Jews & College Admissions: All You Need to Know
There were no fixed quotas; that’s an urban legend. The truth is no better.
For the past five years, I have had two principal projects as a writer and reporter. The first was Squirrel Hill, my book about the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. The second project was Gatecrashers, an eight-part podcast series about the history of antisemitism in the Ivy League. Since October, when that podcast debuted, I have given numerous talks about Jews, the Ivy League, antisemitism, and college admissions. In just the past four days, I have given three such talks: to Jewish parents of student at the Harvard-Westlake School, in Los Angeles; to a lunch group that meets monthly at a yacht club in Mamaroneck, N.Y.; and, Sunday morning, to the men’s breakfast club at Larchmont Temple, in Larchmont, N.Y. Although I strongly suspect I’ll get more speaking requests on this topic—and hope I do! I love talking about this stuff—I have, for now anyway, reached the end of the speaking calendar on this particular topic.
And so it is time to offer some conclusions. All of these conclusions will make more sense to you if you have listened to Gatecrashers (which you can find on Apple Podcasts here; it’s also available on all main streaming platforms). You can also supplement the podcast with articles by Shira Telushkin (which I edited some years ago) and Armin Rosen (he is a terrific writer and a good man, but I’ll say here I don’t endorse all his conclusions in this piece; if you like his stuff, check out this truly amazing profile). The basic takeaway is that ca. World War I, a lot of elite universities, starting with Columbia, instituted practices (though not hard quotas) to shrink the number of Jewish undergraduates; after World War II, those policies were relaxed; by the 1980s/90s, what I call “Peak Jew” at elite universities, Jews likely made up a fifth or even a quarter of the student body at these schools; and today they make up far less, probably under ten percent at most Ivy League schools. Why? How? Should we care?—those are some of the questions the podcast series answers. But people have more questions …
So, okay, on with it. I’m going to frame this piece as a Q&A with myself. All questions are based on real questions I have gotten from audience members, questions that, in one form or another, I have been asked more than once, often several times. (If you are interested in the present moment, and your question includes words like “affirmative action” and “Asian Americans” and “Supreme Court,” you may want to skip toward the end.) Anyway, here goes:
I always heard that my alma mater [Yale, Harvard, Columbia, etc…] had a strict ten percent quota on Jews in the 1930s [’40s, ’50s, ’60s]. Are you telling me that’s not true?
Yes, I am telling you that’s not true. There is no evidence that any of these schools had a precise quota. Urban legends abounded; one Yale admission officer of the late 1950s told me that his boss told him the target was about seven percent, and I heard other numbers from others. There are good histories of college admissions written, and none of them has found a smoking gun, some memo that says, “In next year’s freshman class of 1,200, admit no more than 120 Jews.” And of course had such a target existed, it would have been impossible to meet it precisely. How would they have figured out the religiosity of every single admitted student?
But my dad told me that an admission officer told him, in 1959, that he was terrific Princeton material, but they couldn’t admit him because their Jewish quota had been met. He said he heard it himself!
Your dad was lying to you. No admission officer who wanted to keep his job would ever tell a high school senior that his Judaism was a factor in denying him admission. Okay, your dad may not have been lying, exactly—maybe he knew somebody who was active on an alumni committee, and that person, to make him feel better about being rejected, said something like, “Look, it may have had to do with your religion,” and your dad took it as gospel, and over time the story grew into something more concrete. But there is zero evidence any high school senior was ever told anything like this. (I have heard versions that are even more improbable: “My grandfather said his rejection letter specifically said the school had met its Jewish quota.” No, it didn’t. Trust me.)
What about the women’s colleges, the Seven Sisters, etc. Were they better for Jews?
Sometimes yes, but often no. In general, we like to think of women’s colleges as more progressive than their male counterparts, and in some areas—like educating females, obviously—they were. But there was serious antisemitism at Barnard, Pembroke, etc. The wonderfully named Virginia Gildersleeve, longtime head of Barnard, kept Jewish enrollment at her women’s college below that of Columbia College, across the street.
I always heard antisemitism was worst at Princeton, because it was more Southern, more conservative, etc. True?
I don’t think so. Princeton was slower to become more heavily Jewish in the early twentieth century, and it attempted to keep Jewish numbers down in the 1920s (as did Columbia, Yale, and Harvard), but after World War II its percentage of Jewish students certainly rose above ten percent, and it ended up looking a lot like Yale and Harvard, percentage-wise.
