Book World Live

Jerome Karabel, "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton"

Jerome Karabel is the author of "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton," a new book examining the admission polices at the three most prestigious Ivy League universities. His book was reviewed in the Oct. 30 issue of Book World .

Karabel was online Tuesday, Nov. 1 to discuss his work.

Karabel is a professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow of the Longview Institute.

Join Book World Live each Tuesday for a discussion based on a story or review in each Sunday's Book World section.

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Jerome Karabel: Good afternoon, thanks for joining me -- it's a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to your questions.

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Silver Spring, Md.: Is there any evidence to suggest that the admissions practices you documented at three Ivy League colleges also were in use at the other Ivy League colleges or at other small, prestigious and selective liberal arts colleges in the Northeast?

Jerome Karabel: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were by no means unique. Most of the prestigious private colleges adopted discriminatory measures against Jews in the 1920s. Among them were Amherst, Williams, Columbia, Stanford, and many of the Seven Sisters.

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Philadelphia, Pa.: Although the Ivy League wasn't created until the 1950s, didn't some of the other Ivies have decent records towards accepting Jewish students, even if religious discrimination existed to some degree. Didn't Penn have a high percent of Jewish students throughout most of the 20th century?

Jerome Karabel: You are correct about Penn, which did indeed have a high percentage of Jewish students throughout the 20th century. Among the Ivy League colleges, Penn is the only one that clearly never had a policy of discriminating against Jews. Scholars are not sure why this was so, but some have speculated that it had to do with the influence of Quakers on Penn's board of trustees.

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Arlington, Va.: I believe that Heywood Broun wrote a book over 75 years ago about how the Ivies kept minority students out. I wonder where the students who were excluded from the three schools you studied ended up. My guess is that they enriched the state universities such as Wisconsin and Michigan. I presume that they all didn't end up at CCNY.

Jerome Karabel: You are correct about Heywood Broun, who co-authored a 1931 book with George Britt called "Christians Only: A Study In Prejudice." No one knows precisely where the students who were discriminated against went, but I suspect that you were right that institutions such as Michigan, Wisconsin, as well as CCNY, Brooklyn, and Hunter were some of the most common places. In addition, MIT seems to have discriminated against Jews little or not at all and the University of Chicago was also generally welcoming. With respect to African-American students, the vast majority attended traditionally black institutions such as Fisk and Howard, but a very small number did attend Ivy League colleges, with Harvard, Penn, and Columbia in the lead.

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Rockville, Md.: Is there a "geographic quota" for admissions to the Ivys that works against highly qualified East coast students, to the advantage of someone from say, North Dakota?

Jerome Karabel: Starting in the 1920s, in the context of what these institutions called the "Jewish problem," there was, if not exactly a geographical quota, favoritism towards students from distant regions. This did work against highly qualified East Coast students from public schools, but it did not seem to affect applicants from private boarding schools. Today, geographical factors play only a small role in admissions, though it probably does still give you a slight edge to come from, let's say, Wyoming, Mississippi, or North Dakota.

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Annandale, Va.: Brandeis was founded to resolve Jewish shortfall at prestigious Ivy League colleges -- but never garnered their panache. Anything your research suggests they should do? (my son went to Princeton and my daughter to Brandeis)

Jerome Karabel: Brandeis, which is a very fine institution, is a really interesting case. It probably reached its height in the 1950s when discriminatory measures against Jews were still in effect at many leading private colleges. Then, in much the same way that woman's colleges and historically black colleges were hurt by the opening of opportunities in the 1960s at the most prestigious private colleges, so too was Brandeis affected by the elimination of the last vestiges of anti-Semitism, which did not finally disappear until the second half of the 1960s. But Brandeis remains a strong university and is, like other institutions, no doubt trying to figure out what its optimal niche is in the complex ecology of American higher education.

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Middlesboro, Ky: Dr. Karabel, Since America's meritocracy is based on wealth -- and thus unfair for the poor -- how do go about creating a more just and fairer society? Is equal opportunity within the realm of possibility, given the vast inequality we see today between the rich and the poor?

