In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I keep returning to David Brooks and his thesis in Bobos in Paradise that James B Conant's educational reforms, in particular egalitarian merit-based college admissions policies based on standardized testing, created a new, meritocratic elite made up especially of suburban Jews. Other writers like Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah and Jerome Karabel's The Chosen have sharply challenged this view, arguing that Jewish quotas in particular persist in the Ivy League, and in any case, secretive college admissions policies allow wealthy donors, legacies, influential politicians, and others to bypass putative rules. My guess is that the 2019 USC admissions scandal, whereby celebrities Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman pled guilty to paying as much as $500,000 in bribes to get their daughters into USC, is just the tip of the iceberg. But USC is not an Ivy; it's second-tier, so the actual cash value of an acceptance letter from Stanford, Chicago, or an Ivy can only be estima...