That said, Princeton made national news in 1958 when a substantial number of Jewish students did not get admitted to any of the school’s eating clubs (which is where juniors and seniors took their meals). The “dirty bicker,” as it was called (bicker was their word for rush, or pledge) was covered by the Times and other major outlets. It’s a complicated story, and it has as much to do with class as with religion; the “right kind” of Jews, those who played sports or had gone to prep schools, generally did not have a problem getting into clubs, whereas poor or public-school Jews did. This was still antisemitism, of course, but the stereotypes at play were not the ones we are familiar with—that Jews are cheap, or cunning, or clannish. Rather, there was a sense that some of them would not fit in because of their urban backgrounds, or their neighborhood backgrounds. It’s sad, even horrifying, but we miss something interesting about Ivy League mores of the 1950s if we make it about religion only. This was a dying gasp of a Wasp culture that was at its zenith but, as its members knew, was going to die soon. Anyway, the Princeton episode of the podcast is well worth a listen; I think it’s the best. Also, I am writing a book about the dirty bicker; if you know any Princeton alumni from around 1958, especially but not only Jewish alumni, send them my way; I want to interview them.
Okay, back to those early days of excluding Jews. You say there was no strict ten-percent quota, so how did it work, exactly?
In the years around World War I, the percentage of Jews at Columbia had grown from the single digits to more than twenty percent—some said over thirty percent, or more. The trustees worried that Protestant boys (like their sons) would cease to attend if the school were so Jewy, and they ordered President Nicholas Murray Butler to shrink the number of Jews. Working with his dean of admission, he instituted several measures designed to limit the number of Jews:
• he changed the application, adding questions about father’s occupation and mother’s maiden name, both ways to suss out Jews (if your father was a tailor or butcher, you weren’t the son of Protestant banker)
• he instituted a standardized test, on the theory that Jews worked hard but weren’t as bright, so would do poorly on an aptitude test
• he began admitting fewer students who were young, say 16 or 17, because Jews were more likely to have skipped grades
• he created the idea of “geographical diversity,” seeking students from outside Greater New York, because students from other parts of the country were less likely to be Jewish
• he created a second campus, Seth Low Junior College, in Brooklyn, where students who were academically capable but seen as socially undesirable (Jewish, maybe Italian) could enroll; it lasted until 1938 and counted among its alumni Red Auerbach and Isaac Asimov.
In the early 1920s, other Ivy League schools copied these measures, and expanded on them. Yale, for example, introduced legacy preferences, which of course favored Protestant boys (today, they favor a lot of Jews).
Here’s the interesting thing. As you may have noticed, these are all features of college admissions today. The lengthy application, the standardized test, the legacy preference, the hunt for diversity—they’re all still with us. Columbia’s template for keeping out Jews bequeathed us the world of college admissions as we know it.
Columbia’s template for keeping out Jews bequeathed us the world of college admissions as we know it.
In one recent poll, only seven percent of Harvard freshmen said they were Jewish. Numbers are said to be just as low at Yale and other schools. Given that Jews had been more than twenty percent of these schools a couple decades ago, what has happened? Is this the result of affirmative action and diversity efforts?
Okay, this is complicated. More complicated than you think. It’s true that the numbers of Jews are down. But it’s not the “fault” of other groups, and it’s not even about affirmative action, not the way you might think.
For the moment, I want to punt on the question of whether this is a “good” thing or a “bad” thing. Jews are about two percent of the American population, and their overrepresentation in academia—indeed, any ethnic group’s over-representation in given field, whether athletics, motel ownership, dentistry (there are a lot of Mormon, or Latter-day Saint, dentists—did you know that?), or whatever—is at once a source of pride and, by the hard necessity of mathematics, an indicator of under-representation for other groups. Same goes for other over-represented groups in academia, like Asian Americans and Latter-day Saints. In the United States, where there are enough four-year colleges to serve everyone who wants to go, there is less at stake in these debates than in most of the world, where those who don’t get into one of a very few colleges may be denied a chance at the education they want. But they are still high-stakes questions.
For now, let’s focus on the why.
I looked back at my facebook (the old analog thing, not the website) for the Yale Class of 1996, and for my residential college (which is like a dorm). There were about 100 freshman in my year, in my residential college. A quick count of us suggests about thirty were Jews. I may be getting some people wrong, but I may also be missing some people; I knew this small cohort well, and I don’t think I am far off. I should note, however, that the class three years behind me, 1999, seems to have had only about ten Jews in its class of 100. So maybe the numbers were already falling. Or maybe that was a blip.
