Jonathan Zimmerman: College Admissions: What Matters Most -- SAT Scores, Grades, or Just Luck?
Steven got nearly perfect SAT scores, but he didn’t get into Princeton. Suzanne has straight A’s, but Brown rejected her. And Samantha – Samantha! – got into both schools, even though her scores and grades are pretty mediocre.
Can you believe it?...
...Fearful that its classes were filled with mediocre young men from prep schools, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board as the major basis for admission in 1905.
Other leading universities quickly followed suit. So for a few years anyone with a high enough score – and a big enough bank account – could get in. But the result, to the chagrin of America’s WASP gentry, was a steep spike in Jewish students.
By 1908, the fraction of Jewish students in Harvard’s freshman class had jumped from almost nil to 7 percent; a decade later, it rose to 20 percent. At Yale, meanwhile, an admissions officer complained that the roster of new students “might easily be mistaken for a recent roll call at the Wailing Wall.”
To elite university officials, this development threatened nothing less than the destruction of the elite university itself. “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate because they drive away the Gentiles,” Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell warned, “and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”
Ironically, then, our current system for determining “diversity” – essays, recommendations, and so on – was born in a bigoted attempt to prevent it. Today, it’s unheard of for someone to scour applications to figure out a kid’s religious background. But colleges still try to gauge each applicant’s “character,” which is no easier to measure than “Jewishness” was in the 1920s.
So to get in, it’s not enough to be smart. You also have to be fortunate, which is something nobody likes to talk about around here. We want to believe that the process is systematic, rational, and predictable. And, most of all, we want to believe that we have earned whatever we get.
But any honest admissions officer will tell you that isn’t so. Sure, you can do any number of things to improve your odds. At the end of the day, though, it’s still a crapshoot. A bunch of people will sit around a table and try to judge your character, as well as your smartness. And they’ll make highly imperfect estimates of both....
So if you didn’t get accepted by the college of your choice, please don’t take it personally. And if you did land your top school, don’t let it go to your head. Yes, you got into a great college. But you also got lucky.