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

Images of Franklin Delano Roosevelt begin the first and last chapters of Jerome Karabel's masterful account of a century of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. In 1900, FDR arrived at Harvard to find himself among similar scions of privilege: New England boarding school men from ruling-class, old Yankee, White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant families. Had Roosevelt returned to his alma mater a hundred years later in 2000 he would have been astounded to find Harvard Yard home to women, Jews, people of color, and public school graduates from every corner of the country and the globe.

More than the demography of the "Big Three" undergraduates had been transformed; the process of allocating precious seats in the Ivy League had changed. Most striking was a new insistence on academic excellence, arising in the 1950s and 1960s with the meritocratic ideology of the Cold War, the rise of influential faculties empowered by federal research funding, and the innovation of national standardized scholastic testing. With his mediocre academic record, FDR would almost certainly not have been accepted to Harvard in 2000.

Yet renowned sociologist Jerome Karabel definitively upends this simple narrative of increased equity, academic merit, and democratic progress in 20th-century higher education. Through a fine-grained historical analysis of admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton from 1900 to 2005, Karabel advances a persuasive argument that the most prestigious American universities opened their doors to new groups reluctantly and incompletely. Despite the myth of the meritocracy, Karabel shows, academic talent has never become the major criterion for Ivy League admission.

Karabel's striking achievement is his pairing of painstakingly researched historical cases with a broader sociological story of meritocracy and social inequality. What is at stake in Ivy League admissions, he reminds us, is no less than the composition and nature of American elites and the public perception of a fair and open opportunity structure essential to a free-enterprise democracy. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have always self-consciously understood themselves as shaping America through producing its leaders. Karabel makes the case that who gets into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton rests on how those universities protect and advance their own interests, not on ideals of inclusion and scholastic merit. Above all, the top universities need to ensure the concrete necessity of financial viability and the symbolic necessity of their competitive position in the prestige hierarchy.

Struggles for continued eminence have meant Harvard, Yale, and Princeton's appeasement of their most powerful constituencies by means of unfair, exclusionary admission policies and practices. The core of their strategy is the preservation of discretion and opacity in admission. Karabel demonstrates how "merit" has been continually reinterpreted according to dominant groups' cultural values and then used to exclude rising social groups who threatened to displace traditional elites. For instance, in FDR's time, meritorious admission candidates possessed knowledge of the gentlemanly languages of Latin and Greek, "manliness" (p. 29) as demonstrated by athletic prowess, and "character" (p. 2) as exemplified by a particular style of polished manners and congeniality ("clubbability") (p. 63).

Defined by the Establishment, these culturally biased understandings of merit were put to the test by the rising numbers of academically able Jewish applicants in the 1920s. Excluding Jews was necessary both to preserve the WASP "clubbability" of the colleges and to safeguard their desirability among the sons of the Protestant elite. It was to keep Jews out that the Big Three formulated the modern selective admission apparatus of colleges and universities (admissions offices, extensive applications, references, interviews, description of extracurricular activities) and established formal non-academic criteria for selection (alumni parentage, geography, character, leadership, athleticism).

Pressures for and against change came from multiple interest groups. The philanthropic power and social influence of elite Ivy League alumni forced substantial legacy admission preferences that endure to the present. Beginning in the Cold War era, well-funded scholarly faculties have...