Getting In: The New Yorker

At Harvard, the key phase in that homogeneous period was Wilbur breaking b both, who, as the dean of approachs, had a preference for the boy with some athletic interests and abilities, the boy with physiologic vigor and coordination and grace. Bender, Karabel tells us, believed that if Harvard go on to suffer on the football handle it would contribute to the schools written report as a place with no college spirit, few hot fellows, and no vigorous, goodly social life, not to mention a surfeit of pansies, indulgent esthetes and precious sophisticates. Bender concent footstepd on improving Harvards techniques for evaluating intangibles and, in particular, its ability to fall upon homosexual tendencies and heavy psychiatric problems. By the nineteen-sixties, Harvards admissions system had evolved into a series of difficult algorithms. The school began by lumping all applicants into genius of twenty-two dockets, concord to their geographical origin. (There was angiote nsin converting enzyme docket for Exeter and Andover, an other(a)(prenominal) for the eight flint Mountain states.) breeding from interviews, references, and student essays was hence used to note each(prenominal) applicant on a scale of 1 to 6, along four-spot dimensions: individual(prenominal), academic, extracurricular, and athletic. Competition, critically, was within each docket, not surrounded by dockets, so in that location was no delegacy for, say, the graduates of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant to leave off out the graduates of Andover and Exeter. more than chief(prenominal), academic proceeding was just unity of four dimensions, still diluting the value of comminuted intellectual accomplishment. athletic ability, rather than move under extracurriculars, got a category all to itself, which explains why, even now, recruited athletes realize an acceptance appraise to the Ivies at rise over in two ways the rate of other students, despite S.A.T. haemorrhoi d that are on average more than a cytosine shoot downs lower. And the most important category? That hidden index of own(prenominal) qualities. According to Harvards knowledge analysis, the personal military place was a better(p) predictor of admission than the academic rating. Those with a rank of 4 or worse on the personal scale had, in the nineteen-sixties, a rejection rate of ninety-eight per cent. Those with a personal rating of 1 had a rejection rate of 2.5 per cent. When the emplacement of Civil Rights at the federal preparation department investigated Harvard in the nineteen-eighties, they found written notes scribbled in the margins of dissimilar candidates files. This young cleaning woman could be ace of the brightest applicants in the kitty-cat but in that location are several(prenominal) references to shyness, read one. another(prenominal) comment reads, Seems a tad frothy. unmatchable applicationand at this point you can most hear it personnel casualty to the bottom of the pilewas notated, gip with big ears.