Short With Big Ears

Malcolm Gladwell is a guy who writes bestselling books with titles that I find too annoyingly trite to consider: Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. This may have been an error on my part, since he has written a very elegant and informative New Yorker article called GETTING IN The social logic of Ivy League admissions.

The focus is on the "Big Ivies" (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) and especially on Harvard, the biggest and richest of them all. It's also apparent that the article owes quite a bit to Jerome Karabel's The Chosen : The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Harvard is the glamour address in American education: I remember feeling a little parental thrill when those big glossy unsolicited brochures from Harvard, Yale, etc. started arriving for my son (he never applied to any of them - too pretentiously snobbish, he claimed). Gladwell's essay tells a bit of the story of how the prestige schools stay that way.
[Ivy League admissions directors] are in the luxury-brand-management business, and “The Chosen,” in the end, is a testament to just how well the brand managers in Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton have done their job in the past seventy-five years.

The entire essay is worth a read, but a couple more bits I found interesting:
In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending.
This led to the "Jewish crisis." The proportion of Jews in the student body kept climbing, and Harvard officials started worrying about how to save the brand and pacify the rich, protestant alumni. After some fumbling, they arrived at more or less the present system, which supplements academic credentials with "personal qualities." The interview and the essay become key factors.
If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears.

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