October 10, 2005

The Best, Not Necessarily The Brightest

Having just watched my first born graduate from Stanford University, I was fascinated by Malcolm Gladwell's piece in the New Yorker about the history of Ivy League college admissions. WOW. Check it out: the truth behind the bizarre, inscrutable system for anointing the academic elite is fascinating and oh so American. In short, all the admissions essaying and interviewing and rating candidates on a scale of 1-6 to create a "balanced class" began as a desperate effort to keep those effete Jews with their smarmy studiousness and irritatingly intellectual inclinations from diluting the all-American, good ole, preppy, academic aristocracy.

Every time people complain about SATs being unfair, I remind them that entrance exams began as a way of letting people in, not keeping them out. If it weren't for a chance to submit stellar SAT scores my un-schooler daughter would never have gotten into Stanford. Entrance exams were originally a progressive concept: the idea was to create an objective means whereby anybody who was smart, whether a public school immigrant urbanite or a prep school Wasp, or in our case a kid who didn't even go to school, would have an equal shot at passing the test and getting in.

But the gatekeepers at Harvard decided that this egalitarian thing had gone way to far when they started getting classes that were 20% Jewish. Gladwell reports that Jerome Karabel's book "The Chosen" relays how Harvard, et. al., instituted highly subjective, immeasurable criteria like "character," not to mention the personal interview and recommendation letter, to screen out the high scoring, skinny, klutzy, intellectuals (read Jews and gays) that were getting in based on test scores alone. Hmm, this was in the twenties and thirties, just as Nazism was percolating abroad. (Side note: at elite Williams College in the 1930's when students staged a parade to protest Hitler's book burnings, frat boys crashed the parade and stole the protester's effigy of Hitler to protect it from being burned.)

Granted modern day SATs and the like are culturally biased and don't actually measure much of anything meaningful (they don't even really predict how well you will do in college beyond Freshman year and they certainly don't measure how smart you are), but at least no one looking at your test scores knows that you are, as Gladwell sums it up, "short with big ears".

Stanford is the only school that my daughter got into (she didn't apply to any back up schools since she wasn't all that convinced that college was necessary; she was rejected by Yale, waitlisted at Harvard). Stanford was also the only school she applied to that doesn't do personal interviews. My husband opined, not entirely whimsically, that perhaps they don't do interviews because historically, as a West Coast School, they needed some smart-alecky, east coast Jews. But seriously, my daughter interviews very well—she's short but cute, and looks way more like my Episcopalian Mom than her East European paternal grandmother, and although she's more bookish than Yale might like, she's remarkably personable when she has to be, considering she's a total introvert—the Harvard interviewer even told her she was "the right kind of person for Harvard"—so why only the one school....

Okay, I do think my daughter got into Stanford because Stanford is awesome in appreciating independent thinkers (it prides itself on being an entrepreneur incubator for goodness sake) and Harvard probably gets way too many self-educated slam poets applying these days.

But I do know that George Bush took my husband's place at Yale in 1964. A short orthodox Jew from Rochester, NY whose parents never got through the 8th grade, my man had the test scores, transcript, academic prizes and artistic achievements to make a Bush blush, but he was waitlisted the year George joined his skull and bones brother John Kerry and waltzed through Yale's hallowed archways.

Of course, I wouldn't want to be selfish here. We all know it's still vitally important for the country, to the grooming of a future generation of leaders, to have a "balanced" class at Yale, don't you agree?