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How an Ivy League College Decides on Admissions
94 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1961
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November 27, 2023
This text will mostly be interesting for people involved or interested in the discourse surrounding university admissions.
Maybe that should be apparent from the title.
The interesting thing is that although the book was written in 1961, there's very little new under the sun. The reader will find concerns about inequities in standardized testing, a lack of consistency in secondary grading policies, a reliance on black-box predictive analytics for student achievement and enrollment, concerns about balancing academic and athletic commitments, interference from alumni groups that give extra attention to legacy students, attempts to shift discourse away from issues of racial equity, feeder schools, maintenance of small student bodies as a means of reinforcing prestige, and various misaligned attempts for university staff to define what the mission of their institution actually is.
The book began as a New Yorker article and it contains the kind of rhetorical impulse that you might associate with that publication. It's a great picture of what kinds of concerns appear to simply be baked into any admissions process where there are scare resources and rapidly expanding appetites. It's a quick read and a delightful one if you're interesting in doing to work to connect its observations to modern conversations.
There's lots of good quotes, but I'll include one here from the Yale admissions director at the time:
"Sometimes I lie awake nights worrying about whether we've been kidding ourselves into taking a lot of brainy kids who are too ego-centric to ever contribute much to society. Or have we been taking a lot of twerps who have read the how-to-get-int-college books, listened to their counselors, and learned to take tests and to give the right answers to interviewers-- a bunch of conformists who will kep right on doing the smart thing for themselves? A prestige-college diploma is apparently considered the quickest way up the status ladder, and that's often what parents mean when they say they want their boys 'to have the opportunities that a Yale education offers.' This is perfectly understandable, but how far should a university go in accepting candidates whose reasons for applying are based on such shallow values? Should we admit them in hope of changing those values, or do we get them too late to accomplish that?"
The more things change...
Maybe that should be apparent from the title.
The interesting thing is that although the book was written in 1961, there's very little new under the sun. The reader will find concerns about inequities in standardized testing, a lack of consistency in secondary grading policies, a reliance on black-box predictive analytics for student achievement and enrollment, concerns about balancing academic and athletic commitments, interference from alumni groups that give extra attention to legacy students, attempts to shift discourse away from issues of racial equity, feeder schools, maintenance of small student bodies as a means of reinforcing prestige, and various misaligned attempts for university staff to define what the mission of their institution actually is.
The book began as a New Yorker article and it contains the kind of rhetorical impulse that you might associate with that publication. It's a great picture of what kinds of concerns appear to simply be baked into any admissions process where there are scare resources and rapidly expanding appetites. It's a quick read and a delightful one if you're interesting in doing to work to connect its observations to modern conversations.
There's lots of good quotes, but I'll include one here from the Yale admissions director at the time:
"Sometimes I lie awake nights worrying about whether we've been kidding ourselves into taking a lot of brainy kids who are too ego-centric to ever contribute much to society. Or have we been taking a lot of twerps who have read the how-to-get-int-college books, listened to their counselors, and learned to take tests and to give the right answers to interviewers-- a bunch of conformists who will kep right on doing the smart thing for themselves? A prestige-college diploma is apparently considered the quickest way up the status ladder, and that's often what parents mean when they say they want their boys 'to have the opportunities that a Yale education offers.' This is perfectly understandable, but how far should a university go in accepting candidates whose reasons for applying are based on such shallow values? Should we admit them in hope of changing those values, or do we get them too late to accomplish that?"
The more things change...
Displaying 1 of 1 review