A Peek Into Ivy League Quotas

There's been a certain amount of background noise over recent generations, especially from commentators like Alan Dershowitz, that quotas persist in ivy League and similar elite schools, and although the schools insist that Jewish quotas are a thing of the past, quotas of all sorts have grown and become steadily more intricate. There may no longer be Jewish quotas per se, but admissions criteria that de-prioritize applicants from affluent suburbs have a similar effect, and these persist.

The first impression I had, just days after arriving at Dartmouth, was that some of my clasmates were in effect flying coach, while others flew first class. This was at complete variance with the public narrative current at least in the 1950s and early 60s that the elite schools were highly selective based on grades, test scores, and extracurriculars, and those selected were the best and the brightest.

This view was reflected in David Brooks's remarkably silly 2000 book, Bobos in Paradise, where he explained that the College Boards had completely changed the educational system after World War II, allowing a true meritocracy to emerge. Well, just for example, Brooks himself had got into Chicago, how could things be otherwise? So why were so many of my new Ivy League schoolmates so vapid, and why were so many, like me in their late teens, already alcoholic and drug dependent?

Within weeks, I'd come to the conclusion that the admissions office had made a terrible mistake by admitting me, and I had several discussions with the Dean of Freshmen about this. I never got a satisfactory explanation, but he convinced me to stay the course. Well, at least I graduated, and I mostly stayed out of trouble.

I was astonished to see this story a few days ago, in The Atlantic of all places:

Less than 2 percent of the nation’s students attend so-called independent schools. But 24 percent of Yale’s class of 2024 attended an independent school. At Princeton, that figure is 25 percent. At Brown and Dartmouth, it is higher still: 29 percent.

The numbers are even more astonishing when you consider that they’re not distributed evenly across the country’s more than 1,600 independent schools but are concentrated in the most exclusive ones—and these are our focus here. In the past five years, Dalton has sent about a third of its graduates to the Ivy League. Ditto the Spence School. Harvard-Westlake, in Los Angeles, sent 45 kids to Harvard alone. Noble and Greenough School, in Massachusetts, did even better: 50 kids went on to Harvard.

There's nothing new about this social condition -- it was pointed out by Ferdinand Lundberg in the 1930s, and it was recognized at least tacitly well before then -- that the real determinant of where you stand socially is not where you went to college, but where you went to private secondary school. The surprise here is that somehow, the Ivies have released the actual percentages of slots in their entering classes that are reserved specifically for the St Grottlesex schools.

Recognize that, although roughly a quarter of the slots in each class across the Ivies are reserved specifically for St Grottlesex, there are other quotas, such as legacies irrespective of private wchool, the children of megadonors, the children of prominent media figures and politicians, and so forth. Tucker Carlson asked rhetorically how Chris Cuomo got into Yale, but he already knew the answer. My puzzlement as an Ivy freshman was based on the same question, but nobody told me the answer back then.

The quality of applicants to elite schools is heavily diluted by what we definitely know now is a privileged cohort from St Grottlesex, around a quarter, but the other reserved slots add an unknown additional proportion. I recall reading an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in the 1970s that said yes, the elite schools were now practicing affirmative action, but those quotas were over and above the still-existing set-asides for the traditional privileged groups. The losers would be the talented applicants who weren't in one or another privileged class -- Jews, Asians, middle-class whites.

This is one reason why non-entities like Jen Psaki rise to prominence, and for that matter why people whose pedigrees are less than pure but who rise via some measure of actual talent, like Donald Trump, are hated by the privileged Ivy Leaguers. But this aso circles back to the peculiar story of Frederick Kinsman, which I'll resume tomorrow.