faculty and opened departments devoted to post-colonial study, feminist and black/latino issues. don't get me wrong. All of those departments needed to be opened up. anyone who says that we were learning a complete (or even moderately honest/comprehensive) history when it was all white men is ignorant of the actual goings on. But I digress. These professors and students didn't just devote themselves to teaching black/latino/NA/feminist history. They relished in their victory and focused on the meta-issues like historiography and feminist/marxist/nationalist social theory. The snake began to eat its own tail and outside observers could see it. By the time the humanities awoke from their post-watershed slumber it was too late. The funding and students had gone, along with the expectation that liberal arts meant a strong and rigorous education rather than a simple "rounding out" of a business or engineering student.

There are some other factors at work here. Rising cost and student mobility (compare the average distance traveled for a student in 1960 w/ 1990 from high school to college) have given rise to an entitlement in the student body which the faculty isn't all that quick to disabuse. One way it has been phrased is that students don't really like homework and professors don't like it either, so they both agree to an equilibrium with less of it (that's from an omnibus study on grade inflation--I can find the cite but it may take me a while). "Good" degrees may just be those in fields which due to their own cultural leanings haven't succumbed to lowered standards or lack of rigor. In some cases these are art classes (seriously talk to a BFA student at one of the big private art colleges, their workload is insane). In some cases these are math or engineering majors. But in other places they may be philosophy majors or anthropology majors or econ or poly sci.

Whew. Sorry that's probably way long.

tl;dr American education underwent some serious shit in the last 60 years and we haven't got it all figured out yet.

Edit: some sources just to let people see what I am and am not pulling out of my ass:

• Jerome Karabel's The Chosen isn't about this issue per se but it does give a great window into how restrictive (in terms or race/class) Ivy Leagues were before WWII
  
• Journal of Economic Perspectives article on grade inflation
  
• There is a great book on the rise of the American MBA program in the 20th century whose name escapes me
  
• On the rise of the "hard social sciences" and government funded lab work from the 30s to the 70s you can read Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams. I didn't really talk about this above either but it is in the mix as well.

Except the idea of "character" on applications is specifically created to be a black box that magically, we-don't-know-why-it-keeps-doing-that-honestly, chucks out far more Asian applicants than any other race.

The black box used to be directed against Jews, but now it's a truly egalitarian holistic system that just so happens to hate Asians? Bullshit.

"Chastened by their recent experience with the traditional system of admission examinations, which had begun yielding the 'wrong' [Wong lol] students, the leaders of the Big Three devised a new admissions regime that allowed them to accept - and reject - whomever they desired. ... The centerpiece of the new policy would be "character" —a quality thought to be in short supply among Jews but present in abundance among high-status Protestants."

Fwiw, they do this more for white people than they do for black people. Athletes (most athletes at places like Harvard play sports like squash, not basketball) and legacies make up a large percentage of the student body.

If you're interested, here is a really interesting book talking about the history of admission at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. These places were built by and for prominent male WASPS, and they're still the ones who fund it, so there are all kinds of things built in to ensure that people like them still get in, namely easier admission for legacies and athletes.

A major point of the book is that the idea of merit in this sense is kind of made up. They create a class of the kinds of people they like and say that it's based on merit. They used to basically just use test scores, then those schools started filling up with Jews, so they decided to assess "character" as well, which meant basically meant being WASPy. Now it's kind of the same thing but with Asians. They still rely heavily on "character" and "leadership." The main thing is that it's a balancing act between a ton of different interests, and most of those interests are rich old white dudes.


Edit: Found this:
“Being African American instead of white is worth an average of 230 additional SAT points on a 1600 point scale, but recruited athletes reap an advantage equivalent to 200 SAT points. Other things equal, Hispanic applicants gain the equivalent of 185 points, which is only slightly more than the legacy advantage which is 160 points. Coming from an Asian background, however, is comparable to a loss of 50 SAT points.”

From around the 1880s until as late as the 1940s, the "Ivy League" actually had a terrible reputation for academic rigor, mostly because of its class-based admission practices.

So those schools were, and remain, exceptionally elite. In 1950, for example, 278 students from elite prep schools applied to Harvard and 245 were accepted. The acceptance rate from Exeter and Andover was 94 percent.

Even today Harvard posted its lowest acceptance margins in history -- only 5.9%.


edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted.

You're right, in that they are dumb.^(http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/09/28/at_the_elite_colleges___dim_white_kids/?page=1)

But mostly, you're wrong. It's not a "dumb tax." It's "pay to play."

Legacy admissions are not a "dumb tax;" it's there to keep poor kids out. It's not about meritocracy, it's about exclusion.

And money isn't the only criteria; race is also a factor.

Docket systems (geographic quotas) are to keep out Jews (mostly from NY & NJ)--& favor certain private schools. Extra-cirricular requirements, especially those that emphasize students be "well-rounded," are there to keep out Asians. Affirmative action is there to get African-Americans and Latinos in.

This system is unlikely to change, because (1) universities, like most things, need money to run, (2) they also want prestige, and (3) a lot of very influential people are going to raise a ruckus over their progeny couldn't get in.

By the way, there is one caveat: It is in a university's interest to attract people who would are mostly likely to go into well-paying jobs, which means Wall Street or big law firms--and extracurricular activities in high school is one way to identify people who gravitate towards those careers. Kids who excel in academics and go into academia tend not have a lot of moolah to donate.

TL;DR: Elite schools are mostly schools for the elites. If you want to join them, apply to the Ivy Leagues. If you want to be judged purely on academic merit, check out places like Berkeley or CalTech (which, coincidentally, happen to be white minority establishments).

If you're interested in this subject, you might want to check out The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Chosen-Admission-Exclusion-Princeton/dp/0618574581

Berkeley enrollment data:

http://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data

CalTech enrollment data:

http://www.registrar.caltech.edu/statistics.htm

You realize that the US college admissions system is an anti-Semitic invention, right?

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