Getting back to the article itself, I found this passage interesting:
Karabel’s massive documentation—over 700 pages and 3000 endnotes—establishes the remarkable fact that America’s uniquely complex and subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert ethnic tribal warfare. During the 1920s, the established Northeastern Anglo-Saxon elites who then dominated the Ivy League wished to sharply curtail the rapidly growing numbers of Jewish students, but their initial attempts to impose simple numerical quotas provoked enormous controversy and faculty opposition.10 Therefore, the approach subsequently taken by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and his peers was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration of all aspects of each individual applicant; the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired. As a consequence, university leaders could honestly deny the existence of any racial or religious quotas, while still managing to reduce Jewish enrollment to a much lower level, and thereafter hold it almost constant during the decades which followed.11 For example, the Jewish portion of Harvard’s entering class dropped from nearly 30 percent in 1925 to 15 percent the following year and remained roughly static until the period of the Second World War.12
I've had many discussions with American leftists on this board about the "holistic" approach of American universities, which they defend and I always regarded as subjective, unfair and discriminatory. Turns out it was specifically designed to be all of those things.
The author offers praise for the admission criteria used by the Grandes Écoles of France and top universities of Northern Europe. Well, they use the simplest and fairest possible criteria, pure academic performance in the form of test scores. The same as the Ivy League unis did before they decided there were too many Jews (and now too many Asians).
Later in the essay, the author goes on to criticize this criteria by essentially saying that:
a)it would force more American kids to study as hard and obsessively as Asians;
b)it would keep people whose primary talent is sports or arts related out of the top universities.
Both of these arguments suck. It would be a good thing for the US if more kids were studying like East Asians (and Europeans for that matter). And this mixing of sports and university so typical of the US is alien to the rest of the world. People whose primary talent is playing football
shouldn't go to Harvard, period.
His article starts by praising the top European and Asian universities for their strictly meritocratic admission policy and then discards the very same policy for the US.
The article goes downhill from there, and his suggestion of an "inner and outer ring" is rather lunatic in my opinion.
I've always maintained that pure standardized tests are the cleanest, fairest way to select candidates for universities. It's better to be left out because some guy scored 0.005 more than you then to be left out because you belong to the wrong race or class.
Why not simply copy the fine admission criteria already used with great success in other countries instead of making up an untested and bizarre new criteria? What Ron Unz suggests is the opposite of conservative wisdom (seek solutions that already exist before inventing new ones); it's social engineering for the sake of social engineering.
