GETTING INTO HARVARD

Terrible things keep on happening in a world on which I can have no noticeable impact.  I sit here worrying about my car windshield (which should be replaced today or tomorrow!) Meanwhile more than 2000 people a day in the United States die from the virus – a 9/11 every day – war is on the edge of breaking out in Eastern Europe and democracy dies a thousand deaths here at home. Now I read that the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to affirmative action admissions programs at Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill.  The thought occurs to me that although I can have no effect on the outcome this is actually a subject about which I have been thinking and writing for virtually my entire life, so today I will make a few remarks about it.

 

Let me begin with a few historical facts. Before World War II, colleges and universities did not have admissions policies or admissions programs. They had admissions requirements. If you met the requirements you were pretty much guaranteed admission. Things began to change after the war, even though only 5% of the adult population earned college degrees. I have several times observed here that when I applied to Harvard in 1949 for admission the next fall, only about 2200 young men applied and three quarters of them were admitted although I think the class eventually was a bit smaller than 1200 in all.  Ten years later, in 1960, things had begun to change. I heard the Dean of the Harvard faculty, McGeorge Bundy, observe that there were 5000 applicants, of whom, as he said, “a thousand are clear admits, a thousand are clear rejects, and all our effort goes in deciding to which of the other 3000 to offer admission.”

 

In those days half or more of the entering class were preppies and it went without saying that if your father had gone to Harvard a place would be found for you. Furthermore, even the elite schools were regional rather than national, let alone international.

 

Very quickly pressures for admission increased steeply as parents sought to get their sons and daughters into elite schools, graduation from which virtually assured them choice positions in the upper-middle-class. In addition to the traditional legacy admittants and the sons and daughters of rich potential donors and of course athletes in the premier college sports, admissions committees started worrying about finding a good oboe player for the orchestra or achieving geographical balance and even, out of an excess of social concern, admitting a number of people who had colored skins and odd names (although, like as not, these new sorts of folks did not come from working-class homes – I mean, there is a limit!)

 

As the proportion of college graduates in the population increased and the already steep pyramid of jobs and wages grew even steeper, parents seeking to launch their children into the upper middle classes became more and more anxious about getting their sons and daughters into the “right” schools. At first the parental concern was simply that their children have access to “college preparatory courses” which frequently carried grades that were higher than the traditional 4.0, resulting in applicants with GPAs above 4. A glut of such overachievers led admissions committees to look for evidence of “extracurricular activities” to which parents responded by pushing their anxious children into internships, musical activities, and officially “good” works designed to help the “poor,” with the result that admissions committees became even more selective as they sifted through stacks of applications from students every one of whom could have made perfectly good use of the education that the college was offering.

 

I wrote about this for the first time 60 years ago in an article for Dissent magazine, another version of which appeared the next year in the Atlantic. The essay was called “College As Rat Race” which pretty well captures my view of the goings-on in the elite corner of the higher educational world.

 

My proposal for how to end this nonsense was heartfelt, sincere, and so off the charts bananas that no one ever picked up on it or echoed it, even on the left of the political spectrum where I lived. I suggested that colleges should establish some reasonable minimum standard calculated to identify students who could benefit educationally from what they were offering, and then simply make a random selection from among the large pile of applications that remained from the sifting and offer admission to whomever made this cut.

 

I had all sorts of good arguments as to why this would be a rational way of handling tertiary education. It was, after all, the way elementary and secondary education was for the most part handled in America. But there was of course a killer objection, namely, Why on earth would parents pay the enormous tuitions being charged by the elite schools if admission to the school was not prima facie evidence of suitably elite ability?  The whole point of going to Harvard – or Princeton or Yale or Cornell or Swarthmore or Reed or Amherst – being to get launched into the scarce elite high-paying jobs with good fringe benefits and no threat of sweat, random admissions would defeat what Robert Merton would have called the latent function of higher education.

 

The reactionary supermajority on the Supreme Court will, I predict, for all the wrong reasons strike down the use of race as a consideration in the admissions policies of American universities and colleges. But say what you will about Harvard, it has some brainy people there (not all of whom, like Senators Cruz and Hawley, have gone over to the dark side), so it will be interesting to see how they manage to get around the Supreme Court ruling.