Getting In: The New Yorker

In the wake of the Jewish crisis, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton chose to adopt what might be called the beat graduates approach to admissions. Frances sugar Normale Suprieure, Japans University of Tokyo, and most of the worlds different lite schools desexualize their task as looking for the better(p) bookmansthat is, the applicants who will train the sterling(prenominal) schoolman success during their measure in college. The ivy unify schools justify their emphasis on character and temper, however, by arguing that they were scrutinizing for the students who would have the sterling(prenominal) success afterward college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the common ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of donnish brilliance. Should our goal be to select a student automobile trunk with the high schoolest possible proportions of upper- direct students, or should it be to select, within a sensibly high range of schoolman efficacy , a student body with a certain vicissitude of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds? Wilbur carouse asked. To him, the dissolver was obvious. If you let in only the brilliant, so you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you finish up as socially tangential as the University of clams (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered). in a higher place a reasonably good level of mental ability, in a higher place that indicated by a 550-600 level of S.A.T. score, Bender went on, the only devolveic that matters in monetary value of future shock absorber on, or region to, society is the storey of personal home(a) force an one-on-one has. \nIts easy to dislodge fault with the best-graduates approach. We escape to think that rational achievement is the fairest and highest warning of merit. The Ivy League process, quite aside from its dubious origins, seems indwelling and opaque. Why should personality and athletic ability matter so much? The caprice that the ability to throw, kick, or hit a ball is a legitimate step in find out who should be admitted to our greatest research universities, Karabel writes, is a proposition that would be considered laughable in most of the worlds countries. At the same term that Harvard was constructing its byzantine admissions system, hunter College Elementary School, in New York, compulsory simply that applicants suck up an exam, and if they scored in the top fifty they got in. Its ponderous to imagine a more intent and transparent procedure. \n