Locations of Ivy League Conference full member institutions. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
"Explosive" is the only word for the cover story in the latest issue of the American Conservative magazine. In a remarkable tour de force, Ron Unz takes the lid off Ivy League universities' admissions policies. He reserves his harshest criticism for his own alma mater, Harvard, which he sees as a money machine first and an educational institution only a distant second. Harvard's educational activities in his view are little more than an alibi to preserve its privileged tax status. Its endowment snowballs more or less tax-free and, after a terrifying plunge a few years ago, has now bounced back up again to around $30 billion.
Unz, who is the magazine's publisher, reports that Harvard has in the last decade been spending nearly as much on compensating five senior hedge fund managers who run its endowment fund as on its entire academic staff.
He argues that admissions policies are basically corrupt. Suggesting that most Ivy League colleges lower their admission standards selectively to favor the children of big donors, he provides an answer to the question of how much you need to fork over to get your son or daughter into a posh school. "The figure is said to be $5 million these days for an applicant who is reasonably competitive and $10 million for one who is not," he reports.
In an article chockfull of controversy, perhaps his most eye-catching allegation is that the Ivy League now strongly discriminates against Asian-Americans, whom he is describes as the "New Jews." This is a reference to a pattern before World War II in which the Ivy League discriminated against high-achieving Jews. The story began when Jews proved disproportionately successful in passing objective tests of intellectual ability. The Ivy League then fudged things by introducing "holistic" standards in an attempt to disguise an anti-Semitic admissions policy. The holistic approach is now apparently being used to discriminate against super-high-achieving Asian Americans. Meanwhile, on Unz's analysis, the Ivy League schools not only no longer discriminate against Jews but for many years now have discriminated in their favor. Adding to the controversy is his suggestion that Jews no longer outperform much in objective tests of intelligence.
Unz goes on to suggest that the Ivy League's standards of objectivity fall far below those not only of Europe and Japan but even -- ouch! -- China. In fact, it is precisely because China's admissions departments are relatively incorruptible that countless under-achieving children of wealthy Chinese parents study at American universities. And because such parents are so wealthy, they can afford to buy -- repeat buy -- their children places at top U.S. universities. In the unkindest cut of all, he explains the relatively high standards of objectivity in China's schools in these terms: "China’s ruling elites may rightly fear that a policy of admitting their own dim and lazy heirs to leading schools ahead of the higher-scoring children of the masses might ignite a widespread popular uprising. This perhaps explains why so many sons and daughters of top Chinese leaders attend college in the West: enrolling them at a third-rate Chinese university would be a tremendous humiliation, while our own corrupt admissions practices get them an easy spot at Harvard or Stanford, sitting side by side with the children of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and George W. Bush."
Although virtually every paragraph in Unz's long essay is brimming with controversy, if I were 18 again and trying to get into a good college, I would be particularly interested in his description of the sort of people who staff university admissions departments. Citing research by the journalist Jacques Steinberg, he comments: "The job of admissions officer is poorly paid, requires no professional training, and offers few opportunities for career advancement; thus, it is often filled by individuals with haphazard employment records. As one of the Little Ivies, Wesleyan is among America’s most prestigious liberal arts colleges, and Steinberg’s description of the career paths of its handful of admissions officers is eye-opening: the interim Director of Admissions had most recently screened food-stamp recipients and run a psychiatric half-way house; another had worked as an animal control officer and managed a camera store; a third unsuccessfully sought a job as a United Airlines flight attendant; others were recent college graduates, whose main college interests had been sports or ethnic studies. The vast majority seem to possess minimal academic expertise and few intellectual interests, raising serious questions about their ability to reasonably evaluate their higher-quality applicants."
To read Unz's article, click here. To read Samuel Goldman's reply to some of Unz's suggestions, click here.
Disclosure: I am an occasional contributor to the American Conservative.
