The Chosen
by Jerome Karabel · first published 2005
9mentions
5recommended by
9HN commenters
2010–2023first – last mentioned
56% recommend44% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Traces how Harvard, Yale, and Princeton shaped university admissions, focusing on the shift toward holistic criteria and its impact on Jewish applicants. Considered the definitive history of elite college admissions.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
The author presents the findings of his survey of admissions at Princeton, revealing a century of exclusion that cuts to the core of the American experience, while raising questions about the stratification of higher education in America.
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It was definitely an explicit goal. There's a great book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/The-Chosen-Admission-Exclusion-Prince... Here's a quote from a summary: > At one point, [Harvard President] Lowell wrote to a Harvard philosophy professor to explain that enrolling a high number of Jewish students…
on “Harvard Is Wrong That Asians Have Terrible Personalities” ↗…education is sending. As for Harvard (etc) not selecting for Jews and Asians, very explicitly throughout the first 60 years or so (Anyone particularly interested in the topic should read Karabel's The Chosen), that's also, exactly as you point out, a signal sent if you went to Harvard in those years. That doesn't make the policy right or wrong, it just means that if you graduate from Harvard in 1930 you're…
on “How I Snuck Into The Ivy League. And You Can Too.” ↗…standardized testing towards the more "holistic" approach to admissions was deliberately designed and implemented to limit the number of Jews at elite universities. See Jerome Karabel's excellent "The Chosen" for more analysis (https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Chosen.html?id=1Nf3... there was a time when testing and grades were a large portion of admissions, but that let too many hard-working undesirables…
on “The Ivy League Is Broken, Standardized Tests Can Fix It” ↗There are many moving parts to this case and the issue(s) it concerns. Highly recommend people read (about) the following book by Jerome Karabel: The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion At Harvard, Yale, And Princeton. Would also recommend Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission. Prof. Frank Wu's insight might also be useful here (from…
on “Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans” ↗Why is the analogy ridiculous? You should read The Chosen, by Karabel, which is probably the best history of elite college admissions. Much of what we do in college admissions today are remnants to reduce the number of Jewish people at Ivy League schools --…
on “Affirmative action at US colleges has been banned” ↗…late homework and statistical irregularities. Or the 6-3 guy who looks like a line-backer, but now teaches psychology, and still plays ball on the weekends. In this case, Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” how the Ivy League started to look for "manliness" to avoid too many geeks and Jews. Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale did the economic study on the selection effect vs. value added. James L. Shulman and William…
on “Jewish problems” ↗…College administrators talked quite openly about the idea that having too many Jews would result in an inferior or degraded college culture. My source here is Jerome Karabel's book called, naturally, The Chosen.
on “Throw Out the College Application System” ↗…still reporting that they earned a 3.9 GPA including an “A” in AP Calculus. ... > This would be one more step in a long-standing trend in college admissions, as described in Jerry Karabel’s book The Chosen. From 1898 to 1919, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton opened up their admissions requirements by adopting the College Entrance Exam Board and abandoning a Greek-language requirement. These reforms made admission…
on “Elite High Schools Plot to Undermine College Admissions” ↗…abandoned for a more rounded approach. This was the exact pretext used by Harvard in the early 20th century to reduce the number of Jews in attendance. > As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.…
on “Jewish Problems (2011)” ↗