应该读一下伯克利教授研究藤校限制犹太人历史而写的书。那是亚裔的翻版，唯一的差异是这内部掌握配额在各校是随心所欲，而现在是趋同。
How Harvard, Princeton, Yale Restricted Jews, Smarties, Blacks
Dec. 30 (Bloomberg) -- ``The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton'' (Houghton Mifflin, 711 pages, $28) is filled with surprising insights into how student selection evolved at the ``Big Three.''
In researching changing admission standards during the past century, Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, found that institutions began using ``character'' as a way to supplement academic criteria and screen out brainy Jews and immigrants. The intent was to establish the ``latitude to admit the dull sons of major donors'' and redefine ``merit.''
Karabel spoke with Robin Schatz on the phone.
Schatz: What surprised you most in the course of your research?
Karabel: I had begun with the notion that the admission of women was a response to the feminist movement, and as I looked more carefully into the documents, it became apparent that this was really not true. That in fact, the decision to move toward co-education predated the rise of modern feminism, and the primary moving force was the desire to compete. That is, to get the best boys.
Yale and Princeton, in particular, thought they would lose more and more students to Harvard and, increasingly, Stanford; so, in order to get the best men, they needed to admit women.
Schatz: What else?
Limiting Jews
Karabel: I think another big surprise was that Harvard in particular but also Yale had, in essence, what you might consider a quota on the number of students who were intellectuals or admitted entirely on academic brilliance and that that quota was around 10 percent.
In one year, for example, of the 150 most brilliant applicants out of around 10,000, at that time, they still rejected 20 or 30, basically, because they disliked them on personal grounds.
Schatz: You write that admissions changed to a merit-based system in the 1920s as a way to limit Jewish enrollments. How so?
Karabel: Harvard, Yale and Princeton, up until the very early 1920s, had an exam-based system of admission. If you passed you were admitted. If you failed you were turned away. If you were in the gray zone, then they might admit you on conditions but basically, if you passed, regardless of your social background, you would be admitted.
Leadership, Character
That was precisely why the system was judged to be no longer viable because too many of the wrong students, the ``undesirable'' students -- that is, predominantly, Jewish students of East European background -- started to pass the exams.
So an entirely new system of admissions was invented with emphasis on such things as character, leadership, personality, alumni parentage, athletic ability, geographical diversity. They started, for the first time, to do interviews. They introduced photos. A lot of things, which we take for granted today, in fact, were introduced in this period and have endured to the present.
Schatz: What happened to Jewish admissions as a result?
Imposing Quotas
Karabel: Well, at Harvard, the Jewish proportion of the freshmen class in 1925 had reached 28 percent and shortly thereafter, after a very protracted and bitter struggle, which lasted from 1922 really to 1926, Harvard imposed a 15 percent quota. At Yale, the proportion of Jews had reached toward 14 percent and in 1924, they imposed a 10 percent quota. At Princeton where the proportion of Jews had gotten only to 3.6 percent, they decided that that was excessive and they cut the proportion of Jews to 2 percent in 1924. That's in contrast to African Americans, who were totally excluded from Princeton until 1945.
Schatz: How did the race riots of the 1960s influence admissions?
Karabel: You had, in the Ivy League as a whole, almost a doubling of blacks in the single year between 1968 and 1969, and that was the year when over 100 cities rioted in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination. And that sort of jolted, I think, the nation's elite into feeling that they could not continue to do business as usual but that the racial strife might lead to the unraveling of the entire social order.
FDR, Yes; Bush, No
Schatz: Would Franklin Delano Roosevelt have gotten into Harvard or George W. Bush have gotten into Yale in 2005?
Karabel: FDR was certainly not an academic whiz, but he was a solid student. Now, George W. Bush, that's a different matter. In his secondary school, which was Andover, a well-known private school, he had never made the honor roll even once and he did not have any particularly distinguished extracurricular talent either, so he was the kind of student who, were it not for his family background, would, I'd say, have essentially no chance of being admitted to Yale.
Schatz: What are the biggest admissions challenges still facing Harvard, Yale and Princeton?
Another Kind of Diversity
Karabel: The biggest challenge today is around not the issue of race or religion or gender but around the issue of socioeconomic or class diversity,
These schools still draw roughly half their students from that segment of the American population that can pay the $45,000 or so a year, and that's only about the top 5 percent of the population, and they have radical under-representation from really the lower half of the socioeconomic spectrum.
Schatz: A whole industry has grown up to help get kids into elite colleges. Are admissions just going to keep getting tighter at the Big Three?
Karabel: In the book, I say that these schools have, almost against their will, been more successful in democratizing anxiety than opportunity because anxiety, now, extends to the highest segments of the elite.
Even the people at the very top of the system are not at all sure that they'll be able to get their children into one of these schools -- and they're right.
Ivy League Mystique
Schatz: Given all the excellent colleges in the country, why does this mystique about the Ivy League persist?
Karabel: There are about 2,000 four-year colleges and universities, and there are under 150 that admit fewer than half their applicants. Harvard, Yale and Princeton and, for that matter Berkeley, are heavily over-represented in the American elite, but it still remains the case that the majority of people who have succeeded in America have not gone to these institutions.
Schatz: So, should parents lighten up?
Karabel: Parents should definitely lighten up. But it's very hard to do because there are all these factors encouraging people to be anxious and insecure. I would say, as a sociologist, that there's an element of reality in America that underlies this. If you succeed your rewards are unparalleled, precisely because America is such an unequal society. If you fail, it's a much more serious thing than if you fail in, let's say Sweden or France.
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