Jerome Karabel: This is a really excellent question. You make a very good point about the effects of what I call in the book "inequality of condition" (i.e., inequality of income, wealth, and power) on inequality of opportunity. A recent body of social scientific research does in fact suggest that the level of economic inequality that now prevails in America is harmful to equality of opportunity. Remarkably, intergenerational social mobility rates now seem to be higher in Germany, France, Canada, Sweden, and several other advanced countries then in the United States, which has of course long conceived of itself as "the land of opportunity." Moreover, there is some fragmentary evidence that rates of social mobility in the U.S. may have declined compared to 30 or 40 years ago. Your question about creating a more just and fairer society takes me outside the scope of the book, but I would note that the periods in American history that have seen the most progress toward greater fairness and justice have been periods of vibrant grassroots social movements such as the 1930s and 1960s.

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Washington, DC: What was the most intersting part of writing this book/or some of the research that you found most interesting? I've read so many good reviews, but I'd love to hear what you were most drawn to.

Jerome Karabel: Researching and writing the book was a great joy, but it's hard to single out one thing that I found most interesting. But I can say that I approached every batch of primary documents from the archives with great anticipation and many times found things that truly surprised me. Particularly gratifying were the many cases where I suspected on the basis of statistical patterns that certain policies were in effect, but could not be sure that I was right until I saw the documentary evidence. Another wonderful part of the experience of working on the book was that it required a huge amount of reading about 20th century American history. Since my objective was to put the admissions policies of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in historical and social context, I had to repeatedly go back and forth between what was happening at HYP and in the larger society. So by the end of the process, I knew a great deal more about the anti-immigration movement, the ethos of the American upper class, "scientific racism," the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the growing influence of the market ethos on American life than I did when I had begun.

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Washington, DC: two questions:

1. Was it all about Jews, or were they trying to keep others out too (non-whites, certain ethnicities, Catholics, etc.)?

2. Beyond the specific effect this still has on college admission practices today (which you say are used for very different purposes today), what effect did these prior practices have on higher education and our society as a whole today? I mean, not to get too political on you, but I think looking at George W. Bush and his background, your research isn't all that surprising -- aren't the ivy leagues and the power brokers in our country still just a big country club in many ways?

Jerome Karabel: Since I have only fifteen minutes left and am receiving lots of new questions by the minute, I will respond only to the first of your two questions. The book, I hope, makes clear that discrimination went well beyond Jews. There was some discrimination against Catholics (especially "ethnic" Catholics such as Italians and Poles) and also, until the mid-1960s, against the vast majority of the population that did not have enough money to qualify as what these institutions called "paying guests." There was, in addition absolute exclusion of women at Yale and Princeton until 1969, with discrimination continuing until the mid-1970s. And the historic record of treatment toward African-Americans, while worst at Princeton (which did not enroll its first black student until 1945), was also often deplorable at Yale and Harvard.

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Chico, Calif.: Ok, so now you have picked on privates like Yale, Princeton, Harvard and Stanford. Don't the same principles apply to elite publics like Michigan, Virginia, and your own campus at Berkeley? And given that such universities are public and controlled by State Legislatures, wouldn't it make sense to call for reform there first?

Jerome Karabel: As you might expect, I don't understand myself as "picking on" the institutions examined in my book, but rather as describing and explaining their changing admissions policies over the past century. To be sure, I did note where their practices diverged from their professed ideals and from widely held American values. But I agree with you that the same principles do apply to elite public universities like Michigan, Virginia, and Berkeley. The historic record shows that these institutions have in fact been less discriminatory on the basis of religion, race, and gender, though Virginia did until around the 1960s exclude blacks. But the publics, no less than the privates, are wrestling today with the issue of inequality of opportunity by social class. And it is true that none of the great public universities have nearly as high a representation from low socioeconomic backgrounds as from high socioeconomic backgrounds. Nonetheless, of the leading research universities, all of the schools with the highest proportion of low-income students are public.

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washingtonpost.com: Thanks to Jerome Karabel and to all who participated.

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Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.