Access and Excess: Selective College Admissions in Historical Perspective

Jerome Karabel's The Chosen presents a fascinating story central to the American ritual of applying to college as a way to get ahead—or, to provide a hedge against downward mobility. To appreciate the full sweep of this saga about selective college admissions you should read all 711 pages of his book. And, if you wish to know how the current president of the United States, George W. Bush, managed to gain admission to Yale in 1964, turn to pages 344 and 345.

Karabel's main line of argument for almost a century of admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton is that established elites have had the liberty to define—and redefine—"merit" to fit their self-interests. Hence, they have been able to control who is admitted to prestigious undergraduate colleges. Abusing this power to create quotas was neither illusory nor accidental. It was a deliberate policy set by Abbott Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard from 1909 to 1934. In the 1920s the mechanism that enabled this abuse was the new consideration of "character" in evaluating students' applications. Reference letters and personal data ostensibly about an applicant's "character" were used to exclude students on the basis of ethnicity, class, and religious affiliation. Crucial to the intriguing story is that Lowell had good company among his counterpart presidents at Princeton and Yale in these practices.

Karabel's archival documents include some gems that show how deans of admissions often kept one eye on the financial ledger sheet and another on transcripts and SAT scores in "creating a freshman class." For example, he quotes from internal memos by Princeton admissions officials in the early 1930s in which they talked about students as "paying guests" and underscored the importance of their tuition revenues for the university budget (pp. 127–128). Karabel is at his best when he juxtaposes the favoritism of admissions for the not-so-studious sons of established families with the stern lessons the admissions office conveyed to other applicants. For example, Karabel writes that in the early 1950s, "Yale's philosophy was built on the belief that requiring work in return for a scholarship was good for the character of recipients" (p. 328). As one college administrator said in a radio interview, Yale wished to communicate that in America "You don't get something for nothing." The puzzle was to figure out the coin of the admissions realm. Was donating a new laboratory building or having a grandfather who was a famous alumnus part of the "price of admission"? Would such good works be worth more or less than an A in calculus from the Bronx High School of Science? So, at times a feature of the New England work ethic was that prestige and wealth along with biased evidence of "character" were used conveniently to justify admissions of the sons of elite families. These also were the primary tools used to exclude academically qualified students from lower-income immigrant groups—especially Jews whose families had emigrated from Eastern Europe.

Karabel's book brings to mind an earlier work, Nicholas Lemann's 1999 blockbuster, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. Although both books deal with the innards of selective admissions to prestigious colleges, there's an important difference. When I was reading Lemann's book, I continuously marveled at his research and storytelling—and exclaimed, "How did he find this out?" In contrast, with Karabel's book, many of his episodes, documents, and anecdotes led me to ask, "Where have I read this before?" In sum, Karabel's book is highly promoted and provocative. But it is a derivative work that is not particularly original in its historical data and argument, especially for the period from 1900 to 1930. Its title is puzzling. Karabel devotes little attention to describing or probing "The Chosen"—namely, the undergraduate life of those admitted to undergraduate colleges at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. More accurately, his book...