<p>The current approach to admissions in which grades and test scores are augmented by geographic distribution and extra-curricular activities as a way of judging candidates character and leadership abilities was instituted by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to reduce the percentage of Jews. As documented by Jerome Karabel, who had access to the schools’ archives, in a book called The Chosen, when explicit quotas became too politically incorrect, they found that accepting applicants just based on pure academic performance produced a much higher percentage of Jews than they found acceptable. So, they introduced geographic distribution (Jews lived in a limited number of urban areas, so increasing kids from Iowa and Arkansas increased the proportion of Christians); athletics (sports was thought to be a measure of Christian virtue); etc. Interestingly, as the book notes, when Fred Hargadon moved from Dean of Admissions at Stanford to the same position at Princeton, he strengthened reliance on the non-academic criteria to systematically reduce the percentage of Jews at Princeton.</p>
<p>Interestingly, we’ve all come to accept these criteria for admission as the norm, but they provide fairly arbitrary and opaque tools to discriminate against certain groups (like Asians – we don’t want too many violin players) and in favor of other groups. Sometimes discrimination will be intentional, as it was against Jews and as I suspect it is against Asians, and sometimes it will be unintentional, perhaps against kids who are poor (but not URMs) who need to care for siblings after school, for example, and don’t have time for ECs.</p>