Thanks! I am behind in reading and love the logical mind he has.
The thing to understand is that everything we know about selective college admissions today is less than a century old. So if you go back to 1910 or 1920, the Ivy League schools were not particularly expensive. They were not particularly desirable, in that they didn’t have five or 10 or 20 times as many applicants as there were spots. And they weren’t particularly rigorous about vetting students. They appealed to a fairly small, self-selecting group of mostly Protestant, mostly well-to-do, mostly male Americans. So how did we get from there to here today, when these schools are desirable, expensive, and have a very rigorous vetting process?
The answer is that most of those measures came about as part of the effort to limit the percentage of Jews in the student body. The extensive college application of multiple pages came about because they added questions to figure out if an applicant was Jewish, including What’s your religion? What is your father’s occupation? What is your mother’s maiden name? Where were your parents born? At some schools, they asked you to attach a photograph. Some began to require an interview. And that was in part so they could try to suss out if you were Jewish or not.
My favorite example is the push for geographical diversity. Today we see this movement as a somewhat virtuous thing: Who doesn’t want to go to a school that has students from all 50 states? But it originally came about because colleges were trying to limit the number of New Yorkers, who were disproportionately Jewish. And so schools like Columbia began to send admissions officers to recruit students in the West and the South, because they were more likely to get gentiles from those regions. So even something as benign as geographical diversity has its origins in this quite calculated scheme to push the number of Jewish students down.
The broader historical background here is that around 1900, all of these schools had very few Jews, but by the time of World War I, all of them had rising numbers of Jewish students. That’s because they were largely open-admission schools, and ambitious Jewish sons of immigrants from New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia were applying. They figured out that if they had a few bucks, they didn’t have to go to City College or Temple. They could go to Columbia or Princeton, which were not particularly expensive and not particularly hard to get into. And so the number of Jews began to soar and multiply during those years of heavy immigration.
Yeah, the irony is that in 1920, the average student at City College or NYU was substantially more interested in homework and in learning a lot than the average student at Yale, who had pretty good prospects of going into his father’s business.
In some ways, this was a matter of happenstance. In 1920, something like half of New York City public-school students were Jewish, both because there’d been heavy Jewish immigration, but also because Jews didn’t drop out in eighth grade. Their parents wanted them to stay in school. And so as the grades went on, they began to overtake other ethnicities as a percentage of students. This meant that of the students graduating high school in New York City in 1920, a very heavy number were Jewish. So it just stood to reason that the percentages of Jews at all of the four-year colleges, which were the gateways to the professions like law and medicine, were going to go up. City College had pretty much maxed out. It was overwhelmingly Jewish. Columbia’s numbers were similarly going to go up, which they did—not as high, but perhaps to a quarter or a third. But it was not because the Jews necessarily did careful research and figured out that these were highly intellectual places. Rather, they might have had some sense that they were higher-prestige places, which might offer you a better chance of getting into one of the professional schools.