The Ivy Curtain

How meritocracy in higher education arose from a system built to keep WASPs in and Jews out.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kittay

Sunday, October 30, 2005; Page BW03

THE CHOSEN

The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
By Jerome Karabel
Houghton Mifflin. 711 pp. $28

Proof of extracurricular activities, leadership qualities, letters of recommendation -- we take all these as natural, necessary and even enlightened elements of the college application process, though they cause us endless anxiety. Actually, they don't resemble in the least the way people in Europe or Japan get into college. They're a result of a particular American challenge at the turn of the 20th century, which President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard then characterized as follows: how to "prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews."