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The Power of Privilege

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Tables.....................................................................................................................ixForeword and Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................xi1. Meritocracy and Its Discontents.................................................................................................12. Elite Colleges and the Search for Superior Students.............................................................................133. Social-Class Diversity at Yale after 1950?......................................................................................534. The Brewster Years, Meritocracy in Power? The New Administration in 1964: Kingman Brewster and Inslee Clark.....................725. The Old Machinery of Meritocracy Is Discarded: No More Predicting Grades, No More Verbal Analogies..............................1196. Top-Tier Colleges and Privileged Social Groups..................................................................................163Conclusions........................................................................................................................191Notes..............................................................................................................................203Index..............................................................................................................................233

Chapter One

Even Americans unfamiliar with the word embrace meritocracy as if it were a birthright. We believe in the essential goodness of the idea that people should be able to achieve in school and at work to the full extent of their natural abilities and drive. Being rewarded for what one does, rather than whom one is, and being able to rise or fall on one's merits is part of what defines the American dream of individual freedom and personal accomplishment. Our national ethos of self-determination may be a delusion, but its appeal persists, even internationally. A female graduate student, speaking for French youths frustrated by a culture of limited opportunities, lamented to a New York Times reporter, "We are never taught the idea of the American dream," the concept of "the self-made man."

For many Americans, schools and colleges are the vessels of our meritocratic aspirations; they provide our primary experience with an institution that evaluates individual performance. Reliable surveys tell us that most adults think of merit in school or college as academic accomplishments; we believe entry to college should be based on grades and test scores alone. Youths applying to college count on the basic fairness of the admissions process, and when it does not appear to be that way, a rejection letter may bring on litigation. If all else is equal between two candidates, is it fair for the applicant whose father went to Harvard, for example, to be admitted there over someone whose parents did not? Should religion, gender, or race matter to one's prospects? Some of the ambivalence that many feel about affirmative action is because it seems unconstitutional that anything other than individual academic merit should count for college admissions.

America has, according to international scholars, seventeen of the top twenty universities in the world. Most of our best universities, as ranked by Barron's, the Princeton Review, or U.S. News and World Report, are private. We take great national pride in our premier universities and like to believe that their academic excellences are matched by a fair admissions process that selects the best brains for their classrooms. Our belief in America as a society where opportunities are open to talent is sustained, in part, by our confidence that our most prestigious universities operate according to the best possible standards of academic meritocracy. One should get into a top university because of one's achievements, not because of accidents of birth.

What would it mean, however, if Harvard and Yale and their peers had a history of excluding applicants based on gender, religion, race, income, and personality? The facts are that colleges like Yale kept a limit on their Jewish students until the early 1960s, females were barred entirely through the late 1960s, Blacks were eliminated from the competition by poverty and inadequate schools until the 1970s, and right up to the contemporary period, one's personality and family income still matter. If those ivied universities pursued, not only in the recent past but at present, admissions policies aimed at capturing youths from families at the top of the income pyramid, and those universities selected students more for personal qualities than for academic accomplishments, would that require us to reevaluate the way we think of educational opportunity and individual merit? What sort of academic meritocracy would we have if one's chances of being in it were substantially determined by extracurricular performance and family wealth?

It is ironic that those top colleges who distance themselves from the pre-professional practices of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) provide the greatest boost to athletes in their admissions process. Neither racial minorities nor alumni offspring receive the preferential treatment given to athletes in top-tier admissions. The academic entry hurdle in the Ivy League is lowest for athletes, a majority of whom are White and from affluent families. And athletes are in a stronger position to influence campus life in ivied colleges than in NCAA state universities because they are a larger percentage of the undergraduate population in the former. Male athletes are just 3 percent of the men at the University of Michigan, for example, although they are 22 percent of Princeton's men. The emphasis placed by American elite colleges on athleticism is a national anomaly. Youths with undistinguished academic records cannot get into England's Oxford University or to France's Ecole Nationale d'Administration just for playing soccer. Why should sports matter so much in the Ivy League?

Separate from the significant athletic boost in admissions, there is the benefit of standing on stacks of money. Lawrence Summers, as president of Harvard, expressed dismay with the grip of wealthy families on elite colleges. He reported that at America's most prestigious colleges, approximately 74 percent of undergraduates came from families in the top income quartile, and only 9 percent of undergraduates came from the bottom 50 percent of America's families ranked by income. Is the overlap of economic class and academic prestige merely an unfortunate yet inescapable coincidence? Or are admissions in the Ivy League governed by a logic that rewards socioeconomic status but disguises it as merit? Summers proclaims, "There is no more important mission for Harvard and higher education than promoting equality of opportunity for all." Yet, as his statistics show, unless one believes that only rich people can be smart, we have a staggering distance to travel to achieve a fair opportunity for all to reach every level of our educational system.

President Summers's disclosure on the economic composition of top-tier colleges draws attention to another American irony....