Whichever the case, it is definitely true that Ivy League schools are regularly showing Jewish enrollment of under ten percent now, and we can be confident it will never again be twenty percent or more. So, why?
• Yes, the quest for racial diversity has something to do with it. As recently as the 1990s, Harvard’s student body (undergrad) was seven percent Black, Cornell’s about four percent. (See here.) Today, Harvard is fifteen percent Black (Cornell still lags). Yale, too, is closer to the percentage of Blacks in the population, which is around thirteen percent. These schools strive to “look like America,” and thus have smaller white populations, including populations of white Jews, than they used to.
But that’s not all that is going on . . .
• As these schools have diversified their domestic populations, they have sought more international students; many now enroll a tenth of their students from abroad. Most of the world, especially places the foreign students come from, have almost no Jews. So if the school goes ten percent international, drawing from countries (in East Asia, South Asia, the Arab world, etc.) with almost no Jews, the Jewish numbers fall.
• Spots for athletes have been held constant. Given that Jews are probably somewhat less likely to be recruited athletes (a very hard thing to quantify, but we know, for example, that football is the largest team at most schools, and the percentage of Jews who have played football at the elite level is quite tiny, though existent), the commitment to keep spots for athletes, while shrinking the white and domestic populations, would tend to lower the percentage of Jews.
Now, there are other factors that would inflate the number of Jews. For example, Jewish high school seniors now often benefit from legacy preference (which was invented to keep Jews out). All those Jews I went to Yale with in the 1990s? We have teenaged children. I have a lot of friends from Yale whose children are now at Yale. How many would have gotten in without the slight advantage of legacy preference? Who knows?
There is a fantasy among some, and they are often in my audience, that if not for affirmative action, Jewish numbers would be higher; they hope that the Supreme Court will rule against Harvard in next month’s decision, and schools will admit based on scores and grades, and their smart Jewish kinderlach will get their rightful spots at their alma maters. But it’s entirely possible the number of Jews would shrink further—that, deprived legacy advantage, or the courtesy shown to their elite private schools, they would have a harder time competing for admission. It’s possible Asian American enrollment would go up in part “at the expense of” (though I don’t like the value judgement in that term) Jews.
Also, the applicant pool of Jewish high schoolers may be shrinking. The American Jewish population is holding steady, but it’s becoming more and more Orthodox, and many Orthodox teens don’t consider Ivy League schools; the big boom in Ivy League Jewry came from secular, Reform, and Conservative Jews, and that may be a shrinking applicant pool.
Finally, the average Jewish applicant may be worse than thirty years ago. As Jews assimilate more and more, they begin to look less like a striving, over-achieving immigrant group, and more like . . . average Americans (emphasis on the “average”).
But with all admission questions, the answer is always: We simply don’t know. Because colleges are deliberately shifty and obfuscatory about their policies. And that is something we can all agree is a bad thing. One thing the lawsuit against Harvard and UNC did was bring more sunlight to the process. Whatever one thinks of quotas, preferences, etc., we can probably agree it would be better if schools were honest about what they were looking for in a student body, and how they got there.
So will my child get into Dartmouth next year?
Yours? Yes, yours will. I promise.
Any final words?
Yes, here are some final words: In 1920, the USA had about 110 million people. Today, a century later, we have precisely tripled in size, to about 330 million people. Yet we’re still obsessing over the same 8-12 colleges, the Ivy League plus a few more. That’s crazy.
In 1920, the USA had about 110 million people. Today, a century later, we have precisely tripled in size, to about 330 million people. Yet we’re still obsessing over the same 8-12 colleges, the Ivy League plus a few more. That’s crazy.
Given the growth in the applicant pool—which now includes so many more people, from different backgrounds, and from other countries—we should all recognize that getting into the 40th best school today is harder than getting into Harvard a century ago. So we should stop obsessing over the Ivy League.
Especially you, there, in the third row—your son is definitely not getting into Brown.
Corduroy Moment
Those of you who are longtime followers know my love of corduroy. Here is an article with a corduroy angle that was new to me—“senior cords,” a century-old tradition of embroidering corduroys, a tradition that is coming back.
Got me thinking: what other traditions have died out but are coming back? And that got me thinking back to my school days. And that led me to this video, which reminds me of the playground when I was in elementary school (although I was not the one playing double dutch), and which is also just a lot of fun to watch: