Reply to Some facts about Holistic Admissions Criteria from Stanford Daily

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[quote=Anonymous]From Bloomberg:

[i]Lowell initially tried to institute a crude quota system for Jewish enrollment. When his plan was condemned in the press, a committee stacked with his sympathizers produced an alternative that seemed remarkably enlightened. Its real purpose, historians have argued, was to implement a kinder, gentler form of discrimination against Jews. It also gave us the admissions process that remains in effect at top universities today.

The plan consisted of two parts. The first was to require that students come from the top 1/7th of their graduating class. More significant, however, was the resolution that Harvard would no longer consider admissions from the "standpoint of race." Rather, it would create an undergraduate population that "will be properly representative of all groups in our national life." This meant actively recruiting applicants from around the country, particularly areas "situated outside the regular Harvard recruiting ground."

Historian Oliver Pollak has observed that "by focusing on geographic representation, while ignoring blatant racial and religious characteristics, the plan obliquely discriminated against Jews." In other words, Harvard could recruit high-achieving students from an applicant pool in which Jews were just one of many groups.

The result was dramatic: Jewish enrollment in Harvard quickly plummeted back to 10 percent. Similar declines occurred at other schools that made a fetish of a highly selective, national admission process designed to bring geographic diversity. Increasingly, admission officials recruited students who would have never considered applying to an Ivy League school thousands of miles from home.

An unintended consequence of expanding the applicant pool was that elite colleges ensured they would receive far more applications than they had slots to fill. Admissions became increasingly selective, particularly after Lowell's successors embraced the idea of recruiting students from an even wider variety of backgrounds: geographic, religious, urban, rural, and so on. The number of categories has continued to proliferate in recent years, but the number of slots available at the nation's top colleges and universities has not increased at a corresponding rate.

It's no surprise, then, that most of this year's applicants to elite schools ended up with rejection letters. High-achieving students probably will find little consolation in the knowledge that their failure to get into the college of the dreams may have less to do with a lack of merit than admissions procedures adopted by anti-Semitic college administrators almost a century ago.[/i][/quote]

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