We tend to think that intellectual achievement is the fairest and highest standard of merit. The Ivy League process, quite apart from its dubious origins, seems subjective and opaque. Why should personality and athletic ability matter so much? The notion that the ability to throw, kick, or hit a ball is a legitimate criterion in determining 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 time that Harvard was constructing its byzantine admissions system, Hunter College Elementary School, in New York, required simply that applicants take an exam, and if they scored in the top fifty they got in. Its hard to imagine a more objective and transparent procedure.
But what did Hunter achieve with that best-students model? In the nineteen-eighties, a handful of educational researchers surveyed the students who attended the elementary school between 1948 and 1960. [The results were published in 1993 as Genius Revisited: High IQ Children Grown Up, by Rena Subotnik, Lee Kassan, Ellen Summers, and Alan Wasser.] This was a group with an average I.Q. of 157three and a half standard deviations above the meanwho had been given what, by any measure, was one of the finest classroom experiences in the world. As graduates, though, they werent nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be. Although most of our study participants are successful and fairly content with their lives and accomplishments, the authors conclude, there are no superstars . . . and only one or two familiar names. The researchers spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why Hunter graduates are so disappointing, and end up sounding very much like Wilbur Bender. Being a smart child isnt a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. Non-intellective factorslike motivation and social skillsprobably matter more. Perhaps, the study suggests, after noting the sacrifices involved in trying for national or world-class leadership in a field, H.C.E.S. graduates decided that the intelligent thing to do was to choose relatively happy and successful lives. It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didnt want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isnt enough.
Most élite law schools, to cite another example, follow a best-students model. Thats why they rely so heavily on the L.S.A.T. Yet theres no reason to believe that a persons L.S.A.T. scores have much relation to how good a lawyer he will be. In a recent research project funded by the Law School Admission Council, the Berkeley researchers Sheldon Zedeck and Marjorie Shultz identified twenty-six competencies that they think effective lawyering demandsamong them practical judgment, passion and engagement, legal-research skills, questioning and interviewing skills, negotiation skills, stress management, and so onand the L.S.A.T. picks up only a handful of them. A law school that wants to select the best possible lawyers has to use a very different admissions process from a law school that wants to select the best possible law students. And wouldnt we prefer that at least some law schools try to select good lawyers instead of good law students?
This search for good lawyers, furthermore, is necessarily going to be subjective, because things like passion and engagement cant be measured as precisely as academic proficiency. Subjectivity in the admissions process is not just an occasion for discrimination; it is also, in better times, the only means available for giving us the social outcome we want. The first black captain of the Yale football team was a man named Levi Jackson, who graduated in 1950. Jackson was a hugely popular figure on campus. He went on to be a top executive at Ford, and is credited with persuading the company to hire thousands of African-Americans after the 1967 riots. When Jackson was tapped for the exclusive secret society Skull and Bones, he joked, If my name had been reversed, I never would have made it. He had a point. The strategy of discretion that Yale had once used to exclude Jews was soon being used to include people like Levi Jackson.
In the 2001 book The Game of Life, James L. Shulman and William Bowen (a former president of Princeton) conducted an enormous statistical analysis on an issue that has become one of the most contentious in admissions: the special preferences given to recruited athletes at selective universities. Athletes, Shulman and Bowen demonstrate, have a large and growing advantage in admission over everyone else. At the same time, they have markedly lower G.P.A.s and S.A.T. scores than their peers. Over the past twenty years, their class rankings have steadily dropped, and they tend to segregate themselves in an athletic culture different from the culture of the rest of the college. Shulman and Bowen think the preference given to athletes by the Ivy League is shameful.
Halfway through the book, however, Shulman and Bowen present what they call a surprising finding. Male athletes, despite their lower S.A.T. scores and grades, and despite the fact that many of them are members of minorities and come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than other students, turn out to earn a lot more than their peers. Apparently, athletes are far more likely to go into the high-paying financial-services sector, where they succeed because of their personality and psychological makeup.
Getting In : The New Yorker
All you lazy introverted b*stards hit the gym then hit a beer summit
But what did Hunter achieve with that best-students model? In the nineteen-eighties, a handful of educational researchers surveyed the students who attended the elementary school between 1948 and 1960. [The results were published in 1993 as Genius Revisited: High IQ Children Grown Up, by Rena Subotnik, Lee Kassan, Ellen Summers, and Alan Wasser.] This was a group with an average I.Q. of 157three and a half standard deviations above the meanwho had been given what, by any measure, was one of the finest classroom experiences in the world. As graduates, though, they werent nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be. Although most of our study participants are successful and fairly content with their lives and accomplishments, the authors conclude, there are no superstars . . . and only one or two familiar names. The researchers spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why Hunter graduates are so disappointing, and end up sounding very much like Wilbur Bender. Being a smart child isnt a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. Non-intellective factorslike motivation and social skillsprobably matter more. Perhaps, the study suggests, after noting the sacrifices involved in trying for national or world-class leadership in a field, H.C.E.S. graduates decided that the intelligent thing to do was to choose relatively happy and successful lives. It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didnt want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isnt enough.
Most élite law schools, to cite another example, follow a best-students model. Thats why they rely so heavily on the L.S.A.T. Yet theres no reason to believe that a persons L.S.A.T. scores have much relation to how good a lawyer he will be. In a recent research project funded by the Law School Admission Council, the Berkeley researchers Sheldon Zedeck and Marjorie Shultz identified twenty-six competencies that they think effective lawyering demandsamong them practical judgment, passion and engagement, legal-research skills, questioning and interviewing skills, negotiation skills, stress management, and so onand the L.S.A.T. picks up only a handful of them. A law school that wants to select the best possible lawyers has to use a very different admissions process from a law school that wants to select the best possible law students. And wouldnt we prefer that at least some law schools try to select good lawyers instead of good law students?
This search for good lawyers, furthermore, is necessarily going to be subjective, because things like passion and engagement cant be measured as precisely as academic proficiency. Subjectivity in the admissions process is not just an occasion for discrimination; it is also, in better times, the only means available for giving us the social outcome we want. The first black captain of the Yale football team was a man named Levi Jackson, who graduated in 1950. Jackson was a hugely popular figure on campus. He went on to be a top executive at Ford, and is credited with persuading the company to hire thousands of African-Americans after the 1967 riots. When Jackson was tapped for the exclusive secret society Skull and Bones, he joked, If my name had been reversed, I never would have made it. He had a point. The strategy of discretion that Yale had once used to exclude Jews was soon being used to include people like Levi Jackson.
In the 2001 book The Game of Life, James L. Shulman and William Bowen (a former president of Princeton) conducted an enormous statistical analysis on an issue that has become one of the most contentious in admissions: the special preferences given to recruited athletes at selective universities. Athletes, Shulman and Bowen demonstrate, have a large and growing advantage in admission over everyone else. At the same time, they have markedly lower G.P.A.s and S.A.T. scores than their peers. Over the past twenty years, their class rankings have steadily dropped, and they tend to segregate themselves in an athletic culture different from the culture of the rest of the college. Shulman and Bowen think the preference given to athletes by the Ivy League is shameful.
Halfway through the book, however, Shulman and Bowen present what they call a surprising finding. Male athletes, despite their lower S.A.T. scores and grades, and despite the fact that many of them are members of minorities and come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than other students, turn out to earn a lot more than their peers. Apparently, athletes are far more likely to go into the high-paying financial-services sector, where they succeed because of their personality and psychological makeup.
Getting In : The New Yorker
All you lazy introverted b*stards hit the gym then hit a beer summit
