<p>The facinating story of how today's elite school admissions operations came into existance - for less than noble reasons - and how they have evolved with quite unintended consequences.</p>
<p>Excellent book about the history of the process. Bottom line if you are a white male you are now finished you wont get in anywhere Ivy. If you are black or hispanic you can phone in your grades and SAT scores. If you are female you are the new white male too many of us sorry- unless you are black or hispanic then you are in. If you are rich and really connected life is good wherever you go haha. That is my summary of "The Chosen".</p>
<p>are you sure that link works?</p>
<p>A interesting portrayal of the completely un-meritocratic and anti-Semitic history of HYP admissions. </p>
<p>The M. Gladwell piece in The New Yorker is well done.</p>
<p>"In 1974, the proportion of admits choosing to enroll at Princeton dropped below 50% for the first time, where it remained in 1975 and 1976 (when it reached an alltime low of 47%.) Princeton was doing particularly poorly in direct competition with Harvard; in 1977, of 540 applicants admitted by both institutions, 81 percent chose Harvard. Yale, too, continued to rank ahead of Princeton, attracting 55 percent of 350 joint admits. Even Stanford, which had been behind Princeton in head to head competition in the early 1970's, had pulled even... with a tie at 62 in 1977....." P. 523</p>
<p>"At century's end, an intense preoccupation with competitive position had become, more than ever, a driving force in admissions policy at all four institutions. But at Princeton, the issue had become a genuine obsession. So it was perhaps not entirely coincidental that, in April 2002, an associate dean of admissions at Old Nassau was caught breaking into Yale's confidential online admissions system. Claiming that he only entered the site to assess the security of such systems, his real purpose seems to have been to snoop on several Yale applicants who had also applied to Princeton .... Not long before a magnet for the languid gentlemen so brilliantly portrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, even Princeton had now become an institution on the make."</p>
<p>Kathy- either the book, or your intrepretation of it, is incredibly over simplified. Condsidering whites still make up an amazing majority at top provate institutions I seriously doubt everything you said.</p>
<p>tyical denigration by byerly: posting the most unflattering passages about a competing institution in a 722-page book directly to that institution's forum. when i get around to reading it in a couple weeks, i'll be sure to post all the choice quotes about harvard's anti-semitism and other faults on the harvard forum for all its prospectives to read.</p>
<p>yeah Byerly, why post on Princeton thread? Why do you think Harvard ranks 28th out of 31 institutions in the student satisfaction? why the NIH funding to Harvard is declining year after year? Wht the Harvard grads can't find jobs? Why do Harvard undergraduate students feel
intimidated by the Profs? Have you compared Harvard and Princeton side by side on campusdirt.com?</p>
<p>That's hardly the most unflattering reference to Princeton in the book, Scottie, if the truth be known. There are plenty of unflattering references to Harvard and Yale of course, but Princeton may well get the worst of it.</p>
<p>The early part of the book focusses,for the most part, on bigotry and racism and anti-semitism in the first part of the century, but a lot of that history is well known.</p>
<p>What interests me most (and may interest you too) are the later chapters talking about the "admission wars."</p>
<p>Particularly interesting are the later chapters:"Coeducation and the Struggle for Gender Equality", "The Alumni Revolt at Yale and Princeton", "Diversity, the Bakke Case and the Defense of Autonomy", "Money, The Market Ethos, and the Struggle For Position", and "The Battle over Merit."</p>
<p>I have called attention to this book on the Harvard and Yale sites as well - suggesting that people buy it or borrow a copy. I've also posted reviews on "the other site."</p>
<p>I wonder how the West Coast Empire comes off.</p>
<p>"Among (Princeton's) many concerns (in the mid-80's) was its low yield: 55% in 1983, compared to 71% at Harvard, 61% at Stanford, and 58% at Yale. Particularly worrisome was its declining status compared to Stanford. In 1985, the annual report of the dean of admissions referred to "the extraordinary emergence of Stanford as competition for large numbers of commonly admitted students." That year's statistics revealed that Stanford was winning the competition, with 155 students admitted at both institutions choosing to enroll at Stanford, compared to only 102 matriculating at Princeton." (P. 526)</p>
<p>Hooray! That's a pretty good tidbit.</p>
<p>Somehow I knew you'd find it tasty.</p>