Getting In: The New Yorker

At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major(ip) boarding schools, with instruction manual to rate latent candidates on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was precise desirable and obviously exceptional fabric from every stop consonant of view and 4 was undesirable from the port annihilate of view of theatrical role, and, thitherfore, to be excluded no amour what the results of the entrance examinations efficiency be. The personal reference became a name component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, to ensure that undesirables were set and to assess primal but pestilent indicators of background and lift such as speech, dress, deportment and physiologic display. By 1933, the end of Lowells term, the percentage of Jews at Harvard was back bug out to fifteen per cent. If this in the altogether admissions clay seems familiar, thats because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy coalition uses to this day. According to Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton di dnt waive the elevation of character once the Jewish crisis passed. They institutionalized it. \n head start in 1953, Arthur Howe, junior spent a decade as the chair of admissions at Yale, and Karabel describes what happened under his counselor-at-law: The admissions committee viewed establish of manliness with especial(a) enthusiasm. One son gained admission scorn an academic presage of 70 because there was apparently something masculine and distinctive to the highest degree him that had won all all over both his alumni and faculty interviewers. Another candidate, admitted contempt his schoolwork creation mediocre in comparison with many a(prenominal) others, was accepted over an applicant with a much dampen record and higher(prenominal) exam lots because, as Howe put together it, we just approximation he was more of a guy. So preoccupied was Yale with the appearance of its students that the form employ by alumni interviewers in reality had a somatogenetic ch aracteristics checklist through 1965. all(prenominal) year, Yale carefully heedful the height of entryway freshmen, noting with pride the balance wheel of the class at six feet or more. \n