I can’t trace it back to 1847, only to 1947.
My father probably would have met the normal white Harvard/Yale/Princeton admissions requirements, but I think not the higher ones for Jews.
And I suspect I could have met the legacy admissions requirement, but not the normal one.
So old-time antisemitism may have prevented my children from drinking out of that poisoned (due to mismatch) chalice.
That’s like saying coming in first in a foot race discriminates against those who didn’t.
Of course the word “discrimination” has two meanings:
A foot race has an unambiguous single goal. To come in first. SAT or GRE scores may be ends in themselves for the testees in that everyone taking them hopes for the best possible outcome for themselves.
But from a college admissions decision-making perspective, the scores are just one indicator.
The score indicates some measure of learning, some measure of test-taking ability, some measure of speed of thought, and some measure of white upper-middle class suburban 2nd-or-greater-generation American upbringing. All blended together into a single number that defies decomposition.
It’s not even clear that the highest score represents the best choice for any college, much less the particular college and major the particular candidate is being evaluated for. We all knew the “idiot geniuses” in school who aced every test but were otherwise too weird and too useless to be successes. See also “Life member of Mensa”. A candidate with a lesser SAT / GRE score coupled with a better, more balanced everything else would probably be a more successful candidate on average.
And from the admissions POV that’s what they’re aiming for. They want the totality of the candidates they select over a span of years to be good enough to succeed, and ideally near the best their school could have attracted. Specifically optimizing each single candidate is not necessarily part of that plan.
And of course that’s all before we start considering the sub rosa goals of the total admissions process, whether that’s currying favor with minority groups, or with alumni, or placating some government oversight. Or simply indulging the power-tripping whims of the person grading your application who has an irrational hatred of people with last names starting with M.
You can make the same claim for anything using that logic. Are we going to apply this to athletic achievement in sports? Sales achievements in business? Patents in research development? The answer should be no. So why apply it to people who put in great effort scholastically?
When we start making subjective versus objective metrics in college to meet quotas then it is purely a scenario of the ends justifying the means. There is no way to determine subjectively if a high scholastic achiever is going to do poorly at their job 20 years later but making up litmus tests to discriminate isn’t going to change that.
In addition to what Magiver said, I’m reminded of the old slogan that you can tell a Harvard man but can’t tell him much.
From the point of view of the Harvard admissions office, said idiot genius should go to some place like UNC, which, despite being consistently ranked as a top 100 university internationally, probably cannot afford an admissions department capable of screening out said weird test-acer (assuming they ace not just the SAT, but also high school tests and assignments). However. making sure that the supposedly useless ace goes to a different undergraduate school is of no public interest.
Some countries, and some top world universities, have an undergraduate admissions process focused on one all-important test. This has advantages and disadvantages. I don’t think the Supreme Court could or should mandate that the U.S. move to such a system. I personally would emphasize high school grades more than test scores, especially when the university has historical statistics showing how that high school’s GPA profile correlates with university academic success. What the Supreme Court missed was that legacy preference, at a school receiving lots of federal funds (Harvard takes 69 percent of government research grants as overhead), like consideration of race, reasonably violates equal protection. They also missed that you can’t stop historically discriminatory schools from considering race and wealth unless the process uses a measurable and publicly available, simple or complex, formula.
Well said overall.
I don’t quite agree that the Supreme Court missed that. Although you may just have been being diplomatic while also understanding the rather more sordid reality.
I think that they consciously decided that discriminatory policies in favor of legacies and whites (which categories have a lot of overlap) was their goal and so they carefully searched for their car keys only in part of the alley, studiously avoiding the lit area over there that would have shown up the error of their ways.
Said another way, with this decision they have elevated a known long-standing bug to the level of fully supported feature.
At one level, discrimination is a bit like toothpaste in a tube. You can squeeze it away from here and it will reappear over there. Having an act of government (whether by legislation or by court action) force a change to the admissions formula used by a college with discriminatory intent simply makes them alter something else in their process to achieve the same goal.
At a whole-society level we have been, and should continue to be, nudging the populace towards having / wanting less total discriminatory intent. It’s taking longer than we thought, and ref the rather acrimonious recent thread about the American Experiment*, right now we’re racing in reverse back to the bad old days.
IMO college admissions has always been one of the least-good places for a well-designed well-intentioned government effort to apply pressure towards equality. A vast amount of unequal potential has already been baked into the kids by the time they’re 17 and applying to colleges. As long as that’s true, tweaking college admissions is a bandaid on a gut shot; better than nothing, but far too little far too late.
Fixing the upstream problems of kids’ vastly unequal schooling, parenting, socialization, and even nutrition (!) would require a lot more Federal action and Federal money at local levels. Which action is arguably unconstitutional, and would certainly be vastly, vastly unpopular cross much of the country.