Table of Contents

American Meritocracy Revisited

Some Minorities Are More Minor than Others

No Quotas, No Elite Public High School

The Myth of American Meritocracy

Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund

Harvard as Hedge Fund: Harvard Replies

Statistics Indicate an Ivy League Asian Quota

Meritocracy: David Brooks' Sidney Award and Other Reactions

Meritocracy: Picking Our Elites at Random?

Meritocracy: "Endangered Jewish Genius"

Meritocracy: A Science Perspective and More University Data

Meritocracy: "Asians as the New Jews, Jews as the New WASPs"

Meritocracy: Response to Prof. Gelman on Jewish Elite Overrepresentation

Racial Quotas, Harvard, and the Legacy of Bakke

Meritocracy: Admitting My Mistakes

Meritocracy: Gelman's Sixth Column

Meritocracy: Dangerous Cancer Statistics

Meritocracy: The College Admissions Season

English and Meritocracy: The Gullibility of Our Political and Media Elites

Asian Quotas in the Ivy League? "We See Nothing! Nothing!"

Our Elite Colleges Should Abolish Tuition

Meritocracy: Will Harvard Become Free and Fair?

Meritocracy: How Harvard Currently Soaks the Rich...Such as NYC Public Schoolteachers

Meritocracy: Harvard PR vs. Factual Reality

The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays

A Harvard Debate on "Asian Quotas"...or Maybe Not!

My Stasi File Published in the Harvard Crimson

Make college cheaper by cutting administrative costs

Win Some, Lose Some

Racial Discrimination at Harvard

Affirmative Action and the Jewish Elephant in the Room

The Myth of American Meritocracy: Quantitative Sources and Methods

Appendix A: Current and Historical Estimates of American Jewish Population

Appendix B: Estimated Age and State Distribution of American Racial and Ethnic Groups

Appendix C: Racial and Ethnic Enrollments at Elite Universities

Appendix D: Recent and Historical Jewish Enrollments at Elite Universities

Appendix E: Estimating the National Distribution of High-Ability Students from the NMS Semifinalists

Appendix F: Winners of Leading Academic Competitions

Appendix G: Roster of Harvard College Phi Beta Kappa Inductees, 1966-2012

Appendix H: Relative Enrollment Figures at Ivy League and Other Universities

American Meritocracy Revisited

Elite Admissions, Asian Quotas, and the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard Campaign

The Unz Review • May 4, 2022 • 28,400 Words

The Disappearance of American Meritocracy

For at least the last two generations, American conservatives have been loudly complaining about the racially-based employment and admission policies widely described as “affirmative action.”

I know this to be true because as a youngster in the 1970s, strong opposition to affirmative action was the primary issue that gradually drew me towards the Republican Party, until I finally cast my first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Yet although Republicans have held the White House and Congress during much of this period and placed numerous conservatives on the Supreme Court, the policies in question are vastly stronger today than they ever were in the past. Indeed, the racial positions publicly espoused by some wildly popular recent “rightwing” presidents as Donald Trump and George W. Bush surely would have utterly appalled such prominent liberals of the 1960s as Hubert Humphrey and Robert F. Kennedy.

However, hope springs eternal, and although most of the Republican Party establishment has long since grown silent on the issue, a small band of determined conservative-activists has persevered, and earlier this year the Supreme Court agreed to take up a racial discrimination case brought by Asian plaintiffs against Harvard University, together with a similar case against the University of North Carolina.

I wish them well and I even have a proprietary interest in their success since the lawsuit was reportedly inspired by my 2012 Meritocracy article, whose findings of anti-Asian discrimination provoked a considerable flurry of attention both in the media and among Asian-American organizations. But after nearly fifty years of overwhelmingly negative progress, I’m quite skeptical that nine justices will suddenly provide a deus ex machina to remedy this unfortunate situation, especially since the Covid outbreak has provided many of our most elite colleges an excuse to sharply reduce their reliance upon standardized tests.

If admissions are increasingly based upon entirely subjective factors such as personal essays, admissions officers can produce whatever racial or demographic results that they and their academic masters desire. Indeed, despite its role in prompting the current lawsuit, relatively little of my analysis had focused upon traditional affirmative action, and my harsh conclusions were far more sweeping. As I wrote:

In recent decades, elite college admissions policy has frequently become an ideological battlefield between liberals and conservatives, but I would argue that both these warring camps have been missing the actual reality of the situation.

Conservatives have denounced “affirmative action” policies which emphasize race over academic merit, and thereby lead to the enrollment of lesser qualified blacks and Hispanics over their more qualified white and Asian competitors; they argue that our elite institutions should be color-blind and race-neutral. Meanwhile, liberals have countered that the student body of these institutions should “look like America,” at least approximately, and that ethnic and racial diversity intrinsically provide important educational benefits, at least if all admitted students are reasonably qualified and able to do the work.

My own position has always been strongly in the former camp, supporting meritocracy over diversity in elite admissions. But based on the detailed evidence I have discussed above, it appears that both these ideological values have gradually been overwhelmed and replaced by the influence of corruption and ethnic favoritism, thereby selecting future American elites which are not meritocratic nor diverse, neither being drawn from our most able students nor reasonably reflecting the general American population.

The overwhelming evidence is that the system currently employed by most of our leading universities admits applicants whose ability may be unremarkable but who are beneficiaries of underhanded manipulation and favoritism. Nations which put their future national leadership in the hands of such individuals are likely to encounter enormous economic and social problems, exactly the sort of problems which our own country seems to have increasingly experienced over the last couple of decades.

So I think the serious ills plaguing our elite universities are far broader and deeper than merely the question of racial discrimination under affirmative action, and even if the latter were rectified, I suspect that few would notice much improvement.

A perfect illustration of the dismal state of college admissions came a couple of weeks ago in a front-page Wall Street Journal story regarding a graduating Texas teenager who had been denied admission to all of the selective colleges to which she had applied. The first few paragraphs explained the details of her plight:

Kaitlyn Younger has been an academic standout since she started studying algebra in third grade.

She took her first advanced-placement course as a freshman, scored 1550 on her SATs as a junior at McKinney High School near Dallas and will graduate this spring with an unweighted 3.95 grade-point average and as the founder of the school’s accounting club. Along the way she performed in and directed about 30 plays, sang in the school choir, scored top marks on the tests she has so far taken for 11 advanced-placement classes, helped run a summer camp and held down a part-time job.

“She is extraordinary,” said Jeff Cranmore, her guidance counselor at McKinney High School.

Ms. Younger, 18 years old, was cautiously optimistic when she applied to top U.S. colleges last fall. Responses came this month: Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of California, Berkeley, and Northwestern all rejected her.

“I expected a bunch wouldn’t accept me,” she said. “I didn’t expect it to be this bad.”

What made her situation so surprising was that her standardized SAT test scores of 1550 out of a possible 1600 placed her in the 99+ percentile, an especially impressive achievement since she had gotten those scores as a junior, being a year younger than nearly all of her competitors. Her ranking was substantially above the average for all of America’s most elite colleges, including those that rejected her, and far surpassed those of many of the other schools that had also returned thin envelopes. She had done very well in 11 AP classes and her application was overflowing with exactly the sort of impressive extra-curricular activities expected in the well-rounded applicant. And the result was still uniform rejection everywhere.

Based upon these apparent facts, the unfairness of her fate seems manifest, but it is much less clear to me that she was a victim of racial discrimination. I certainly don’t doubt that a large fraction of all the blacks or Hispanics admitted in her place had considerably lower test scores and less stellar academic transcripts. But given her extremely impressive record, the same was probably also true for most of the whites and Asians favored over her.

My suspicion is that she and her middle-class family lacked the special “hooks” that admissions consultants charge huge sums to arrange, and so she fell victim to the random whims of the bored or ignorant admissions officers who seem so typical of that profession. The obvious, almost inevitable consequence of the elimination of objective, meritocratic admissions criteria is that the process will increasingly be governed by corruption, connections, and favoritism, certainly very negative social ills but not necessarily violations of Civil Rights statutes.

So with the tenth anniversary of my Meritocracy monograph fast approaching and a Supreme Court ruling also on the horizon, I’ve decided to provide a lengthy summary of that analysis as well as a retrospective account of my own unsuccessful efforts to achieve reform via my Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign of 2016, starting with lengthy excerpts from my most recent 2018 discussion and the original 2012 article.

Asian Quotas in the Ivy League

This last week trial began in Boston federal court for the current lawsuit in which a collection of Asian-American organizations are charging Harvard University with racial discrimination in its college admissions policies. The New York Times, our national newspaper of record, has been providing almost daily coverage to developments in the case, with the stories sometimes reaching the front page.

Last Sunday, just before the legal proceedings began, the Times ran a major article explaining the general background of the controversy, and I was very pleased to see that my own past research was cited as an important factor sparking the lawsuit, with the reporter even including a direct link to my 26,000 word 2012 cover-story “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” which had provided strong quantitative evidence of anti-Asian racial quotas. Economic historian Niall Ferguson, long one of Harvard’s most prominent professors but recently decamped to Stanford, similarly noted the role of my research in his column for the London Sunday Times.

Two decades ago, I had published a widely-discussed op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on somewhat similar issues of racial discrimination in elite admissions. But my more recent article was far longer and more comprehensive, and certainly drew more attention than anything else I have ever published, before or since. After it appeared in The American Conservative, its hundreds of thousands of pageviews broke all records for that publication and it attracted considerable notice in the media. Times columnist David Brooks soon ranked it as perhaps the best American magazine article of the year, a verdict seconded by a top editor at The Economist, and the Times itself quickly organized a symposium on the topic of Asian Quotas, in which I eagerly participated. Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, Business Insider, and other publications all discussed my striking results.

Conservative circles took considerable interest, with Charles Murray highlighting my findings, and National Review later published an article in which I explained the important implications of my findings for the legal validity of the 1978 Bakke decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

There was also a considerable reaction from the academic community itself. I quickly received speaking invitations from the Yale Political Union, Yale Law, and the University of Chicago Law School, while Prof. Ferguson discussed my distressing analysis in a lengthy Newsweek/Daily Beast column entitled “The End of the American Dream.”

Moreover, I had also published an associated critique suggesting that over the years my beloved Harvard alma mater had transformed itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds with a vestigial school attached for tax-exempt purposes. This also generated enormous discussion in media circles, with liberal journalist Chris Hayes Tweeting it out and generously saying he was “very jealous” he hadn’t written the piece himself. Many of his colleagues promoted the piece with similarly favorable remarks, while the university quickly provided a weak public response to these serious financial charges.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to myself or other outside observers, Harvard itself launched an internal investigation of the anti-Asian bias that I had alleged. Apparently, the university’s own initial results generally confirmed my accusations, indicating that if students were admitted solely based upon objective academic merit, far more Asians would receive thick envelopes. But Harvard’s top administrators buried the study and did nothing, with these important facts only coming out years later during the discovery process of the current Asian Quotas lawsuit.

Only the first part of my very long article dealt with the question of anti-Asian racial discrimination in elite college admissions, but it attracted vastly more attention than any other element.

For many years, there had been a widespread belief within the Asian-American community that such discriminatory practices existed, a sentiment backed by considerable anecdotal evidence. But the university administrations had always flatly denied those claims, and the media had shown little interest in investigating them. However, my powerful new quantitative evidence proved very difficult to ignore.

Among other things, I focused upon the publicly available statewide lists of National Merit Semifinalists (NMS), a group that constituted the highest-performing one-half percent of American high school seniors. By a fortunate coincidence, this fraction of the American student body was reasonably close in size to the total enrollment of students at the Ivy League schools together with similarly elite schools such as Stanford, Caltech, and MIT. The NMS dataset had previously been almost entirely ignored by researchers, but I found it provided a treasure-trove of useful empirical information.

Since Asian last names are extremely distinctive, I was able to estimate that Asians nationally constituted roughly 25-30% of this top academic group, a figure considerably larger than their enrollment at Harvard and other elite schools. This conclusion was supported by the even greater Asian dominance in more highly selective academic competitions such as the Math Olympiad and the Intel Science Talent Search, though the far smaller numbers involved reduced the statistical validity of these analyses.

But my most dramatic finding relied upon an even simpler analysis of public data, which had previously remained unnoticed. As I wrote in my New York Times column:

Just as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the existence of “Jewish quotas,” top officials at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of “Asian quotas.” But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary.

Each year, American universities provide their racial enrollment data to the National Center for Education Statistics, which makes this information available online. After the Justice Department closed an investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University discriminated against Asian-American applicants, Harvard’s reported enrollment of Asian-Americans began gradually declining, falling from 20.6 percent in 1993 to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade.

This decline might seem small. But these same years brought a huge increase in America’s college-age Asian population, which roughly doubled between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic white numbers remained almost unchanged. Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last two decades, while the percentage of whites changed little. This decline in relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of Harvard’s 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to 15 percent.

The percentages of college-age Asian-Americans enrolled at most of the other Ivy League schools also fell during this same period, and over the last few years Asian enrollments across these different universities have converged to a very similar level and remained static over time. This raises suspicions of a joint Ivy League policy to restrict Asian-American numbers to a particular percentage…

This statistical finding was illustrated in a simple graph, demonstrating that over the last two decades enrollment of Asian-Americans had gradually converged across the entire Ivy League, while sharply diverging from the rapidly increasing Asian-American population, with only strictly meritocratic Caltech continuing to track the latter.

It would be difficult to imagine more obvious visual evidence of an Asian Quota implemented across the Ivy League, and this chart was very widely circulated among Asian-American organizations and activists, who launched their lawsuit the following year. If they do succeed in winning their current case in federal court, the history books may eventually record that the wealthiest and most powerful university in the world was brought low by a single striking graph.

The Hidden Jewish Dimension

For decades affirmative action based upon race has been an extremely contentious topic in American politics, sharply divisive across ideological lines, and it was hardly surprising that my new analysis of that issue produced a wave of coverage. But buried deeper within that same lengthy article were even more explosive findings, apparently far too sensitive to even become a subject of significant media scrutiny.

Not without reason, most journalists regard matters touching upon Jewish sensitivities as the lethal “third rail” of their profession, and the bulk of my piece had presented some unexpected new insights in this area. These attracted the widespread private fascination of numerous prominent scholars and members of the media, but almost none of these individuals was willing to publicly disclose the results that had drawn their rapt attention.

As a consequence, these findings have remained largely unnoticed except among those who have actually taken the time to read far into my extremely long piece, while never penetrating into the awareness of the broader public. For example, Prof. Jordan Peterson, a leading celebrity-intellectual with a large YouTube following, recently demonstrated that he was totally ignorant of these important facts. Therefore, I am now taking this opportunity to summarize and excerpt those elements of my Meritocracy analysis that attracted the greatest private interest but received the least public attention.

A few years earlier, Jerome Karabel, an eminent Berkeley sociologist, had published The Chosen, his magisterial history of Jewish enrollment in the Ivy League, which won numerous scholarly accolades. His research conclusively demonstrated the existence of the once-denied Jewish Quotas of the past, employed by the reigning WASP elites to maintain control of those institutions against their upstart ethnic competitors. As I wrote:

Karabel’s massive documentation—over 700 pages and 3000 endnotes—establishes the remarkable fact that America’s uniquely complex and subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert ethnic tribal warfare…

As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the major changes in admissions policy which later followed were usually determined by factors of raw political power and the balance of contending forces rather than any idealistic considerations. For example, in the aftermath of World War II, Jewish organizations and their allies mobilized their political and media resources to pressure the universities into increasing their ethnic enrollment by modifying the weight assigned to various academic and non-academic factors, raising the importance of the former over the latter. Then a decade or two later, this exact process was repeated in the opposite direction, as the early 1960s saw black activists and their liberal political allies pressure universities to bring their racial minority enrollments into closer alignment with America’s national population by partially shifting away from their recently enshrined focus on purely academic considerations. Indeed, Karabel notes that the most sudden and extreme increase in minority enrollment took place at Yale in the years 1968–69, and was largely due to fears of race riots in heavily black New Haven, which surrounded the campus.

Philosophical consistency appears notably absent in many of the prominent figures involved in these admissions battles, with both liberals and conservatives sometimes favoring academic merit and sometimes non-academic factors, whichever would produce the particular ethnic student mix they desired for personal or ideological reasons. Different political blocs waged long battles for control of particular universities, and sudden large shifts in admissions rates occurred as these groups gained or lost influence within the university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissions staff in 1965 and the following year Jewish numbers nearly doubled…

Branches of Hillel, the Jewish student organization, exist across most college campuses, and for decades they have provided estimates of the percentages of the local Jewish enrollment, with Karabel and other scholars relying upon these to chart the ebbs and flows of Jewish numbers. I discussed how Karabel used this data to celebrate the final meritocratic victory of Jewish college applicants over their former WASP oppressors…

Indeed, Karabel opens the final chapter of his book by…noting the extreme irony that the WASP demographic group which had once so completely dominated America’s elite universities and “virtually all the major institutions of American life” had by 2000 become “a small and beleaguered minority at Harvard,” being actually fewer in number than the Jews whose presence they had once sought to restrict. Very similar results seem to apply all across the Ivy League, with the disproportion often being even greater than the particular example emphasized by Karabel…

Karabel showed that the collapse of WASP resistance to the admission of high-performing Jewish students soon drastically reshaped the ethnic composition of these institutions, with his triumphalist narrative suggesting that this transformation raised academic standards and lifted the quality of the student body to new heights. And for decades, I had entirely accepted this simple morality tale, which was implicitly or explicitly presented in nearly all the accounts, liberal and conservative alike, that I had read regarding the history of our leading East Coast universities.

But as I began to quantitatively explore this issue, utilizing the same techniques and data sets I had applied to determining the existence of severe discrimination against Asian applicants, I uncovered evidence of an entirely contrary nature. I soon came to realize that many of my beliefs were merely ideological fairy tales, sometimes little more accurate than the Soviet claims of Russian peasants eagerly joining their collective farms.

Although Jewish names are not nearly as distinctive as Asian ones, they may usually be determined with reasonable accuracy, and applying Weyl analysis to a subset of the most absolutely characteristic ones—such as Goldstein, Silverberg, Cohen, and Kaplan—allows us to statistically validate the results so obtained.

As I thus analyzed the many dozens of statewide NMS lists, I soon discovered that Jews were far less heavily represented among America’s highest-performing students than I had expected, probably constituting no more than 6% of the national NMS total. The lists of the winners of the top scholastic competitions I had previously examined for Asians produced reasonably similar results.

Hispanic names are quite distinct and blacks are fewer in number and somewhat less successful academically, so the NMS totals for those two groups are also not difficult to determine. Once we subtract the totals of Asians, Jews, Hispanics, and blacks, what remains is the NMS total of non-Hispanic white Gentiles. And the results were absolutely eye-opening:

The evidence of the recent NMS semifinalist lists seems the most conclusive of all, given the huge statistical sample sizes involved. As discussed earlier, these students constitute roughly the highest 0.5 percent in academic ability, the top 16,000 high school seniors who should be enrolling at the Ivy League and America’s other most elite academic universities. In California, white Gentile names outnumber Jewish ones by over 8-to-1; in Texas, over 20-to-1; in Florida and Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in New York, America’s most heavily Jewish state, there are more than two high-ability white Gentile students for every Jewish one. Based on the overall distribution of America’s population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America’s highest ability students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish total of under 6 percent.

Needless to say, these proportions are considerably different from what we actually find among the admitted students at Harvard and its elite peers, which today serve as a direct funnel to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, and finance. Based on reported statistics, Jews approximately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools, which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the official statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Harvard are America’s most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction of their national population than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher academic test scores.

When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America’s recent NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics, foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.

However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all relative to their number of high-ability college-age students.

Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70 percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews…

Several graphs from my article effectively illustrated these remarkable findings.

Based on these figures, Jewish students were roughly 1,000% more likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League than white Gentiles of similar ability. This was an absolutely astonishing result given that under-representation in the range of 20% or 30% is often treated by courts as powerful prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.

Furthermore, I noted the possibility that this discrepancy might be related to the overwhelming Jewish dominance of the top administration of those institutions:

It would be unreasonable to ignore the salient fact that this massive apparent bias in favor of far less-qualified Jewish applicants coincides with an equally massive ethnic skew at the topmost administrative ranks of the universities in question, a situation which once again exactly parallels Karabel’s account from the 1920s. Indeed, Karabel points out that by 1993 Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all had presidents of Jewish ancestry, and the same is true for the current presidents of Yale, Penn, Cornell, and possibly Columbia, as well as Princeton’s president throughout during the 1990s and Yale’s new incoming president, while all three of Harvard’s most recent presidents have either had Jewish origins or a Jewish spouse.

At most universities, a provost is the second-ranking official, being responsible for day-to-day academic operations. Although Princeton’s current president is not Jewish, all seven of the most recent Princeton provosts stretching back to 1977 have had such ancestry, with several of the other Ivies not being far behind. A similar degree of massive overrepresentation is found throughout the other top administrative ranks of the rest of the Ivy League, and across American leading educational institutions in general, and these are the institutions which select our future national elites…

Since the publication of my 2012 article, Harvard and Princeton have both selected new presidents, each of them Jewish, while Yale’s Jewish president has remained in office.

The Corruption of the Admissions Process

The exact mechanism by which this seemingly enormous bias in favor of Jewish applicants to our most elite colleges manifests itself is not entirely clear, and I very much doubt that it takes the crude form of top administrators directing admissions officers to admit under-qualified Jewish applicants. Instead, I strongly suggested that a leading factor was the “negative pressure” of America’s overwhelmingly Jewish media and Jewish activist groups, which might respond harshly to any significant decline in Jewish numbers:

Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s, and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. These articles included denunciations of Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system.

I suspect that the combined effect of these separate pressures, rather than any planned or intentional bias, is the primary cause of the striking enrollment statistics that we have examined above. In effect, somewhat dim and over-worked admissions officers, generally possessing weak quantitative skills, have been tasked by their academic superiors and media monitors with the twin ideological goals of enrolling Jews and enrolling non-whites, with any major failures risking harsh charges of either “anti-Semitism” or “racism.” But by inescapable logic maximizing the number of Jews and non-whites implies minimizing the number of non-Jewish whites…

I further noted that this 1999 firestorm of media controversy attacking Princeton for its alleged “anti-Semitism” took place at a time when university’s president and provost were both Jewish, and the campus had recently opened a $4.5 million Center for Jewish Life.

In 2002, Jacques Steinberg, a longtime National Educational Correspondent for the New York Times, published The Gatekeepers, a widely praised best-seller that provided an “inside look” at the college admissions process based on the year he had spent embedded with those officials at Wesleyan, and the 2012 edition of his book stated that few aspects of the process had changed during the previous decade. I was deeply distressed by his description of the background of the admissions officers:

In fact, it seems likely that some of these obvious admissions biases we have noticed may be related to the poor human quality and weak academic credentials of many of the university employees making these momentous decisions. As mentioned above, 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…

Books by former members of the Harvard and Dartmouth admissions strongly supported the same conclusions…

As additional evidence, we can consider What It Really Takes to Get into the Ivy League, a 2003 advice book written by Chuck Hughes, who spent five years as a Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard, after having himself graduated from that university. Although he strongly emphasizes his own college participation in varsity sports, he never says a word about any personal academic interests, and near the end of his book on elite college admissions, he appears to describe Duke, Northwestern, and Rice as being members of the Ivy League.

A more explicit statement of this exact problem is found in A for Admission, a very candid 1997 description of the admissions process at elite private universities written by Michele A. Hernandez, who had spent four years as Dartmouth’s Assistant Director of Admissions. Near the beginning of her book, Hernandez explains that over half of Ivy League admissions officers are individuals who had not attended such academically challenging universities, nor probably had the intellectual capability to do so, and were sometimes confused about the relative ranking of SAT scores and other basic academic credentials. She also cautions students to avoid any subtlety in their essays, lest their words be misunderstood by their readers in the admissions office, whose degrees are more likely to have been in education than in any serious academic discipline…

Given this unfortunate situation, we should not be overly surprised by the egregious aspects of the particular admissions stories that Steinberg recounts…

Consider the case of Tiffany Wang, a Chinese immigrant student raised in the Silicon Valley area, where her father worked as an engineer. Although English was not her first language, her SAT scores were over 100 points above the Wesleyan average, and she ranked as a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, putting her in the top 0.5 percent of high school students (not the top 2 percent as Steinberg mistakenly claims). Nevertheless, the admissions officer rated her just so-so in academics, and seemed far more positively impressed by her ethnic activism in the local school’s Asian-American club. Ultimately, he stamped her with a “Reject,” but later admitted to Steinberg that she might have been admitted if he had been aware of the enormous time and effort she had spent campaigning against the death penalty, a political cause near and dear to his own heart. Somehow I suspect that a student who boasted of leadership in pro-death penalty activism among his extracurriculars might have fared rather worse in this process. And presumably for similar reasons, Tiffany was also rejected by all her other prestigious college choices, including Yale, Penn, Duke, and Wellesley, an outcome which greatly surprised and disappointed her immigrant father.

There was also the case of half-Brazilian Julianna Bentes, with slight black ancestry, who came from a middle-class family and attended on a partial scholarship one of America’s most elite prep schools, whose annual tuition now tops $30,000; her SAT scores were somewhat higher than Tiffany’s, and she was an excellent dancer. The combination of her academic ability, dancing talent, and “multiracial” background ranked her as one of America’s top college recruitment prospects, gaining her admission and generous financial packages from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and every other elite university to which she applied, including the University of Chicago’s most prestigious academic scholarship award and a personal opportunity to meet Chelsea Clinton while visiting Stanford, which she did, before ultimately selecting Yale.

Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam, her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion, he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.

In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she “didn’t see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After graduation, she eventually took a job at her father’s successful law firm, thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America’s ruling Ivy League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best”…

Jannol’s account also contains a particularly intriguing element. Personal essays have become a crucial component of application packages to elite colleges, and these are considered especially effective if they provide strong evidence of hardships and victimhood. Given her extremely wealthy and privileged background, Jannol had originally considered focusing on her status as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, but ultimately decided against it because so many of her peers would be following exactly that same stratagem, explaining to Steinberg that “Everyone’s going to write about their Holocaust grandma.”

Over the last few decades, our news and entertainment industries have elevated Jewish suffering during World War II into the most horrific and monumental tragedy of the modern era, and it not impossible that a substantial fraction of the unfair Jewish advantage in elite admissions may derive from something as simple as the ability of the children of elite Jewish families to wrap themselves in the ultimate victimhood of Holocaust survivor status…

The Strange Collapse of Jewish Academic Performance

I had been stunned by my evidence of the unreasonable over-representation of Jewish students at our most elite academic institutions, and most of the prominent scholars and journalists who read my analysis seemed to have a similar reaction. Further analysis suggested some of the crucial reasons for this widespread myopia, which I explicated in a section entitled “The Strange Collapse of Jewish Academic Achievement”…

From my own perspective, I found these statistical results surprising, even shocking.

I had always been well aware of the very heavy Jewish presence at elite academic institutions. But the underwhelming percentage of Jewish students who today achieve high scores on academic aptitude tests was totally unexpected, and very different from the impressions I had formed during my own high school and college years a generation or so ago. An examination of other available statistics seems to support my recollections and provides evidence for a dramatic recent decline in the academic performance of American Jews.

The U.S. Math Olympiad began in 1974, and all the names of the top scoring students are easily available on the Internet. During the 1970s, well over 40 percent of the total were Jewish, and during the 1980s and 1990s, the fraction averaged about one-third. However, during the thirteen years since 2000, just two names out of 78 or 2.5 percent appear to be Jewish. The Putnam Exam is the most difficult and prestigious mathematics competition for American college students, with five or six Putnam winners having been selected each year since 1938. Over 40 percent of the Putnam winners prior to 1950 were Jewish, and during every decade from the 1950s through the 1990s, between 22 percent and 31 percent of the winners seem to have come from that same ethnic background. But since 2000, the percentage has dropped to under 10 percent, without a single likely Jewish name in the last seven years.

This consistent picture of stark ethnic decline recurs when we examine the statistics for the Science Talent Search, which has been selecting 40 students as national finalists for America’s most prestigious high school science award since 1942, thus providing a huge statistical dataset of over 2800 top science students. During every decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jewish students were consistently 22–23 percent of the recipients, with the percentage then declining to 17 percent in the 1990s, 15 percent in the 2000s, and just 7 percent since 2010. Indeed, of the thirty top ranked students over the last three years, only a single one seems likely to have been Jewish. Similarly, Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997, but have fallen to just 5 percent over the last decade, a result which must surely send Richard Feynman spinning in his grave.

• • •

Taken in combination, these trends all provide powerful evidence that over the last decade or more there has been a dramatic collapse in Jewish academic achievement, at least at the high end.

Several possible explanations for this empirical result seem reasonably plausible. Although the innate potential of a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly, achievement is a function of both ability and effort, and today’s overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students may be far less diligent in their work habits or driven in their studies than were their parents or grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing challenges of the immigrant experience. In support of this hypothesis, roughly half of the Jewish Math Olympiad winners from the last two decades have had the sort of highly distinctive names which would tend to mark them as recent immigrants from the Soviet Union or elsewhere, and such names were also very common among the top Jewish science students of the same period, even though this group represents only about 10 percent of current American Jews. Indeed, it seems quite possible that this large sudden influx of very high performing immigrant Jews from the late 1980s onward served to partially mask the rapid concurrent decline of high academic achievement among native American Jews, which otherwise would have become much more clearly evident a decade or so earlier.

This pattern of third or fourth generation American students lacking the academic drive or intensity of their forefathers is hardly surprising, nor unique to Jews. Consider the case of Japanese-Americans, who mostly arrived in America during roughly the same era. America’s Japanese have always been a high-performing group, with a strong academic tradition, and Japan’s international PISA academic scores are today among the highest in the world. But when we examine the list of California’s NMS semifinalists, less than 1 percent of the names are Japanese, roughly in line with their share of the California population. Meanwhile, Chinese, Koreans, and South Asians are 6 percent of California but contribute 50 percent of the top scoring students, an eight-fold better result, with a major likely difference being that they are overwhelmingly of recent immigrant origin. In fact, although ongoing Japanese immigration has been trivial in size, a significant fraction of the top Japanese students have the unassimilated Japanese first names that would tend to indicate they are probably drawn from that tiny group.

In his 1966 book The Creative Elite in America, Weyl used last name analysis to document a similarly remarkable collapse in achievement among America’s Puritan-descended population, which had once provided a hugely disproportionate fraction of our intellectual leadership, but for various reasons went into rapid decline from about 1900 onward. He also mentions the disappearance of the remarkable Scottish intellectual contribution to British life after about 1800. Although the evidence for both these historical parallels seems very strong, the causal factors are not entirely clear, though Weyl does provide some possible explanations.

In some respects, perhaps it was the enormously outsize Jewish academic performance of the past which was highly anomalous, and the more recent partial convergence toward white European norms which is somewhat less surprising. Over the years, claims have been widely circulated that the mean Jewish IQ is a full standard deviation—15 points—above the white average of 100, but this seems to have little basis in reality. Richard Lynn, one of the world’s foremost IQ experts, has performed an exhaustive literature review and located some 32 IQ samples of American Jews, taken from 1920 to 2008. For the first 14 studies conducted during the years 1920–1937, the Jewish IQ came out very close to the white American mean, and it was only in later decades that the average figure rose to the approximate range of 107–111.

In a previous article “Race, IQ & Wealth,” I had suggested that the IQs of ethnic groups appear to be far more malleable than many people would acknowledge, and may be particularly influenced by factors of urbanization, education, and affluence. Given that Jews have always been America’s most heavily urbanized population and became the most affluent during the decades in question, these factors may account for a substantial portion of their huge IQ rise during most of the twentieth century. But with modern electronic technology recently narrowing the gaps in social environment and educational opportunities between America’s rural and urban worlds, we might expect a portion of this difference to gradually dissipate. American Jews are certainly a high-ability population, but the innate advantage they have over other high-ability white populations is probably far smaller than is widely believed.

This conclusion is supported by the General Social Survey (GSS), an online dataset of tens of thousands of American survey responses from the last forty years which includes the Wordsum vocabulary test, a very useful IQ proxy correlating at 0.71. Converted into the corresponding IQ scores, the Wordsum-IQ of Jews is indeed quite high at 109. But Americans of English, Welsh, Scottish, Swedish, and Catholic Irish ancestry also have fairly high mean IQs of 104 or above, and their combined populations outnumber Jews by almost 15-to-1, implying that they would totally dominate the upper reaches of the white American ability distribution, even if we excluded the remaining two-thirds of all American whites, many of whose IQs are also fairly high. Furthermore, all these groups are far less highly urbanized or affluent than Jews, probably indicating that their scores are still artificially depressed to some extent. We should also remember that Jewish intellectual performance tends to be quite skewed, being exceptionally strong in the verbal subcomponent, much lower in math, and completely mediocre in visuospatial ability; thus, a completely verbal-oriented test such as Wordsum would actually tend to exaggerate Jewish IQ.

Stratifying the white American population along religious lines produces similar conclusions. An analysis of the data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that Americans raised in the Episcopal Church actually exceeded Jews in mean IQ, while several other religious categories came quite close, leading to the result that the overwhelming majority of America’s high-ability white population had a non-Jewish background.

Finally, in the case of Jews, these assimilation- or environment-related declines in relative academic performance may have been reinforced by powerful demographic trends. For the last generation or two, typical Jewish women from successful or even ordinary families have married very late and averaged little more than a single child, while the small fraction of Jewish women who are ultra-Orthodox often marry in their teens and then produce seven or eight children. As a consequence, this extremely religious subpopulation has been doubling in size every twenty years, and now easily exceeds 10 percent of the total, including a far higher percentage of younger Jews. But ultra-Orthodox Jews have generally been academically mediocre, often with enormously high rates of poverty and government dependency. Therefore, the combination of these two radically different trends of Jewish reproduction has acted to stabilize the total number of Jewish youngsters, while probably producing a sharp drop in their average academic achievement.

Although the relative importance of these individual factors behind Jewish academic decline is unclear, the decline itself seems an unmistakable empirical fact, and the widespread unawareness of this fact has had important social consequences.

My casual mental image of today’s top American students is based upon my memories of a generation or so ago, when Jewish students, sometimes including myself, regularly took home a quarter or more of the highest national honors on standardized tests or in prestigious academic competitions; thus, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools might be 25 percent Jewish, based on meritocracy. But the objective evidence indicates that in present day America, only about 6 percent of our top students are Jewish, which now renders such very high Jewish enrollments at elite universities totally absurd and ridiculous. I strongly suspect that a similar time lag effect is responsible for the apparent confusion in many others who have considered the topic.

For example, throughout his very detailed book, Karabel always seems to automatically identify increasing Jewish enrollments with academic meritocracy, and Jewish declines with bias or discrimination, retaining this assumption even when his discussion moves into the 1990s and 2000s. He was born in 1950, graduated Harvard in 1972, and returned there to earn his Ph.D. in 1977, so this may indeed have been the reality during his formative years. But he seems strikingly unaware that the world has changed since then, and that over the last decade or two, meritocracy and Jewish numbers have become opposing forces: the stricter the meritocratic standard, the fewer the Jews admitted…

Evidence of the remarkable collapse of Jewish academic achievement is easily seen in a series of charts:

Successfully Opening a Public Debate on Meritocracy

Important results with major policy implications will only have significant impact if they are widely distributed, and in this regard I faced formidable obstacles.

My article was running in The American Conservative, a small circulation political opinion magazine of which I was the publisher, and so my findings needed to break through into far larger and more mainstream outlets in order to reach a sizable audience. But in the past TAC had often been fiercely denounced by Jewish activists and organizations, mostly on foreign policy issues, and elements of my piece were far more inflammatory than any of that previous material. While harsh attacks might help promote my information within particular ideological circles, they would surely dissuade mainstream publications from taking notice, and would also sufficiently stigmatize my research that no respectable individual would be willing to cite it in the future.

My first decision was to place my Asian Quota section near the front of my very long text. Aside from the intrinsic importance, this would also provide interested readers with a relatively safe “hook” that they could use to describe and promote my analysis, while allowing them to avoid mentioning any of the “third rail” material that constituted the bulk of my text; and this was exactly what eventually occurred. But such a strategy would obviously fail unless I could also somehow induce hair-trigger activist groups to maintain silence about my article rather than begin crudely demonizing it. Therefore, I decided to launch what I considered a decapitating first strike against those central organs of Jewish activism but to do so in a rather oblique manner.

Jerome Karabel certainly ranked as the world’s foremost authority on Jewish admissions to the Ivy League, and his celebrated opus had been the central text I had used, although my ultimate conclusions were radically different than his own. It seemed likely to me that once Jewish organizations became aware of the controversial elements of my article, he would be among the first individuals they contacted, both to seek his assessment of my analysis and perhaps also receive suggestions for an effective rebuttal.

Therefore, I obtained Karabel’s contact information and sent him an advance copy of my completed article weeks before it was generally released, explaining that I thought he would find it rather interesting although some of my conclusions were quite different than his own. My expectation was that once he carefully read my detailed analysis, he would conclude that the case I made was far too strong to be effectively refuted, and he would pass along that verdict to the activist organizations when they eventually contacted him, thus leading them adopt a policy of “strategic silence” in order to avoid drawing attention to my claims. For whatever reason, that was exactly how they reacted, and no prominent Jewish activist or group ever issued a public response to my extremely controversial findings despite the considerable attention these ultimately attracted.

Not only did this complete absence of organized attacks provide a green light for the very favorable mainstream coverage I soon began receiving, but it even opened the door to quite friendly treatment from numerous members of the organized Jewish community itself, as they discovered and read my article without any prior negative preconceptions. Most of these discussions focused directly upon the evidence of the sharp recent decline in Jewish academic ability and the resulting Jewish over-representation at elite universities, with a professor of Talmud Studies at Yeshiva University publishing a thousand-word column entitled “Endangered Jewish Genius” and NYU’s Berman Jewish Policy Center featuring my article on its website. Even the Israeli press took notice, with a columnist for Israel Hayom, Sheldon Adelson’s top-circulation newpaper, devoting a 1500 word column to my analysis, focusing especially upon my claims of Jewish over-representation.

But although prominent Jewish activists maintained their strict blockade against any discussion of my findings, the Jewish community has never lacked for extreme zealots, and some of these did eventually launch ferocious attacks on my work. However, these were fringe figures, so they were very slow off the mark in their responses and lacked significant credibility or media support. Therefore, their complaints had little impact, especially because they were largely self-refuting.

My fiercest academic critic was a certain cancer researcher named Janet Mertz, a fanatic feminist whose previous public efforts had been focused on vilifying and refuting former Harvard president Larry Summers for his mild but impolitic suggestion that perhaps men might be a bit better at math than women, a position she regarded as utter anathema. To that end, she had published a 10,000 word peer-reviewed analysis of decades worth of International Math Olympiad participants, which convincingly demonstrated that across almost every time period and country, roughly 95% of the best mathematicians had been male and only 5% female. But she rather bizarrely claimed that this conclusively proved that males and females had exactly equal mathematical aptitude, and then persuaded Science Daily and other gullible media outlets to publish headlined news stories touting her powerful debunking of male chauvinist mythology.

Mertz was equally zealous in her Jewish identitarianism, and she had invested enormous effort in exhaustively determining the exact fractional Jewish ancestry of all of America’s recent Math Olympians. As a consequence, she fiercely denounced as mere “guesswork” my own estimates of Jewish numbers, based as they were upon a much more casual inspection of surnames, supplemented by Weyl analysis. I think my response was quite effective…

As it happens, she and her co-authors had exhaustively researched the ethnicity of the 1988-2007 American Math Olympians in their aforementioned 2008 article, and through a combination of extensive biographical research and confidential personal interviews had determined the exact number of full-Jews and part-Jews among those 120 individuals, publishing the results in their Table 7 mentioned above, together with the broader racial categories.

Given that I had produced my own ethnic estimates for those same students based on perhaps five minutes of cursory surname analysis, while Mertz and her associates seemingly devoted five weeks of research to the same task, I readily acknowledge that her results are certain to be vastly more accurate than my own. Indeed, if we regard the Mertz figures as the “gold standard,” then comparing them with my own numbers provides a useful means of assessing the overall quality of my direct inspection technique, a technique that constituted a central pillar of my entire study. This allows us to decide whether my approach was indeed just the worthless “guesswork” that she alleges.

Her peer-reviewed journal article determined that the 120 American Math Olympians from 1988-2007 consisted of exactly 42 Asians, 26 Jews, and 52 non-Jewish whites. My crude surname estimate had been 44 Asians, 23 Jews, and 53 non-Jewish whites. Individual readers must decide for themselves whether these estimation errors seem so enormous as to totally invalidate my overall conclusions, but personally I would be quite satisfied if they remained in this range across the tens of thousands of surnames I had inspected throughout the rest of my paper.

Obviously, such estimation techniques may be completely incorrect for tiny handfuls of names, and should only be relied upon across substantial lists. For example, in one sentence of my 30,000 word article I stated that just 2 of the 78 names of Olympiad winners since 2000 seemed likely to be Jewish, and Mertz has repeatedly attacked me for this claim, now pointing out that I had missed the Hebrew name of winner “Oaz Nir.” She is correct, and since Nir was a double winner in 2000 and 2001, this single surname error on my part accounts for virtually the entire discrepancy between my own 1988-2007 Olympiad results and those produced by the exhaustive research undertaken by Mertz and her three academic co-authors…

The only reason that I or anyone else even became aware of Mertz’s harsh critique of my analysis was the heavy promotion she received by Andrew Gelman, a professor of Statistics at Columbia University and a prominent blogger, who thereby apparently hoped to undercut my findings without directly involving himself and thereby risking his own reputation. But once I informed him of some of her previous scholarly claims regarding gender issues, he seemed to abandon the project.

A close Mertz ally was a much younger woman named Nurit Baytch, whom I actually encountered in person. As I was giving my lecture at the University of Chicago Law School, I couldn’t help but notice a rather short young woman sitting in the front row, glaring at me with a glassy-eyed stare. I am hardly a clothes-horse, but she was dressed very strangely, and when she afterward came up to “confront me,” her mannerisms and style of speaking were quite odd as well. All in all, her appearance much reminded me of the photos of female Weather Underground terrorists of the late 1960s, most of whom had also come from a Jewish background.

Eventually, Ms. Baytch wrote a massive document purportedly refuting my Meritocracy analysis, and since it was never published anywhere, she posted it on the Internet as a GoogleDocs file, which countless Jewish activists have subsequently cited as a conclusive debunking of my claims. But all her tens of thousands of words of complex verbiage cannot get around the simple fact that only about 6% of America’s high-performing NMS students are Jewish and the remaining 94% are Gentile.

Her other line of criticism was to denounce my use of the Hillel numbers for Jewish enrollment, which she claimed were completely fraudulent, though without any evidence buttressing her claim. For decades, these Hillel figures had been accepted without reservation by all our leading media outlets and academic researchers, while I had actually treated them with some caution, perhaps being the first analyst to do so…

Similarly, nearly all our figures on Jewish enrollment were ultimately drawn from the estimates of Hillel, the national Jewish campus organization, and these are obviously approximate. However, the Hillel data is the best we possess for recent decades, and is regularly used by the New York Times and other prominent media outlets, while also serving as the basis for much of Karabel’s award-winning scholarship. Furthermore, so long as any latent bias in the data remained relatively constant, we could still correctly analyze changes over time…

Completely discarding as unreliable the tens of thousands of annual Jewish enrollment estimates compiled by Hillel over the last half-century would completely eliminate almost everything we know about the historical size and trajectory of the Jewish presence at thousands of American colleges, destroying the sociological studies of many scholars. But fortunately, it seems quite unlikely that the figures are as completely nonsensical as Baytch casually claimed.

These Hillel estimates have been very widely circulated within the Jewish community for decades and republished in Jewish magazines, being primarily intended to help guide strongly-identified Jewish families in selecting a college campus with a Jewish enrollment in the range they considered necessary. For most families, the cost of a college education is one of the largest investments they will ever make, and if for decades, tens or hundreds of thousands of committed Jewish families had picked their colleges based on the Hillel numbers only to discover that those figures had no connection to reality, surely there would have been a huge and angry backlash. But there is no record of any such complaints.

For many years, Harvard Hillel had regularly claimed that half or more of all the white undergraduates on the campus came from a Jewish background, and if this figure were wildly inaccurate, surely someone at Harvard Hillel would have eventually noticed that error and corrected it, with the same being true for Yale, Columbia, Penn, and numerous other colleges. Obviously, the criteria used to classify a student as Jewish are somewhat elastic, and we can easily suppose that the estimate generally includes part-Jews who in any way identified with that community, and may have been been somewhat exaggerated due to ethnic boosterism. But it seems highly unlikely that the figures would be utterly and demonstrably false.

These arguments based on general plausibility are strongly supported by quantitative evidence, and ironically enough, it is Baytch herself who provided it. Around the time she produced her lengthy and unpublished document, Harvard Hillel was claiming a Jewish undergraduate enrollment of 25%, and near the beginning of her text, she claimed that figure was obviously false by citing a Harvard Crimson survey indicating that only 9.5% of the Class of 2017 were Jewish. However, she failed to notice that the survey referred to being religiously Jewish, which is entirely different than being Jewish in the broader ethnic or ancestral sense, especially since Jews are among the most secular populations in American society and a full 42% of the Harvard students described their religious beliefs as atheist, agnostic, or “other.” Indeed, a worldwide survey finds that only 38% of (ethnic) Jews follow the Jewish religion. So if the Crimson survey were correct and Harvard Jews were typical in their religiosity, this would imply that 9.5% / 0.38 = 25%(!!!) of Harvard freshman were ethnically Jewish, exactly the figure claimed by Harvard Hillel. Fanatic ideologues such as Baytch sometimes have a tendency to score game-ending own-goals without even realizing what they have done.

In general, Jewish classification has a rather protean nature, with somewhat overlapping definitions based on religion, ethnicity, and full or partial ancestry, allowing it to be drastically expanded or contracted for various reasons. I suspect that Baytch’s confusion on this matter was entirely sincere, related to the obsessive tendencies she exhibited in real life. But others may employ these shifting definitions based upon more pragmatic considerations.

It is well known that for many decades the American Communist Party and especially its top leadership were overwhelmingly Jewish, even at a time when Jews were just 3% of the national population. But Jewish community leaders were not pleased with this situation, and they sometimes flatly denied the reality, insisting that there were actually no Jewish Communists whatsoever—how could there be, when Communists were hostile to all religious belief?

Similarly, my findings that Jews were apparently enrolled at Harvard and other elite colleges at a rate some 1,000% greater than white Gentiles of similar academic performance must surely have set off alarm bells within the leadership of Jewish activist organizations, who wondered how best to manage or conceal this potentially dangerous information. With a high-profile Asian discrimination lawsuit wending its way through the courts and my own unsuccessful 2016 attempt to run a slate of candidates for the Board of Harvard Overseers, the likelihood of growing public scrutiny surely loomed very large.

Baytch’s apparent confusion between having Jewish ancestry and practicing the Jewish religion would have been well-known in these circles, and offered an obvious solution. If Jewish numbers were suddenly narrowed to only include those students who claimed to follow Jewish religious practices, the flagrant over-representation of Jews on elite campuses would be greatly reduced. Meanwhile, large numbers of lesser-qualified applicants of Jewish ancestry but no religious belief could continue to gain unfair admission by writing essays about their “Holocaust grandmas” with America’s 98% Gentile population being none the wiser.

For whatever reason, Hillel seems to have recently adopted this practice, drastically reducing its published estimates of the Jewish enrollment at Harvard and other elite colleges, thus eliminating a glaring example of ethnic bias by a simple act of redefinition. For example, the Hillel website now claims that merely 11% of Harvard undergraduates are Jewish, a huge reduction from the previous 25% figure, and a total suspiciously close to the Crimson survey of a few years ago which counted Jews only based upon their religious beliefs. The Hillel figures for Yale, Princeton, and most other elite colleges have experienced equally sudden and huge declines.

One very strong clue regarding this new definition of Jewish enrollment comes from Caltech, an elite science and engineering school which is quite unlikely to attract Jews professing religious faith. According to the Hillel website, the Jewish enrollment is 0%, claiming that there absolutely no Jews on campus. Despite this, the website also describes the vibrant Jewish life at Caltech, with Caltech Jews involved in all sorts of local activities and projects. This absurd paradox is obviously due to the distinction between individuals who are Jewish by religion and those who are Jewish by ancestry.

As the 1999 media firestorm engulfing Princeton demonstrated, in the past even slight and gentle declines of Jewish enrollment over a fifteen year period would provoke massive controversy and angry denunciations from Jewish organizations. The absolute lack of any organized response to the recent sudden disappearance of nearly 60% of Harvard’s Jews certainly suggests that little more than a mere change in definition had occurred.

Many years ago as a young and naive undergraduate, I would usually spend my dinners discussing all sorts of political and policy issues with my fellow classmates in our Harvard dining hall.

Affirmative action was a regular topic of our conversations, and I would occasionally note how odd America was in that regard. No other example came to mind in which an ethnic group had established a legalized system of racial discrimination against its own members, while similar sorts of systems aimed at excluding or disadvantaging rival ethnic groups were all too common in world history.

As the decades went by, I gradually noticed that the huge and continuing increase in the enrollment of non-white and foreign students at our most elite universities had caused a complete collapse in the enrollment of white American Gentiles, but oddly enough, no similar reduction in Jewish numbers. It was well-known that Jewish activists had been the primary force behind the establishment of affirmative action and related policies in college admissions, and I began to wonder about their true motivation, whether conscious or unconscious.

Had the goal been the stated one, of providing educational opportunities to previously excluded groups? Or had that merely been the excuse used to advance a policy that eliminated the majority of white Gentiles, their primary ethnic competitors? With the Jewish population numbering merely 2%, there was an obvious limit as to how many elite college slots they themselves could possibly fill, but if enough other groups were also brought in, then Gentile numbers could easily be reduced to low levels, despite the fact that they constituted the bulk of the national population.

Asians represented an interesting test-case. As their numbers rapidly grew, white Gentiles were consequently pushed out, and this process was celebrated across the academic community. But by the late 1980s, Asian numbers had increased to such an extent that they inevitably began to impinge upon elite Jewish enrollment as well and future increases would surely worsen the situation. And at that point, the process suddenly halted, with Asian numbers being sharply reduced and thereafter permanently capped. The implications of this situation were already in the back of my mind when I published my 1998 Wall Street Journal column describing some of these striking racial facts.

The current high-profile trial in Boston is widely portrayed by the media as a conflict between Asian-American groups, whose educational interests suffer under the current subjective and opaque admissions system, and black and Hispanic groups, whose numbers might be sharply reduced under some proposed changes. Whites are largely portrayed as bystanders, with Harvard indicating that their numbers would scarcely shift even under drastic changes in admissions policy. But the term “white” encompasses both Jews and Gentiles, and thus may conceal more than it reveals.

The implications of my 2012 Meritocracy analysis are certainly well-known to all of the prominent participants and observers in the ongoing legal battle, but the fearsome power of the ADL and its media allies ensures that certain important aspects of the current situation are never subjected to widespread public discussion. Asian advocates rightly denounce the unfairness of the current elite academic admissions system, but remain absolutely mute about which American group actually controls the institutions involved.

Throughout the enormous media controversy surrounding the Harvard trial in Boston, all sides are doing their utmost to avoid noticing the 2% elephant in the room. And that fact provides the best proof of the tremendous size and power of that elephant in today’s American society.

Abolishing Tuition at Harvard University?

By early 2015 a couple of years had passed since the publication of my Meritocracy article. The last echoes had long since faded away, and I saw no likelihood for anything to happen in the real world during the immediate future.

In the wake of the considerable media coverage of my analysis, many dozens of Asian organizations had publicly denounced Harvard’s policies and a federal lawsuit had been filed challenging Harvard’s apparent racial discrimination against Asian-American applicants; but lawsuits moved slowly, so I assumed it would take many years until anything significant resulted. Meanwhile, I’d launched my new webzine, The Unz Review, but had been too preoccupied with software work to do any writing over the previous year.

Then in March 2015 I decided to finally publish my expose describing the true military career of Sen. John McCain, which I had discovered was so extremely divergent from the sugar-coated narrative promoted by his worshipful mainstream media scribes. Drawing upon the seminal research of Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg, I emphasized that the closest analogy to the man widely regarded as our greatest national war hero was probably the notorious “Tokyo Rose,” who had been convicted of treason after World War II.

- John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President

The Unz Review • March 9, 2015 • 4,200 Words

My piece did very well, receiving a great deal of readership and many favorable comments, including from the numerous individuals on my distribution list, and a week or two later, the New York Times invited me to contribute to a symposium they were organizing on how to improve American higher education, a natural topic for me given my previous Meritocracy analysis. My first thought was to submit a piece arguing that an element of randomness should be added to the admissions process, a suggestion that I had advanced in my Meritocracy article. But another contributor had already proposed that idea, so I switched to arguing that Harvard and the other elite, wealthy schools should abolish undergraduate tuition, another proposal I had previously made, even as I ridiculed them as tax-exempt hedge-funds.

- Our Elite Colleges Should Abolish Tuition

The New York Times • March 30, 2015 • 500 Words

Although Harvard is widely known as one of America’s oldest and most prestigious colleges, that public image is outdated. Over the last couple of decades, the university has transformed itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds, with the huge profits of its aggressively managed $36 billion portfolio shielded from taxes because of the educational institution it continues to run as a charity off to one side.

The numbers tell the story. These days Harvard’s 6,600 undergraduates are charged annual tuition of $44,000 per year, with substantial reductions for students from less wealthy families. So student tuition probably contributes much less than $200 million to Harvard’s annual revenue. Meanwhile, the hedge-fund side of Harvard’s operations last year generated a $5 billion return, an amount at least 25 times larger. If all of Harvard’s college students disappeared tomorrow, or attended classes without paying a dime, the financial impact on Harvard, Inc. would be completely negligible.

But although those tuition dollars mean almost nothing to Harvard, they are surely a daunting barrier and burden to almost any American family. An admissions process is flawed when a four-year total price tag approaching $250,000 probably deters many students from even applying.

Harvard claims to provide generous assistance, heavily discounting its nominal list price for many students from middle class or impoverished backgrounds. But the intrusive financial disclosures required by Harvard’s financial aid bureaucracy may be a source of confusion or shame to many working-class households. I also wonder how many lower-income families unfamiliar with our elite college system see such huge costs and automatically assume that Harvard is only open to the very rich.

Meanwhile, even some upper-middle-class parents — who are charged closer to full freight — must wonder if they can afford paying close to a quarter million dollars for a Harvard diploma.

Harvard’s enormous hedge-fund operation has avoided billions of dollars in government taxes. In exchange for this continuing tax benefit, Harvard should abolish all tuition for its undergraduates.

The announcement of a free Harvard education would capture the world’s imagination and draw a vastly broader and more diverse applicant pool, including many high-ability students who had previously limited their aim to their local state college.

Furthermore, everything I’ve said about Harvard applies equally well to most of America’s other top universities including Yale, Princeton and Stanford, which have also become huge untaxed hedge-funds that charge exorbitant tuition. They could just as easily provide free college educations to their students at little financial cost and great social benefit.

In recent decades a greater and greater fraction of our financial, media and political elites have been drawn from among the graduates of a small handful of our top colleges, whose enrollments are enormously skewed toward the wealthy and the well-connected. Having these colleges eliminate their tuition would be an important step toward reversing this unhealthy American polarization.

The reaction of the Times readership to my proposal was very positive and gratifying, and the idea began to play around in my head with increased seriousness.

For many years I’d been convinced that it made absolutely no financial sense for Harvard to charge tuition, and if the world’s most famous university took the radical step of abolishing such fees, the impact upon its rivals and lesser counterparts would be enormous. America’s hugely corrupt and bloated higher education sector would be greatly transformed for the better, with tremendous long-term consequences. If only Harvard President Drew Faust were daring enough to take such a bold step, she would instantly be proclaimed a global academic icon, probably becoming the most famous educator in modern world history. It seemed such a great pity that there was absolutely no chance she would ever consider taking such necessary and forceful action.

Then a couple of weeks later I received my annual ballots for the Harvard Board of Overseers, and it suddenly struck me that perhaps I could try to grasp the brass ring myself.

Although Harvard’s Board of Overseers possesses little legal power, it holds considerable prestige and authority, with eight of the university’s most distinguished and influential alumni annually nominated by the Harvard Alumni Association for the five open seats. Each year, the ballot statements of the nominated candidates were invariably total pablum, filled with vague promises to do their best to support their beloved alma mater, and although I almost always returned the mail-in ballot with my five marked choices, my selections were usually close to random.

However, in 1989 something quite different had happened. Overseer candidates could also be nominated by petition signatures, and a group of anti-Apartheid activists had placed several individuals on the ballot running on the platform that Harvard’s endowment should divest from all corporations doing business with white minority-ruled South Africa. Although Overseers had no authority over investment decisions and Harvard’s administrators and financial managers had strongly criticized the effort, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a couple of other candidates had won, and the following year Harvard had begun divesting, soon followed by several other elite universities. In effect, the Overseer vote had functioned as a popular referendum of the entire Harvard community, the 300,000 or so individuals who held graduate or undergraduate degrees.

I realized that I could use the same methods to enact my proposals. If I organized a full slate of candidates and most or all of them won, the world’s wealthiest and most influential university might feel enormous pressure to implement our campaign proposals, and would probably do so. Such a strategy seemed breathtakingly bold, but it might succeed.

It was now late April and the Overseer nominations opened near the end of the year, so I began planning the necessary steps, keeping the idea entirely to myself to avoid the disruption of early attention.

I decided that the platform of our slate of candidates would focus upon two of the key issues at the heart of my Meritocracy critique. We would propose that Harvard provide greater transparency in its admissions process, thereby allowing a closer investigation of likely anti-Asian discrimination, and we would also ask for the immediate abolition of undergraduate tuition.

I believed that these issues would probably attract a great deal of media coverage, and their enormous popularity might easily carry our slate to victory. After all, something like 20% of the potential Harvard voters were themselves Asian, and anti-Asian discrimination had become a hot topic over the last few years, so many or most of them might give us their votes. Four years of Harvard undergraduate tuition now totaled around $180,000, and eliminating it would be a very tempting idea both for the families of current students and those who might attend in the future. I began asking a few of my friends whether they thought people would be willing to check a simple box on a piece of paper if it might save them almost $200,000, and although most of them thought it was some sort of strange, trick question, they generally said yes.

With a little effort, I came up with a descriptive name for the project—the “Free Harvard/Fair Harvard” campaign—simple and easy for people to remember, and I later produced a reasonably attractive logo. As a single unified slate of five candidates, we would benefit from the concentrated votes of our adherents, while our opponents would have their votes spread out over the eight regular nominees. No one had ever tried anything like this in Harvard’s nearly 300 year history, so success was far from certain, but I felt that under the right circumstances our chances would be pretty good.

As my Times column had emphasized, the possible impact of the project might extend far beyond Harvard. A victory would place enormous pressure upon some of the other wealthy, top-elite universities such as Yale, Princeton, and Stanford to take similar steps, and if they did, a tidal wave might begin sweeping across American higher education, transforming both admissions and tuition policies. The changes would be greater than anything that had happened to American universities in at least two or three generations, perhaps even a century or more. My original Meritocracy article had sharply criticized the pernicious social consequences of our existing system:

But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America.

I now envisioned a means of rectifying that system, like a skilled jeweler in a Hollywood movie splitting a rough diamond by a single hard tap in exactly the right location.

Later that year, the influential Economist fortuitously published a 2,800 word briefing on anti-Asian discrimination in elite admissions, and its update of my own analysis demonstrated that little had changed in three years. I dropped notes about this unfortunate situation to the circle of individuals who shared my views, arguing that Harvard and the Ivies were “extremely tough nuts to crack.”

As I’ve always told people, our elite universities represent an *enormous* concentration of soft power, and they’re very entrenched on their admissions policies. I doubt even a $100M advertising campaign or a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling would really change things. Frankly, I’m not sure there’s any single individual on the planet who deploys the influence to overcome their determined resistance. If Obama or George Soros or the Pope got into a wrestling match with Harvard and the Ivies, I’d certainly put my money on the latter.

But I cryptically added that I had worked out a political/media strategy that might suddenly change everything.

Indeed, given the broader influence of our elite universities, success in my planned venture might be enormously consequential in ways even extending far beyond America’s university system. Although I obviously never discussed those broader implications at the time, a couple of years ago I sketched out the grandiose scenario that had soon entered my thoughts:

(1) A victory for our slate would probably have put us on the front-pages of half the world’s newspapers, giving us gigantic media momentum and putting enormous pressure on Harvard.

(2) One or two people who knew President Faust fairly well had told me she wasn’t very tough-minded, and since abolishing undergrad tuition required such a trivial amount of endowment spending, she and the Board would have almost certainly folded immediately and done so.

(3) I doubt that even 5% of the Harvard community who heard of our campaign regarded our free tuition proposal as “real.” But suddenly the next year their tuition would have gone from $50,000 to ZERO! All the 6,500 students and their (affluent, influential) parents would have been utterly flabbergasted, and they would have then backed us on anything else. Our political capital at Harvard would have been almost unlimited.

(4) Immediately thereafter, copycat campaigns would have been launched to zero out tuition at Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, while MIT and Caltech would have also gone along, plus maybe a few other sufficiently-wealthy universities. With Harvard having set the example, I assume most of these other campaigns would have quickly succeeded. And our political capital would then have extended into most of America’s most elite universities.

(5) To nail down our effective control of Harvard, we could have sponsored additional Harvard slates the following couple of years, while also blowing the lid on the Asian Quota and other admissions bias and academic corruption issues, helping to organize additional copycat campaigns at the other elite colleges. Maybe we would then also eliminate tuition at some of the graduate schools or do various other worthwhile things.

(6) Taken together, I’d say that Harvard and the Ivies constitute one of the world’s greatest reservoirs of soft power, and tens of thousands of their students and families would owe us billions in financial savings, giving us substantial control over all that soft power, which we could then deploy for all sorts of other useful national and international projects.

A Star Wars metaphor had always been in the back of my mind: a five-man commando team sneaks into the Death Star and seizes its control room, then uses the Death Star to subdue the entire Galactic Empire …

Preparing the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard Campaign

Given those visions of the sweeping possible impact and with half a year to go until the new Overseers nominations opened, I spent a few months finishing up some of my existing software work, and then began carefully laying the groundwork for a strong Harvard campaign.

EPub Format • Mobi/Kindle

As the organizer of the effort, I decided I needed to burnish my own academic credentials as much as possible. I was on quite friendly terms with a couple of Harvard’s most eminent scholars, who had been very impressed by my Meritocracy analysis. They had occasionally shared their negative views of the entrenched administrative bureaucracy that actually ran their university, which sometimes favored policies harmful to educational excellence and research scholarship. Under the right circumstances, I even hoped they might consider lending their public support to our redemptive effort, and the last thing I wanted was to be portrayed by our opponents as a philistine interloper from the business world seeking to wrangle a Harvard seat for reasons of personal aggrandizement.

Although my scholarly credentials had once been strong, I had defected from the academic community more than a quarter century earlier, and lacked the advanced degrees or publication history that many might consider appropriate for someone seeking to influence such an august intellectual institution. I’d been on friendly terms for years with a number of highly-regarded writers and scholars who respected my work, but I felt I needed to provide that evidence in a weighty and concrete form, so I decided that publishing a collection of my essays might be the best means of accomplishing this.

Obviously, I lacked the substantial visibility to attract the interest of a mainstream publishing house and I anyway soon discovered that the production lead-times would be far too long. But the costs and difficulty of self-publishing a volume had greatly diminished, and with a few months of effort I was able to put together an attractive hard-cover edition of my substantial essays, which ran over 500,000 words and would be available on Amazon. Once the proof copy was ready, I managed to secure some flattering cover-blurbs from individuals whom I greatly respected:

With high intelligence, common sense, and advanced statistical skills, presented transparently and accessibly, Ron Unz has for decades been addressing key issues in a rapidly changing America, enlightening us on the implications and effects of bilingual programs in American schools, clarifying the issues around crime and immigration so often distorted in political and popular discussion, placing the question of an increased minimum wage effectively on the national agenda, and addressing most provocatively the issue of affirmative action and admission to selective colleges and universities, revealing some aspects of this ever disputed question that have never been noted or discussed publicly before. He is one of our most valuable discussants and analysts of public issues.—Nathan Glazer, Professor Emeritus of Education and Sociology, Harvard University, and author of Beyond the Melting Pot.

Few people on the planet are smarter than Ron Unz or have more intellectual curiosity. This fascinating and provocative collection of essays explores a remarkable range of topics, many of them high profile, some of them arcane. Unz’s analysis is always serious and invariably challenges prevailing wisdoms, which is to say there are a lot of controversial arguments in this book. No one is likely to agree with every one of his conclusions, but we would be better off if there were more people like Ron Unz among us. —John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and author of The Israel Lobby.

Ron Unz is a brilliant essayist. His interests run from ancient history and black holes to contemporary issues like racial quotas and the minimum wage. He moves swiftly to the heart of a subject with cogent analysis and limpid argument. This collection of essays sparkles with unexpected gems ranging from critiques of the mainstream press to appreciation of dissenters from common wisdom such as General Bill Odom and Alexander Cockburn. In every paragraph of these essays the reader enjoys a penetrating intelligence at work. —Nicholas Wade, former writer and editor for The New York Times, and author of Before the Dawn, The Faith Instinct, and A Troublesome Inheritance.

Over the past two decades as an original thinker and writer Ron Unz has tackled complex and significant subjects such as immigration, education, economics, race, and the press, pushing aside common assumptions. This book brings together in one volume these pieces from a variety of publications. Unlike other essayists on culture and politics, Unz shreds ideology and relies on statistical data to support his often groundbreaking ideas, such as his 2010 essay on “The Myth of Hispanic Crime.” And his 2014 efforts to put a $12 an hour minimum wage bill before California voters is an example of how the action of an individual can draw public attention to an issue he believes is necessary for the economic health of the Republic. Anyone reading this book will learn a great deal about America from an incisive writer and scholar who has peeled back layers of conventional wisdom to expose the truth on issues of prime importance today. —Sydney Schanberg, Pulitzer-Prize winning former reporter and editor for The New York Times, whose story inspired the 1984 film The Killing Fields.

Provocative and fearless, sometimes infuriating, and quite often, persuasive. And when American’s low-wage workers get their coming big raise, the apostate conservative Ron Unz will deserve a decent share of the credit. —Prof. James K. Galbraith, author of The End of Normal and Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe.

As I had in my other political ventures, I intended to rely heavily upon the media for success in my Harvard undertaking, and I felt reasonably confident in that regard.

I expected that a public campaign demanding that Harvard cut its annual tuition from $45,000 to zero would certainly attract a great deal of attention, as would the revelation that the financial impact upon the university would be negligible. My 2012 column denouncing the school as a tax-exempt hedge-fund in disguise had been widely circulated within the media.

I’d produced a striking graph at the time demonstrating the apparent anti-Asian bias in Ivy League admissions, which was republished by the Times and widely circulated online, serving as the visual cutting-edge of my 26,000 word article.

So now I designed an equally striking chart showing the gigantic imbalance between Harvard’s investment income and its tuition revenue, suggesting that it was more of a hedge-fund than an institution of higher education, and could eliminate tuition with negligible financial impact. This would highlight the summary explanation of our “Free Harvard” campaign:

Harvard Should Be Free

As Harvard Overseers we would demand the immediate elimination of all tuition for undergraduates since the revenue generated is negligible compared to the investment income of the endowment.

Over the last quarter century, Harvard University has transformed itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds, with the huge profits of its aggressively managed $38 billion portfolio shielded from taxes because of the educational institution it continues to run as a charity off to one side.

The numbers tell the story. Each year, the investment income the university receives from its private equity and securities holdings averages some twenty-five times larger than the net tuition revenue from its 6,600 undergraduate students. Under such circumstances, continuing to charge tuition of up to $180,000 for four years of college education is unconscionable.

Admittedly, Harvard does exempt from tuition families earning less than $65,000 per year and provides some financial aid to families with incomes up to $150,000. But relatively few less affluent families even bother applying because they assume that a Harvard education is reserved only for the rich.

If Harvard abolished tuition the announcement would reach around the world, and soon nearly every family in America would be aware that a Harvard education was now free. Academically-successful students from all walks of life would suddenly begin to consider the possibility of attending Harvard. Other very wealthy and elite colleges such Yale, Princeton, and Stanford would be forced to follow Harvard’s example and also abolition tuition. There would be considerable pressure on all our public colleges and universities to trim their bloated administrative costs and drastically cut their tuition.

A closely related chart showed that the same situation existed at Harvard’s closest peers of Yale, Princeton, and Stanford.

Meanwhile, my previous chart played a similar role in the summary of the “Fair Harvard” goals:

Harvard Should Be Fair

As Harvard Overseers we would demand far greater transparency in the admissions process, which today is opaque and therefore subject to hidden favoritism and abuse.

In his book The Price of Admission Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Daniel Golden has described the strong evidence of corrupt admissions practices at Harvard and other elite universities, with the children of the wealthy and the powerful regularly granted admission over the more able and higher-achieving children of ordinary American families. In some cases, millions of dollars may have been paid to purchase an admissions slot for an undeserving applicant.

A nation that selects its elites by corrupt means will produce corrupt elites. These abuses must end.

Also, just as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the existence of “Jewish quotas,” top officials at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of “Asian quotas.” But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary.

During the last twenty-five years, the size of America’s college-age Asian population has more than doubled but there has been no corresponding increase in the number of Asians admitted to Harvard, with the federally-reported statistics actually showing a decline. Thus, the relative percentage of the Asian-American population attending Harvard has dropped by over 50 percent, while the percentage of whites has changed little. A very similar pattern of declining Asian enrollment has occurred at most of the other Ivy League universities, while at meritocratic Caltech, Asian enrollment has increased along with the size of the Asian-American population.

Racial discrimination against Asian-American students has no place at Harvard University and must end.

Just a year earlier I’d successfully used the vehicle of my California minimum wage initiative to focus a great deal of public attention upon that policy issue, shifting the entire national consensus as a consequence; and although my measure had failed to reach the ballot, my media credibility was consequently far stronger than it had been in at least a decade.

From an ideological perspective, although most liberals now generally supported affirmative action, they also somewhat inconsistently tended to oppose anti-Asian discrimination, and they certainly favored greater transparency in admissions, which was all we would be demanding. So I expected that we would be operating within a reasonably receptive media environment.

After I’d published my Meritocracy article in 2012, the New York Times had been very sympathetic to the Asian Quota analysis I provided, quickly organizing an on-line symposium on the subject, while running an opinion column by an Asian-American academic in the print edition, and much of the rest of the mainstream media had also been quite friendly. Forcing ultra-wealthy Harvard to abolish tuition would surely be a dream come true for progressives. Meanwhile conservatives would be even more supportive of both of our central planks, given their distaste for racial preferences in admissions policy and their intense hostility to all the elite universities, which they would love to see taken down a peg or two.

Moreover, the two elements of my platform—reducing anti-Asian bias in Harvard admissions and eliminating undergraduate tuition—had both been proposed in columns I had published in the Times, and these had now prompted my planned effort. Surely, the editors of the Gray Lady would be thrilled at the possibility that the political proposals they had recently presented on their opinion pages might so quickly be implemented at the world’s most prestigious university, giving them a proprietary interest in my project. And with the Times in support, I would have the wind at my back, with the rest of the media surely following in its wake.

Recruiting a Slate of Overseer Candidates

Finalizing my book ultimately absorbed much more time and effort than I had expected, but by mid-November I cautiously contacted the university to determine the exact mechanics of qualifying for the Harvard ballot, which I discovered was straightforward if a little unusual. Based upon recent turn-out, merely 201 valid signatures were required from among the 320,000 holders of a Harvard degree, but these had to be recorded upon specially watermarked petitions printed and distributed by the university itself, and then returned by February 1st. My California initiatives had required many hundreds of thousands of voter signatures to reach the ballot, so this seemed an easy burden by comparison. I wasn’t exactly sure how the Harvard administration would react to the potential challenge I was organizing, so I merely said I was thinking of running for the Board of Overseers and asked them to provide me the necessary petitions, which they soon sent me.

Throughout the year, I had also been giving careful thought to which individuals I would recruit as members of my slate, and had put together a list of eight or ten good prospects, mostly focusing upon prominent academics with whom I was friendly. I felt confident that these would yield the four names that I needed once I explained my plan.

By early December, I was ready to launch my project and began taking a few others into my confidence, including both prospective members of my slate and other individuals whose opinions I respected. Nearly all of them were shocked at the audacity of my proposal but most agreed with me about its potential impact. At the very least, they thought it might generate some attention for the Asian Quotas issue, in which many of them had been directly involved.

Some of these highly-placed academics personally moved in the circle of Harvard’s president, and they thought that my strategy had an excellent possibility of success. If we won, Harvard’s leadership would probably fold rather than trying to strongly resist our proposals on the tuition or the transparency issues.

Unfortunately, recruiting my prospective candidates proved much more difficult than I had expected. Economist James Galbraith had given an early boost to my minimum wage project a few years earlier and he was the first individual whom I solicited; but he was totally preoccupied with the global debt crisis, traveling to speak at numerous international conferences and working with Greece’s high-profile finance minister, a long-time friend. Yale Law Prof. Amy Chua—of Asian Tiger Mom fame—had been quite impressed with my original Meritocracy article, inviting me to her university for a couple of speaking engagements; but she had already come under harsh ideological attacks, and wanted to avoid further controversy. A prominent Harvard professor begged off on the reasonable grounds that as a faculty member, he had an obvious conflict of interest.

The other names on my list also proved much less willing than I had expected, perhaps viewing my daring plan as a quixotic, hopeless effort. Admittedly, it sounded like an insane undertaking. Could the world’s wealthiest, most powerful university, possessing an ocean of soft power, $38 billion of financial assets, and 16,000 employees fall victim to a sudden political coup d’etat carried out by five private individuals, backed by no one except themselves?

So as the days of December passed, I was still struggling to put together a reasonably strong slate of candidates. Many of the individuals I had contacted were involved in the Asian Quotas controversy, and some of them put me in touch with others they knew who had a strong Harvard connection. Several excellent academics and policy experts seemed interested, but they were already involved in the Harvard lawsuit, and they ultimately decided that their election to the Board of Overseers would represent an obvious conflict of interest.

Investigative journalist Daniel Golden had won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the corrupt nature of university admissions, and his 2006 classic The Price of Admission had been very widely and favorably reviewed, serving as one of my own core research texts. He seemed an absolutely ideal choice, but he balked. I later heard that his influential book had actually generated many hard feelings at his Harvard alma mater, and he had spent years working to repair those relationships, so he obviously didn’t want to reopen old wounds.

By mid-December, I had finally managed to secure three other names for the slate, and was desperately seeking a fourth, when I suddenly realized that progressive icon Ralph Nader had been a graduate of Harvard Law. I’d worked closely with him during my minimum wage effort, and quickly tried to contact him. He didn’t use email and was spending a week as a featured speaker on the Nation‘s annual fund-raising cruise, but when he returned I finally managed to reach him in a phone call and explain the situation. Being in his eighties, he was initially quite reluctant to participate, concerned about the number of meetings he might have to attend or the other possible burdens, but over a period of about two weeks, I gradually won him over, and by early January America’s legendary consumer advocate had agreed to lead our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard slate.

So despite the unexpected difficulties in recruiting candidates, our ultimate slate was far stronger than I had originally expected.

A Slate of Five Candidates for the Harvard Board of Overseers

Ralph Nader – Citizen Activist and Author, The Center for the Study of Responsive Law. B.A. Princeton University, LL.B., Harvard Law. During the fifty years since the publication of his landmark 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, Mr. Nader has regularly been ranked as one of the most influential figures in American society, challenging large institutions on issues of administrative transparency, financial propriety, and consumer protection. Throughout his long career, he has established or inspired dozens of nonprofit organizations, including Public Citizen and the state PIRGs, and spurred the passage of major federal consumer laws such as the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Freedom of Information Act, while helping to launch regulatory agencies such as OSHA and the EPA.

Ron Unz – Software Developer and Chairman, UNZ.org and Publisher of The Unz Review. A.B., Harvard College; graduate degrees from Cambridge University and Stanford University. A past first-place winner of the Intel/Westinghouse Science Talent Search, Mr. Unz was the co-founder of Wall Street Analytics, Inc., has published widely on public policy issues, including the admissions and financial malfeasance of many of our elite universities, and has organized and led several successful initiative campaigns.

Stephen Hsu – Professor of Theoretical Physics and Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, Michigan State University. B.S., Caltech; Ph.D. U.C. Berkeley; Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows. The co-founder of two software companies, Prof. Hsu serves as an advisor to BGI (formerly Beijing Genomics Institute) and has written widely on public policy issues, including the indications of anti-Asian discrimination at elite universities.

Stuart Taylor, Jr. – Author, journalist, lawyer, and Brookings Institution nonresident senior fellow. A.B., Princeton University; J.D., Harvard Law. During 35 years as a prominent writer, Mr. Taylor covered legal affairs and then the Supreme Court from 1980-1988 for The New York Times and has since written commentary for American Lawyer Media, National Journal, Newsweek, and other publications, with many broadcast appearances and journalism awards. He has co-authored two critically acclaimed books, Mismatch and Until Proven Innocent.

Lee C. Cheng – Chief Legal Officer, Newegg, Inc. A.B., Harvard College; J.D., Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley. A co-founder of the Asian-American Legal Foundation, Mr. Cheng has been actively involved for over two decades in issues related to anti-Asian discrimination at secondary schools, colleges, and universities.

Launching Our Campaign in the New York Times

During this same period, I had been preparing my all-important effort to secure the necessary media coverage that would make or break my project. As always, the New York Times constituted the top of the media food chain, and I planned to offer them an exclusive in hopes of attracting their interest. Unfortunately, I couldn’t begin approaching them until at least most of my slate of candidates had been selected and once I did the editor I contacted was a little dubious that their newsdesk would be interested. But after a few blind alleys I finally managed to get in touch with their higher education reporter just before the end of the year, dropping her a note with a summary of the project and then speaking with her on the phone.

She was an experienced, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and very properly began our lengthy conversation with a rigorous and highly skeptical attitude. She carefully questioned me on some of the very surprising claims I was making, especially with regard to the astonishing size of Harvard’s investment income relative to its tuition revenue, as indicated in the shocking chart I had sent her. But all my factual information checked out, and I also immediately fedexed her for New Year’s Eve delivery a thick package of documentation and additional background information, including hard copies of my many articles. Several of my fellow slate-members had been very actively involved in the Asian Quota issue, and over the next few days she spoke to them at length, with everything going very well. Stuart Taylor Jr. had spent eight years covering the Supreme Court for the Times itself prior to her own arrival, and had a great deal of legal expertise on the admissions issues. We continued to exchange emails as her story came together, just after New Year’s day.

I had given her the names of the four members already on our slate and mentioned that I was still pursuing a fifth, a potentially big name. She told me that her editor was enthusiastic about the story, but probably would be reluctant to run it until the slate was finalized, so I took her into my confidence and revealed that I’d spent nearly two weeks talking with Ralph Nader, whom I hoped to recruit, but otherwise would have to go with a fall-back option. As I explained at the beginning of my note:

The fifth person I’ve been hoping to get is Ralph Nader. Not only is he a very Big Name, but I thought the issue was ideal for him, since he’s spent his entire career focusing on issues of transparency, institutional malfeasance, and reducing the absurd costs imposed upon consumers by self-interested bureaucracies, while he’s also a graduate of Harvard Law. Having him lead the campaign that might abolish tuition for Harvard students and perhaps produce similar results at many other colleges would be a great capstone to his half-century long career.

I had been desperately juggling all these balls in the air for several weeks, but fortunately the next morning Nader agreed to join our slate, and I immediately passed on the good news to Times reporter. She quickly contacted him by phone to confirm his participation, got a few useful quotes, and finished her article. She told me it was scheduled to run the next day, but just as I had hoped, Nader’s involvement immediately made it a much bigger story, and after showing it to her editor, she mentioned that she was “trying to levitate it onto page 1,” which is where it ultimately appeared.

None of my previous political campaigns had ever been launched with a front-page story in the Times, the sort of public prominence normally reserved for a major presidential initiative, and I was obviously thrilled. So despite all the delays and difficulties along the way, my media efforts had culminated in a far greater success than I had ever hoped or expected.

But that very success may have set the stage for the ultimate failure of my project.

Up to this point in time, everything at the Times had gone almost ideally well, and with a strong front-page launch I believed our media momentum would be enormous. Sen. Bernie Sanders, then near the height of his political influence, had made free public college tuition one of his leading issues, and our campaign to do the same at America’s most elite private university would surely attract his support and the multitude of his followers. I expected Harvard’s resistance to crumble before the battering-ram of public attention that would be unleashed.

But instead of appearing in the next day’s paper, I received a lengthy and detailed follow-up note apparently based upon questions forcefully raised by the Times editors. Was our project merely a disguised attack upon affirmative action, as suggested by the public views of several of our slate members? Wasn’t Lee Cheng the co-founder of an organization that had filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit against Harvard? Was the whole campaign merely a trick, intended to allow an “anti-affirmative-action slate” to ride to victory on the back of a wildly popular (and “less contentious”) proposal to abolition tuition at Harvard? So what “EXACTLY” did we mean by our “Fair Harvard” proposal?

I responded at considerable length, and I think I made a very persuasive case, partly because everything I said was entirely true and candid. For example, quite a number of the slate candidates I had unsuccessfully approached were decidedly on the Left and strong supporters of affirmative action, so the ultimate skew of our group was partly due to chance circumstances. Indeed, although all the members of our slate were strongly opposed to “Asian Quotas,” most of them considered themselves liberals, and claimed to actually favor “affirmative action” as they chose to define the notoriously ambiguous term. But the pushback and questioning continued, clearly prompted by heavy editorial pressure.

More than a week later, the article still hadn’t run in the Times, and I began to assume it had been killed, only to be very pleasantly surprised when it did finally appear on January 15th, Page One as promised. But the skew of the story seemed very different from what I think the original version had been. Although some attention was given to the radical tuition proposal, the focus was much more on affirmative action, and the possible connection to the ongoing conservative attempt to eliminate those programs, including by means of the lawsuit against Harvard likely to reach the Supreme Court. Inclusion of all the paragraphs focusing on the conservative drive against “racial preferences” had obviously required cuts elsewhere, and the striking figures I had provided on the enormous size of Harvard’s annual investment income relative to its tuition revenue had been left on the cutting-room floor.

The piece closed with the ironic detail that although some of the anti-Apartheid Overseer candidates of the early 1990s had won, most had lost, notably including the 1991 candidacy of a certain Barack H. Obama.

- How Some Would Level the Playing Field: Free Harvard Degrees

Stephanie Saul • The New York Times • January 15, 2016 • 1,400 Words

The overall tone was one of heavy suspicion that—despite Nader’s presence—-our project was part of a right-wing plot to destroy affirmative action. Just two years earlier, I had successfully orchestrated a nationwide drive to raise the minimum wage, as heavily covered in the Times itself, but that went unmentioned; instead I was identified as the leader of the anti-bilingual education campaigns of the late 1990s. Liberals or progressives reading the article might be intrigued by the tuition issue, but left extremely suspicious of the other elements, fearing they would be falling for a right-wing plot. The story seemed to present a flashing red warning sign to mainstream media editors and journalists, and as a result the huge tidal wave of political and media momentum I had counted upon never appeared. Indeed, there were far fewer follow-on stories than the launch of my minimum wage initiative had generated in late 2013, even though the Times had only run it on the inside pages.

Although I have no window into the editorial workings of the Times, I do have my suspicions. Stories slated to run on the front-page may come to the notice of top editors while lesser articles do not, and I think this may explain the striking shift in the apparent editorial sentiments that occurred around that point. Back in late 2012, my Asian Quota findings had been treated in very sympathetic fashion on the editorial side of the Times, and as late as April 2014, the paper had run a lengthy and reasonably respectful profile of the Republican architect of the subsequent Asian Quotas lawsuits against affirmative action. But in May 2014, Executive Editor Jill Abramson had suddenly been fired by the publisher, replaced by Dean Baquet, the first black to hold that position and himself an important beneficiary of an Ivy League college affirmative action program. All things considered, it wouldn’t surprise me if editorial intervention from a very high level had helped transform the story originally scheduled to run on Jan. 5th into the one that eventually appeared on Jan. 15th. Perhaps if a certain particular individual had been on vacation that week or preoccupied with other matters, the course of our campaign—and American higher education—might have followed a very different trajectory.

Although I was obviously disappointed with the negative tone of the Times story, I couldn’t blame the journalist given the strong pressure she had clearly faced from her editors. But since she might be writing future stories on our project, I wanted to completely dispel any suspicion that I’d somehow secretly orchestrated my efforts with the groups suing Harvard or other activists opposed to affirmative action. So I dropped her a lengthy note providing a very detailed and candid account of how my campaign had come about:

After an utterly exhausting Thursday, I woke up to an extremely pleasant surprise this morning: your great story on the front page of my NYT! I’m an old-fashioned print guy myself, and for me a news story isn’t “real” unless it’s in my morning newspapers and isn’t “big” unless its on the front page of the NYT or maybe the WSJ. Frankly, given all the delays and push-back you’d gotten from your editors, I’d written off the possibility of making page one. All’s well that ends well!

BTW, in reading the piece over again more carefully, I’d noticed quite a bit of discussion of the relationship between this effort and some of the ongoing lawsuits regarding admissions, including that case currently before the Supreme Court. Since none of this had come up in our original phone discussion, I should probably clarify the whole history in exhaustive detail for you.

(1) I’d been closely following all these admissions issues since the 1970s and over the years had written quite a lot about the topic. However, about 15-20 years ago I gradually decided that probably nothing would ever happen, and stopped paying any attention to the issue. I vaguely know that during the 2000s there were several different lawsuits that went up and down the courts, sometimes even reaching SCOTUS, but their details are a little fuzzy to me and all my information tended to come from the occasional articles in the NYT or my other newspapers.

(2) A few years ago, I was casually chatting with a former (white) classmate of mine at a Harvard reunion who did quite a lot of alumni interviewing in LA and he told me he was really shocked at some of the ultra-high-quality Asian-Am applicants which Harvard rejected. Then perhaps a year later, I happened to be reading Steve Hsu’s blog in which he had a number of posts relating to alleged anti-Asian discrimination at elite universities, which I thought seemed likely to be true. I mentioned to him at the time that I suspected I could find a statistical approach that might produce a real “Smoking Gun” on the matter and hoped to get around to looking into the subject when I was less busy with my software work. About a year later, I finally had some time, and sure enough the “Smoking Gun” popped right up, which persuaded me to write my 30,000 word Meritocracy article.

(3) The Meritocracy article and my “Asian Quota” graph got lots of attention, and sparked an NYT Symposium on the topic, to which I contributed. That’s how I got to know several of the various Asian-Am activists and groups such as 80-20. (Lee Cheng I’d known slightly since the mid-1990s but had completely lost touch with him a decade or more before). Naturally, Harvard and the Ivies didn’t pay the slightest attention to any of these complaints, so I just went back to my other work, still assuming nothing would ever happen.

(4) Supposedly my “Asian Quota” graph and the NYT Symposium it inspired spent the next couple of years circulating among Asian-Am activists, including that group in CA that last year quickly got 100,000 online signatures to protest the attempted repeal of Prop. 209 and also those 64(?) Asian-Am orgs that filed a complaint against Harvard earlier this year and also that lawsuit. I was too busy with my software work to pay any attention to these events, and all I know about them is what I read in my morning newspapers, including the NYT.

(5) Earlier this year Nick Fox solicited a contribution from me for a symposium on improving higher ed. I originally suggested my piece focus on my radical “random admissions” proposal for Harvard and the Ivies, which he thought was fine, but someone named Barry Schwartz had already grabbed that idea so (very fortunately!) I went with my backup idea of free tuition at Harvard and the Ivies, which I’d previously proposed in a sidebar to my Meritocracy article three years before.

(6) When I distributed my NYT piece lots of people told me what a great idea it was and hoped there was some way I could get it actually implemented, including a top AFL-CIO official I’d gotten friendly with from my Minimum Wage campaign, especially since the endowment income had grown so absurdly large over the years. The whole notion of Harvard still charging tuition seemed so totally ridiculous I told them maybe something could actually be done about it, and starting vaguely thinking if there some possible way to put pressure on Harvard. Then, a few weeks later, I suddenly got my Overseer idea, possibly because I’d gotten my annual ballot mailed out from Harvard in April. The idea seemed like such an excellent one that I was kicking myself for not having thought of it years before. Naturally, I also added the Asian Quota issue, since I’d actually been writing about it much longer.

(7) The crucial part of any political campaign is media coverage, and the media won’t cover what isn’t “new”. So I vaguely dropped a note to Steve Hsu saying that I’d come up with a very clever political/media strategy to finally fix the Asian Quota problem, but wouldn’t be able to get around to working on it until the end of the year. And for the next eight months I kept my planned project entirely to myself while I was busy with my software work and various other things. People in the political world tend to gossip an enormous amount and if I mentioned it to anyone at all, such a simple and exciting idea would surely have spread like wildfire, probably prompting numerous different activists of all sorts of backgrounds and views to plan on putting together candidates for the Harvard Overseer ballot. Plus since everyone would be talking about it, it would no longer be newsworthy when I launched my own effort, and neither the NYT nor anyone else would bother covering it.

(8) So until mid-December absolutely no one in the world was aware of my plan, though a couple of weeks before I’d dropped notes to a number of Asian-Am activists I’d known saying I might have a new project in the works and checking whether they were still active at all in the issue (Lee Cheng was, but I never heard back from several others, so I guess they weren’t). I did the same with Ralph Nader and his top assistant, plus quite a number of other people whom I thought might make pretty good prospective Overseer candidates.

(9) For various reasons I got delayed, and whereas I’d hoped to start telling people my plan and putting together my slate in early December, I didn’t get around to it until a week or two later in mid-December. Also, whereas Harvard had previously had a mid-February turn-in date for petitions, this time they’d changed it to Feb 1st, which made me nervous. Plus I discovered that only Harvard-printed petitions could be used. On the other hand, the number of signatures in the past had generally been closer to 250, and this time it was 201, which was easier.

(10) I’ve done a lot of successful campaigns over the years and I have a very good reputation for political effectiveness. But when I began approaching my prospective Overseer candidates in mid-December, most of them thought that this particular project was just *too* audacious, and balked at having their names associated with something that seemed so utterly hopeless: Mighty Harvard, with its $38 billion endowment and 100 PR professionals, falling to handful of people backed by no organization and recruited so near to the deadline. This was a disappointment, and I really had to scramble to somehow put together a slate of five solid candidates within the very tight timeline, made much more difficult by the Holidays. Also, Nader had been away for a week headlining the fundraising cruise of The Nation, and then was at his home in Connecticut, making things especially difficult with him, since he doesn’t use email or the Internet and never gives anyone his home phone or fax number. I also got in touch with the NYT towards the end of December, and Nick Fox passed me over to you.

(11) Fortunately, things ultimately worked out and I think we’re now in pretty good shape, especially given how much enthusiasm our signature drive seems to be getting. And if we do manage to get on the Overseer ballot—despite everything not at all a certainty—I feel quite confident we’ll win. And if we win, Mighty Harvard will quickly abolish tuition and (probably) increase the transparency of their admissions process.

(12) Finally, here’s a nice metaphor of mine you might appreciate. In the original Star Wars movie, there was that gigantic, invincible Death Star, totally invulnerable, except that if you dropped a hand-grenade down a particular exhaust-shaft, the entire moon-size space-fortress exploded. Harvard University is a seemingly invincible fortress, but I do think I’ve managed to locate the right exhaust-shaft, and so long as we can manage to drop 201 valid alumni signatures down that location in time, victory on all these seemingly impossible issues may well be ours.

Anyway, that’s the full saga of where this all came from. Partly I wrote this up just so I would have a nice future summary for myself.

Qualifying for the Ballot and Early Media Coverage

As a consequence of these developments, our petition drive was to become a horrific nightmare. Media coverage had been a central element of my planned campaign and on Jan. 5th it looked like we were about to be launched with the unrivaled cannon-shot of a front-page Times story, which I felt I needed to protect. But if we began our public petitioning drive and our supporters spread the word to their many contacts, other media outlets would surely hear about our project and probably begin running their own stories, perhaps risking the placement of the Times article or even its appearance. So I assumed that the article would run any day, and urged everyone to sit tight and wait for it to appear, even as the clock ticked down towards Harvard’s February 1st deadline. I’d prepared hundreds of petition kits, stapled copies of the five candidate petitions together with signing instructions and a stamped, express-mail return envelope, and these were ready to be fedexed out, but we avoided any public announcement until the Times fired the starting gun. Media represented the absolutely central component of a successful political campaign.

But after a week’s delay vainly waiting for the Times story to run, I finally gave up and we began our petition drive, though without any public announcement, fedexing out our petition kits and urgently trying to locate additional potential signers. With only a couple of weeks until the deadline, we faced a desperate scramble.

Although I soon sent out hundreds of our petition packages and everyone had promised to immediately sign their names and drop them in the self-addressed express-mail envelopes I’d included, very few had been returned as the deadline drew near. The petitioning in all my initiative campaigns had always been handled by professional subcontractors without any involvement on my part, but I knew perfectly well that individuals often make mistakes on their petitions, change their minds, or forget their promises, and we had an exceptionally tight time-window.

We needed all five petitions properly signed, with the personal and business address information completed, as well as the year and type of the Harvard degree, all of which provided numerous opportunities for careless mistakes. Our success might cost Harvard billions of dollars in tuition revenue and the Harvard administrators would be the ones validating and counting the petitions, so I wondered if they would find enough disqualifying mistakes to keep us off the ballot. I felt like we were starring in a remake of Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

As the days passed with few petitions being returned, I became desperate. Stanford University was only a mile or two from my home, and I realized that many Harvard degree holders would be on the campus, so I set up a card-table in the central Quad with signs, petitions, and other materials, and spent a couple of days collecting a handful of additional signatures from curious passers-by, the first time in my life I’d ever personally done any petitioning.

Four days before the deadline, we had received fewer than half the necessary signatures, and I began to believe that our situation was hopeless. But then a huge wave of express-mail envelopes suddenly arrived, carrying us across the finish line. I described the belt-and-suspenders delivery plans I implemented:

This last Saturday night I took a red-eye flight to Boston accompanied by an all-important carry-on bag, containing some thirty pounds of signed nomination petitions for our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign for the Harvard Board of Overseers.

With potentially major changes in the structure of American higher education hanging in the balance, I could not possibly trust Fedex or any other service for the safe Monday arrival of our petitions at the 17 Quincy Street Harvard offices, and hand-delivery seemed the only secure option. I’d originally planned my trip when huge winter storms had led to thousands of flight cancellations along the East Coast, so I separately booked both Saturday night and Sunday morning flights, with an eye towards possibly buying a last-minute third ticket to some other city along the Eastern Seaboard just in case snow blocked all incoming flights to Boston’s Logan Airport.

Despite all our concerns, we easily met our goals, and my heavy satchel on the flight to Boston Saturday night contained around 285 total signatures for most of our individual candidacies, providing a large safety margin over the required number. Virtually all our signers appeared absolutely legitimate, and unless the Harvard administrators choose to disqualify huge numbers of those alumni signatures on unreasonably trivial grounds, our slate will appear on the next Harvard Overseer ballot, with potentially major consequences. So we have now passed the first hurdle, though not without considerable nail-biting along the way.

The foot-high stack of paper I’d transported across the country was potentially worth billions of dollars, and I nervously dropped it off at the university offices first thing Monday morning. The Harvard administrators were absolutely professional, and within a couple of weeks we were informed that our names would appear on the Overseer ballot.

The second half of January had mostly been filled with our desperate scramble to obtain the necessary qualifying signatures, but other important developments occurred as well, especially on the all-important media front.

Although the highly suspicious tone of the Times story had probably prevented the enormous flood of follow-up mainstream media coverage I had once anticipated, brief items based upon the article did quickly appear in New York Magazine and Time, along with much more extensive international coverage in the London Telegraph, as well as Spanish, Turkish, and Chinese media outlets.

A couple of young journalists from the Harvard Crimson had immediately contacted us as well, and we quickly answered their questions and provided background materials, so the story they produced was quite balanced and even-handed, considerably more so than what had run in the Times. I’d already prepared complete media kits that I immediately fedexed out to any interested journalist, and I soon produced simple explanatory PDFs that could be emailed, so our extreme responsiveness to all journalistic inquiries served us very well.

- Free Harvard/Fair Harvard Candidate Slate

- Free Harvard/Fair Harvard Platform

A few days later, I received a note from John S. Rosenberg, editor of Harvard Magazine, saying he was interested in speaking to me for a possible article, and wondering when I might be available. I responded immediately, sending him some of our PDF materials, fedexing him a full media kit for morning delivery, and setting up an early interview call for the next day. We spent an hour or two on the phone, and he seemed extremely well informed and knowledgeable about all the issues, with everything going very well.

We exchanged some additional emails in the next couple of days, and I emphasized that some of Harvard’s own faculty members were quite sympathetic to our efforts:

Incidentally, I got a very nice note a few days ago from one of Harvard’s most eminent professors, with whom I’ve been friendly for 25 years. A few weeks ago I’d told him the new project I was planning to launch, and he’d been very surprised and happy to see it get on the front page of the NYT so quickly. We traded a couple of emails, and then he sent me this note:

Yes, I saw some of the Cooper Union story, did not the recall the stock market losses, I recall Cooper Union and its great role in NYC I also went to totally tuition free CCNY, even many of the texts were free, loaned out by the college. I wonder how NYC in the depression could afford the free city colleges, which then paid good faculty salaries, and why in a much wealthier country and city it requires state support in addition to city, and charges substantial tuition. A good subject for research. Harvard tuition was then I recall $500 or so—it’s close to 100 X that now, far exceeding inflation.

Rosenberg’s 9,000 word article on our campaign appeared just a few days later, and I was extremely impressed. He seemed to have very carefully read and digested the 30,000 words of my published articles I had fedexed him, also doing the same for the writings of my fellow slate-members, and then contrasted our analysis that with the positions taken by his own university’s senior officials, past and present. The bulk of his piece was devoted to the complex issue of Harvard admissions policies, now the subject of ongoing litigation, but he still devoted a couple of thousand words to the university’s finances and the implications of our proposal to eliminate tuition. The overall presentation seemed scrupulously fair and even-handed and in the months that followed he would produce several additional articles, with the series totaling over 20,000 words, certainly constituting by far the best and most thorough discussion of our campaign and the related issues that would appear anywhere.

- Overseers Petitioners Challenge Harvard Policies

John S. Rosenberg • Harvard Magazine • January 27, 2016 • 9,000 Words

Harvard Magazine was a glossy alumni publication with production values comparable to those of the New Yorker or Vanity Fair, mailed out six times each year to more than 250,000 of the alumni. Given the length of his treatment and the importance of the topic, I very much hoped it would go out in the next issue of his own magazine, perhaps even running as the cover story. But such fancy print publications have long preparation lead-times, and the outstanding article only appeared in online form, so relatively few members of the Harvard community probably ever saw it.

Since I had hand-delivered the petitions to Harvard’s offices, I used the opportunity of my trip to try to gauge the sentiments of the Harvard community toward our proposal and also to generate a little additional media coverage. As I wrote after my return to California:

Because I arrived in Cambridge very early Sunday morning and the Harvard offices did not open until Monday, I decided to spend the day trying to pad our numbers by doing some personal petitioning in Harvard Square and at various places around the university, having brought along some signs, large charts, and hand-outs to support such an effort.

During a full day of energetic petitioning, my success rate ran 100% among those who stopped in curiosity, asked questions, then declared themselves to be holders of Harvard degrees eligible to sign. Unfortunately, that total came to merely two individuals, as a cold New England Sunday deterred the busy and the sensible from dawdling in conversation with some obvious political crackpot sermonizing on Harvard’s vast wealth and absurdly promising to abolish Harvard tuition as a consequence.

A couple of pleasant young Crimson reporters also spent an hour or so reporting on my petitioning efforts and interviewing me, with a picture taken by their staff photographer and displayed on the front-page of their Monday newspaper accurately capturing the somewhat amusing street scene. Frankly, I doubt if even a single passer-by that day actually believed that my remarkably quixotic proposal had the slightest prospect of actual real-world success.

Petitioning near Harvard’s Science Center. Credit: Harvard Crimson

Still, a much larger number of current Harvard students or casual visitors did stop, listen, and take away some of our materials, and of these individuals not one opposed our project, with the great majority being enthusiastic supporters. So the secondary goal of my petitioning—to gauge the political temperature in the Harvard community—proved much more encouraging and successful.

On Monday morning, I waited in my local hotel for the fedex deliveries of those petitions signed too late to reach me on Saturday in California, then took a taxi and lugged my heavy bag of petitions to the Harvard offices for delivery to the friendly staff located there, receiving a signed receipt in return.

I then picked up a couple of copies of the Crimson issue featuring my local petitioning efforts, as well as President Drew Faust’s sharp rebuttal to our proposals, and went to have a cup of coffee with John S. Rosenberg, editor of Harvard Magazine. Just a few days earlier, I had been stunned by the sudden appearance of his remarkably long (9,000 words), thorough, and even-handed article on our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign, and I was very glad to have an opportunity to meet the author himself and explain some of my forthcoming plans for the coming months. Afterwards I took a taxi to WBUR, Boston’s local NPR station, which had invited me to do a long in-studio interview segment on our campaign, which I think went quite well.

https://www.unz.com/CONTENTS/AUDIO/misc/FreeHarvard-WBUR-2016-02-01.mp3

Responding to Critics and Seeking Media Coverage

I returned to California with a tremendous sense of relief. I’d been involved in political campaigns for more than twenty years, but the previous few weeks had been among the most challenging and hectic of my entire life. After quietly plotting my campaign for nearly a year, I had then struggled tremendously in trying to recruit a credible slate of candidates, then faced even greater difficulties in obtaining the necessary alumni signatures. Despite suffering through these two political near-death experiences, our campaign had survived and our names would appear on the Overseer ballot.

A huge backlog of other matters had accumulated over the previous thirty days, including issues connected with the production of my essay collection, and once the books were printed and available, I used Amazon to send copies to many dozens of the journalists and other individuals on my distribution list, hoping that the text would enhance my credibility and the weight of our project. I handled a couple of additional media inquiries, hoping that these would gradually grow in number. I also finished building our new website, which I intended to serve as a go-to source of information for the journalists covering our campaign, thereby allowing us to shape their resulting coverage. Finally, I put together a simple FAQ sheet responding to the weak arguments that Harvard officials or our other critics had been making, including with regard to the existing system of financial aid:

Q: Doesn’t generous financial aid mean that only the rich pay the high Harvard tuition?

A: Harvard officials sometimes make that claim, but it just isn’t true. Harvard’s website provides a “Net Price Calculator” that estimates the size of a family’s expected financial contribution based on the information supplied. If you plug in the income for a pair of New York City public schoolteachers, you discover that Harvard expects them to contribute a large portion of their life-savings—over $175,000—or even go heavily into family debt in order to allow their high-achieving son or daughter to obtain a Harvard degree. So unless you believe that public schoolteachers are part of America’s rich elite, Harvard’s claims aren’t correct. Meanwhile, Harvard remains mystified why relatively few middle-class families even bother applying, thereby ensuring that such a large fraction of all current undergraduates come from wealthy families.

- Facts and Myths About Free Harvard/Fair Harvard

Harvard administrators had also been claiming that any accusations of anti-Asian discrimination were obviously contradicted by the considerable rise in Asian-American enrollment since the 1980s, but their response failed to take into account the much greater increase in the Asian-American population during that same period. I soon produced a simple graph based upon these public numbers illustrating the dramatic 60% decline in per capita Asian enrollment over the previous twenty years. An enrollment drop of such size seemed very suspicious and inexplicable, and I passed it along to the Crimson reporters and other journalists, hoping that they would begin pressing the Harvard administration for an explanation, perhaps leading to additional news stories.

These points and many others were included in the series of columns I had been publishing and sending to my growing distribution list, summarizing the state of the campaign and responding to various arguments made by Harvard and our other opponents. Meanwhile, all of us also worked together to prepare the 250 word candidate statements that would be included in the Overseer ballot mailing.

- Meritocracy: Will Harvard Become Free and Fair?

The Unz Review • January 19, 2016 • 1,100 Words

- Meritocracy: How Harvard Currently Soaks the Rich…Such as NYC Public Schoolteachers

The Unz Review • February 4, 2016 • 2,200 Words

- Meritocracy: Harvard PR vs. Factual Reality

The Unz Review • February 15, 2016 • 1,200 Words

EPub Format • Mobi/Kindle

Aside from continuing to run my Unz Review webzine, other political projects also now absorbed some of my time. To date, my greatest personal achievement had been my highly successful late 1990s campaigns to dismantle so-called “bilingual education” programs in California and elsewhere, which had amounted to Spanish-almost-only instruction. I had transformed the lives of many millions of immigrant students, and the huge subsequent rise in their academic test scores had proven that I had been correct, so the whole issue had been settled and forgotten for many years. But in 2014, the determined bilingual activists had successfully lobbied the State Legislature into placing a repeal measure on the November 2016 ballot, and that vote was now fast approaching. So I dug out my stored boxes of materials and produced new “English” media kits and PDF scans of the old news stories, built a new website to help remind journalists and voters about those long-forgotten facts, and considered other possible ways to bring some attention to this important issue.

But as I took stock of our situation in late February, I felt quite good about our chances. Although the Times piece had proven a very mixed blessing, I felt that the excellent 9,000 word article in Harvard Magazine had made up for it, and I mistakenly assumed the piece would also appear in the next print issue, thereby reaching the entire Harvard alumni community and alerting them to our campaign and the issues we were raising just as they began receiving their ballots. Given the dismally low turnout in most Overseer elections, if even just 10% of the alumni read the story and agreed with our positions, we would probably win.

Although I effectively filled the role of political and media consultant for our campaign, we lacked the backing of any organization, which severely reduced our options. I’d invested a few hundred dollars producing a large batch of attractive campaign paraphernalia—tee-shirts, baseball caps, and buttons—all emblazoned with our logo, and these would have provided ideal visuals for media stories if we had been able to organize any public events or rallies. But since there were just the five of us, mostly preoccupied with their regular work, this wasn’t possible.

The Bernie Sanders phenomenon was near its peak and America’s most famous Democratic Socialist had made free college tuition one of his leading campaign issues, attracting enormous youthful support. With Ralph Nader heading up our slate, a highly flattering Times story would have probably brought us an immediate wave of enthusiastic Harvard students, eager to wear our tee-shirts and buttons and hold public rallies for our cause, whose success might save their families hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition; and this would have generated tremendous media coverage. But the sharply negative spin of the Times story completely foreclosed these possibilities. Indeed, although a wave of protests soon engulfed the Harvard Law School, with the students demanding that tuition be abolished, these progressive activists carefully avoided any association with our tainted campaign.

Conservative students, let alone opponents of affirmative action, were a tiny minority at Harvard, and although I might have tried to mobilize some of them for public events, any such ideological identification would surely have been severely damaging to our efforts.

I’d never personally used Facebook or Twitter, so one major, unrecognized weakness in our effort was its complete lack of presence on social media. These technologies had not existed during my political campaigns of the late 1990s, and were still very rudimentary during my abortive minimum wage campaign of late 2013, so I paid little attention to them.

Although I had acquired a great deal of expertise over the years in the media side of campaigning, my experience was entirely restricted to the traditional mainstream media, with its hierarchical top-down structure. So all my efforts to take our message to the Harvard alumni were aimed at shaping the coverage in the Times, the Crimson, Harvard Magazine and other regular media outlets, hoping that our potential voters would happen to see these pieces. Yet Facebook had originally been started as a Harvard-only network, and there were numerous Facebook groups for all the different alumni classes. It was a major failing that I had never planned to recruit individuals to distribute and promote our factual information or striking charts and graphs in that obvious channels of communication. Only Lee Cheng, the youngest member of our slate, was active on Facebook, and although he mentioned he was regularly engaging with our numerous critics on that platform, I initially paid little attention to the matter. As our severe weakness on social media became apparent, we did eventually run some basic Facebook ads linking to our website, but it was too little and too late.

This mistake became potentially more serious in early March when an organization was launched to oppose our campaign. As reported in the Crimson, the “Coalition for a Diverse Harvard” boasted nearly 500 alumni members, with its chief spokesperson being Jeannie Park ’83, a Korean-American activist while at Harvard who had later served as top editor of InStyle and People magazines in New York. The Times article had portrayed our effort as a disguised attack on affirmative action, and according to the Crimson account, this had outraged and mobilized the founders of this opposition group, exactly the sort of consequence I had feared. Their strategy was to provide all Overseer candidates with a questionnaire on affirmative action and diversity at Harvard, after which they would issue five endorsements. A lengthy follow-up article on the Harvard Magazine website provided many more details, and also raised some of the critiques of my original Meritocracy analysis that had been so exhaustively debated following its 2012 publication.

I probably paid much less attention to this new threat than I should have. The website I had built seemed far more comprehensive than their simple effort, and also provided an enormous amount of detailed factual information compared to their rather rhetorical content celebrating “diversity” so I didn’t take their effort very seriously. But what I failed to consider was that they had hundreds of determined members who were regularly presenting their arguments, weak though they might be, on all of Harvard’s many Facebook groups, while we probably only had three or four volunteer activists making the case on the other side. When the landscape of the media technology dominating politics radically changes, those who fail to adapt may be left behind.

Meanwhile, I continued to focus upon the traditional media, and here the tide remained very encouraging. The day after the Crimson revealed our new opponents, the Nation ran a major article entitled “Universities Are Becoming Billion-Dollar Hedge Funds With Schools Attached,” a piece that shamelessly cribbed the contents and even almost the title from my own past writings on that subject. Despite the focus on Harvard, our own campaign was never mentioned, but if the Times article had been favorable rather than portraying us as promoting an underhanded attack against affirmative action, I suspect that our efforts would have received a rousing endorsement from America’s left-liberal flagship publication.

The following week the influential Economist contacted me for an interview, and soon published a major story focused upon our campaign to eliminate tuition, treating it quite sympathetically. Soon after I had begun informing my DC friends about my project, Republican Rep. Tom Reed had introduced legislation requiring all wealthy universities to allocate at least 25% of their investment income to financial aid or lose their tax exemption, a proposal vastly more onerous than our own, and his bill was also discussed in the article. I regarded the Economist coverage as a major media coup, failing to consider that the story had probably reached just a tiny fraction of the number of Harvard alumni voters who spent each day on Facebook.

In late March, just before ballots were mailed out, Harvard Magazine published yet another comprehensive and even-handed article on the contest, primarily focusing on the contrasting positions of our own camp and those of our “pro-diversity” opponents. The piece also substantially excerpted a lengthy letter it had received from five past presidents of the Board of Overseers, strongly opposing our slate, which would be published in the print issue soon to be mailed out to all alumni. Their statement strongly defended Harvard’s admissions policies against our accusations of discrimination, and sharply criticized our proposal that tuition be abolished as “misguided.” This letter was also apparently emailed out to all members of the Harvard Alumni Association.

The Surprising Rise of Donald Trump and a Bold Response

Although we had counted on much of this establishmentarian opposition, a completely unanticipated development that severely damaged our prospects was the sudden political rise of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries, as I explained at the time:

Without doubt the current election for the Harvard Board of Overseers must rank as the most significant and substantive of the last twenty-five years, perhaps even the last century. The results of our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign could have tremendous national implications for tuition and admissions policy at our most elite colleges, with ripple effects upon all of American higher education.

Unfortunately, the ongoing national Trumpathon, with its endless series of Page One insults and crude slurs has captured an absolutely overwhelming share of American political attention, leaving relatively little for any other campaign, let alone a mere battle for the Harvard Board of Overseers. When The Dreadful Donald and Lyin’ Ted are trading staged photos of their wives in dress and undress on Twitter, why would anyone in America care whether elite college tuition might be abolished?

If not for Trump, the widely expected presidential contest between bland front-runners Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush would have prompted bored national political reporters to desperately seek out more interesting topics, and surely our own campaign would have been a major beneficiary of that coverage. But instead Trump now entirely dominated the national stage, choking off all of our media-oxygen, so I began to consider different ways of attracting additional attention. A daring possibility came to mind, one that I ultimately decided to pursue.

As some of you may have already heard, a few days ago I made a last-minute decision to enter the U.S. Senate race for the seat of retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer in California. I took out my official papers early Monday morning and returned them with the necessary 65 signatures of registered voters on Wednesday afternoon, the last possible day for filing.

I am certainly under no illusions that my candidacy is anything but a tremendous long-shot. Over the two decades that have passed since Gov. Pete Wilson’s Prop. 187 campaign, California has been transformed into what amounts to a one-party Democratic state, with Republicans holding not a single statewide office and barely one-third of the State Legislature; GOP presidential campaigns rarely invest any time or money in hopeless pursuit of California’s 55 electoral votes. With the sole exception of Arnold Schwarzenegger—who was obviously a special case—not a single Republican has won a top-ticket statewide race since 1994, with candidates often losing by 20-25 points despite spending many millions or even tens of millions on their campaigns; and virtually all down-ticket Republican candidates have generally lost by comparable margins.

But the flip-side of this difficult situation is that the California Republican Party is so extremely feeble these days that my entrance into the race would hardly face strong GOP rivals. Neither of the other two Republicans running has ever held any elective office or boasts significant political accomplishments, they were tied at 3% in the most recent polls, and after a full year of campaigning, each had only raised about $50,000. As most readers are well aware, I’m hardly an ultra-wealthy “checkbook” candidate able to spend unlimited sums, but dollars in that sort of range I can easily handle.

The primary factor behind this sudden decision on my part was the current effort by the California Democrats and their (totally worthless) Republican allies to repeal my 1998 Prop. 227 “English for the Children” initiative. Although the English immersion system established in the late 1990s was judged an enormous educational triumph by nearly all observers, and the issue has long since been forgotten, a legislative ballot measure up for a vote this November aims to undo all that progress and reestablish the disastrously unsuccessful system of Spanish-almost-only “bilingual education” in California public schools:

- Is the Republican Party Just Too Stupid to Survive?

After considering various options, I decided that becoming a statewide candidate myself was the probably the best means of effectively focusing public attention on this repeal effort and defeating it.

An important factor in my decision-making was the strong likelihood that Donald Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee. He and his campaign would almost certainly support keeping English in the public schools, but for obvious reasons he would hardly be the best political figure to be strongly identified with the No campaign. However, if I were a statewide candidate myself, heavily focusing on that issue, my standing as the original author of Prop. 227 would give me an excellent chance of establishing myself as the main voice behind the anti-repeal campaign. I also discussed the possibility of this race with some of my fellow Harvard Overseer slate-members, and they strongly believed that my candidacy would be far more likely to help rather than hurt our efforts, which was another major consideration in my decision. Furthermore, running for office provides me with an opportunity to raise all sorts of other policy issues often ignored by most political candidates or elected officials.

This last point is one that I have frequently emphasized to people over the years, namely that under the right circumstances, the real importance of a major political campaign sometimes has relatively little connection to the actual vote on election day. Instead, if used properly, a campaign can become a powerful focal point for large amounts of media coverage on under-examined issues. And such media coverage may have long-term consequences, win or lose.

The leading candidates were two Democrats, Attorney-General Kamala Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, and with California having adopted a top-two open primary system, it seemed quite unlikely that there would even be a Republican name on the November ballot. I emphasized the extremely long-shot nature of my last-minute candidacy, but I also noted that in a year so unexpectedly dominated by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, anything was possible.

The media had not entirely forgotten my past political achievements in California and given the completely unknown Republicans currently in the race, my entrance received quite a bit more attention than I expected. As a consequence, a surprising statewide poll soon ranked me as the leading Republican candidate, though my 5% share of the primary vote still placed me 40 points behind “Undecided.”

Because of my standing in the polls, I was invited to participate in both of the major televised U.S. Senate debates over the next few weeks, and despite having been away from politics for many years, I think I performed very credibly against Kamala Harris and the other candidates, as can be seen from my clips below, or in the complete debates, provided in the links. I relished the opportunity to raise all sorts of issues normally avoided by major party candidates.

- California U.S. Senate Debate, Stockton, April 26, 2016 – Entire Debate, 83m

Kamala Harris, Loretta Sanchez, Ron Unz, Duf Sundheim, Tom Del Beccaro

- California U.S. Senate Debate, San Diego, May 10, 2016 – Entire Debate, 56m

Kamala Harris, Loretta Sanchez, Ron Unz, Duf Sundheim, Tom Del Beccaro

A Harvard Debate and a Sudden Media Controversy

Meanwhile, I continued my efforts to attract media interest to our Harvard campaign. During my past initiative efforts, public debates had served as an excellent means of focusing attention on the issues, and I felt very confident that the extreme weakness of the arguments against us would easily be revealed in such a forum. Harvard’s official representatives had regularly disputed my claims in the Times article and other media stories, so for weeks I had repeatedly challenged them to a public debate on the matter, though without any success. But now that an official opposition group had emerged, I redoubled my suggestions to the Crimson reporters and our local supporters that Harvard should hold a debate, and the Chinese Students Association soon announced that they would sponsor one, inviting me to participate. I immediately accepted, although the date they selected would require me to take a red-eye flight following one of my California U.S. Senate debates.

It’s possible that Harvard had never previously held a public debate on the contentious issue of Asian Quotas or the closely-related topic of affirmative action, and with “diversity” being a watchword on campus, my opponents would obviously enjoy a huge home-field advantage, but that didn’t concern me in the least. Even a raucous, angry crowd overwhelmingly on the other side would serve my purposes by attracting the media coverage that constituted the life’s blood of our campaign. Unfortunately, the opposition apparently had similar thoughts because they refused to participate, then outrageously demanded that the debate be cancelled because it would be unfair for the audience to hear only one side of the issue, heavily pressuring the Chinese student group into withdrawing its sponsorship.

But a large Harvard lecture hall had already been reserved, I’d already paid for my tickets and hotel room, and my materials were already in transit to Cambridge. So I assisted a young Law School student in quickly rounding up a couple of other sponsoring organizations and local Harvard opponents, and the event went ahead as I afterwards explained.

While on campus, I was told by one student that if he published an op-ed in the Crimson critical of affirmative action, he would be subjected to a massive campaign of vilification and there would be widespread demands for his immediate expulsion. Hence our public debate on closely-related issues was almost unprecedented in Harvard’s current intellectual climate of fear. Regardless of whether you are a liberal or a conservative, I think this is an outrageous state of affairs at one of world’s most prestigious centers of higher education.

The debate produced a nice front-page story in the Crimson and a video of the event was loaded on Youtube, with one of my erstwhile opponents even changing his stance and supporting our proposal to abolish tuition as our position was fully explained.

- Free Harvard/Fair Harvard Debate, April 10, 2016

Ron Unz, Daniel J. Solomon, Luran J. He

I was quite pleased with the results, especially since I’d only gotten a couple of hours sleep on the red-eye flight out from California that had arrived earlier that morning. A few hours later I was back at the airport on my way home again, making this an exhausting but very productive East Coast trip.

A couple of days earlier, the Pacifica Radio Network, America’s leading leftwing media group, had broadcast my half hour discussion of our campaign with Ralph Nader, which was highly informative and also went very well:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/ralphnaderradiohour/NADER_EP_107.mp3

Unfortunately, our increasing public profile had apparently drawn other determined foes, concerned by the very favorable media coverage we had been attracting. Just after my return from Harvard, an activist group began distributing an opposition-research dossier of harsh accusations against me, hoping to destroy my credibility with the media.

The main issues raised were that over the years I had provided financial support to extreme right-wing writers, intellectuals, and organizations, notably including Steve Sailer, Gregory Cochran, Tom Woods, and VDare.com., and the Crimson ran the story under the lurid headline “Overseers Candidate Donates to ‘Quasi-White Nationalist’ Group.”

I regarded the charges made against me as extremely distorted and misleading, and immediately provided a lengthy rebuttal:

I was very unhappy with the unfair and inflammatory article that the Harvard Crimson ran regarding my political associations, and they suggested I submit an op-ed in response. I provided the piece below, which they requested be trimmed for length prior to publication, which I did.

They then notified me that after further consideration, they had decided that most of my points were irrelevant or unfair and should not be published: I could only make the arguments that they themselves approved. Perhaps they felt that the effectiveness of my response might risk “confusing” some of their readers.

Several individuals have emphasized to me that outrageous character assassination based on guilt-by-association must be answered quickly, so here’s the rebuttal that the Crimson refused to publish, and you can decide for yourself if their decision was appropriate.

- My Stasi File Published in the Harvard Crimson

The Unz Review • April 17, 2016 • 1,400 Words

I think my response very effectively rebutted those allegations, and probably left the young Crimson reporters a little ashamed that their inexperience had led them to fall for such nonsense; perhaps as a consequence, they published a glowing account of Ralph Nader’s role in our campaign just a few days later. By contrast, those same accusations and distortions were ignored by the political reporters covering my U.S. Senate campaign in California, and never raised at my editorial board meetings nor in the televised debates, partly because my own positions on racial and ethnic issues had become so well known in my home state during the more than twenty years of my major political campaigns. Instead California’s very mainstream Zocolo Public Square organization soon solicited a short item from me presenting my zero tuition arguments.

But although these nasty smears soon mostly vanished from the media coverage of our Harvard campaign, I’m sure that they continued to circulate widely on Harvard Facebook pages.

Defeat, Aftermath, and Epilogue

Shortly before the close of voting, the national media finally began taking some notice of our effort, with Politico running a major article focusing on Nader’s involvement and the controversy over affirmative action at Harvard.

- Ralph Nader Declares War on Harvard

Josh Gerstein • Politico • May 19, 2016 • 2,500 Words

But by then nearly all the votes had already been cast and just a few days later, we received the unfortunate news that our slate had been defeated. The following day I discussed the outcome:

As many of you have probably already heard, our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign for the Board of Overseers failed yesterday, with none of the five candidates on our slate being successful. The highly contentious nature of this year’s contest did boost the vote-by-mail turnout to 11%, considerably higher than the more usual 7%. But with nearly 90% of Harvard’s 320,000 throwing their ballots in the trash, lack of interest clearly won a gigantic landslide victory.

Given that no petition candidate had successfully won a seat on Harvard’s board in the 27 years since Nobel Laureate Archbishop Tutu of South Africa made the cut in 1989, with a young Barack Obama being among the numerous failures, I suppose I should have expected this result from the beginning. But I’d like to believe that if not for a certain loudmouthed Republican presidential candidate having grabbed such an astonishing share of the national media oxygen over the last six months, our bold proposal to completely abolish tuition at the world’s most prestigious college would have attracted far more attention, considerably reducing the trash-can vote, and perhaps giving us a shot at victory.

In any event, I do believe we vastly increased the number of Americans now aware that Harvard’s annual investment income is so massively disproportionate to its net tuition revenue, perhaps laying the basis for future changes along the lines we proposed. Among other straws in the wind, just a few weeks after our campaign reached the front page of The New York Times, a group of influential U.S. Senators began pressing Harvard and its peers to allocate a much larger fraction of their annual earnings to financial aid or lose their tax exemption, with a figure as high as 25% being bandied about.

Although to a layperson, it might hardly seem unreasonable for wealthy colleges such as Harvard to spend just a quarter of their income subsidizing the education of their undergraduates, in practice such a demand would force Harvard to abolish all tuition, abolish all room-and-board costs, and also provide each student a brand new Rolls-Royce automobile each year, a policy which would surely increase the number of annual applicants to even higher levels.

It would not totally surprise me if at some point, Harvard’s shrewd financial managers may decide that the 4% allocation we were suggesting seems a lot cheaper than the 25% demanded by Congress, and immediately abolish tuition with a sudden wave of their hands.

In another strange irony, disgraced former Harvard President Larry Summers ferociously denounced our “free tuition” proposal as a disgusting giveaway to the wealthy elites, whose unfair financial privileges he so strongly opposes. Surely, Hillary Clinton should begin using a similar line of attack against her notoriously pro-Oligarchic opponent Bernie Sanders, who has proposed something very similar.

In the past, Summers has been somewhat less hesitant in assisting the rich, such as when he used $26.5 million of Harvard funds to settle a government insider-trading case against one of his closest friends, who thereby perhaps avoided a long prison sentence as a result. This was one of the major factors leading to a massive faculty revolt against Summers and his forced resignation as Harvard president, an event probably without precedent in Harvard history. Although personal friendship is surely priceless, Summers must have realized he was risking his presidency over that decision, and I’ve always half-suspected that he’d himself been a silent partner in that insider-trading ring, and was therefore blackmailed into using tens of millions in Harvard’s endowment money to save his friend from the slammer lest he end up wearing pinstripes himself.

Despite all our efforts—and those of our vigorous opponents—the pitiful turnout of just 11% demonstrated just how little awareness the campaign had generated within the Harvard alumni community. Moreover, indifferent or uninterested voters would be expected to select the names listed closer to the top of the ballot, and four of the five winners came from that group, a result apparently similar to that of most previous years. Meanwhile, all petition candidates were grouped at the bottom, and we discovered that the votes the five of us had individually received exactly corresponded to the order in which our names were listed. So all our efforts, our dramatic proposals, and our carefully crafted ballot-statements had had almost no impact, and we had lost for the same reasons that every other petition candidate for the previous 27 years had lost.

Despite the energetic campaign on Facebook by the hundreds of activists in our “diversity” opposition, they didn’t do much better. Although some of their endorsed candidates won, their success rate was almost exactly what would have been produced by random chance.

I was somewhat surprised by these results, but I probably should not have been. Perhaps ten or twenty thousand of the alumni voters came from families currently paying up to $180,000 in Harvard undergraduate tuition or believing that they might have to do so in the near future. My assumption had been that the prospect of such enormous financial savings would ensure our victory, but in hindsight I think I understand why this did not happen.

Although grounded in solid reality, our proposal must have seemed entirely fantastical to Harvard alumni who encountered it for the first time, and almost none of them would have believed it was real. Aside from the original Times article several months earlier, our media coverage had been minimal, so probably only a sliver of the alumni had heard of our proposal—either positively or negatively—until they glanced at their Overseer ballots, and they would have dismissed the claims we made in our ballot arguments as total nonsense, little different than the bizarre rantings of a street-corner agitator. But if the media had extensively covered and validated our issue, suggesting that a few simple checkmarks on a piece of paper might indeed save their families a six-figure sum, we surely would have gotten their votes. The media creates Reality, and without the necessary media validation, our project wasn’t “real” in the minds of the alumni voters who encountered it.

As with many other political campaigns, the unpredictable uncertainties of the media landscape had doomed our effort. If the tone of the original Times article had been friendlier or if Donald Trump had not suddenly erupted into the presidential race, absorbing so much political attention, the greatly increased coverage of our campaign might have easily changed the outcome.

Having successfully seen off our unexpected challenge, the Harvard administration soon took defensive steps to prevent any recurrence. Our effort had been made possible because petition candidates required only some 200 alumni signatures to be placed on the ballot, and later that year Harvard raised the requirement more than ten-fold to 2,650, while modernizing the petitioning process. Also, henceforth only holders of a Harvard degree would be eligible as candidates, thus preventing the participation of prominent celebrities such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who had headed the successful anti-Apartheid slate of 1987.

However, to Harvard’s considerable surprise, in 2020 a group of climate change activists successfully organized a petition drive to have their names placed on the ballot, with the five candidates running on a platform of having the Harvard endowment divest from all holdings related to fossil fuels. They conducted a very vigorous campaign on social media, and despite the opposition of Harvard’s administration, three of their candidates were elected.

But their efforts had received almost no attention until after their unexpected victory, and even that consisted of merely a small item buried on p. A-22 of the New York Times, with no indications that their proposals would be carried out. Harvard also soon limited the number of petition candidates to just six of the 30 seats on the Board of Overseers, largely closing the door to any such future campaigns.

Meanwhile, Harvard’s enormous endowment has continued to grow, recently exceeding $53 billion, an amount more than 40% larger than the 2015 figure we had emphasized. Whereas the university’s investment income had averaged about 25 times larger than its undergraduate tuition revenue during the years leading up to our campaign, last year’s figure was around 75 times larger. Back then, the combined endowments of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford exceeded $100 billion, while today the total is approaching $200 billion.

The absurdities of America’s tax-exempt, tuition-charging hedge-funds have grown steadily more extreme. But with so many powerful political figures and wealthy political donors eager to have Harvard and its top peers look favorably upon the applications of their family members or relatives, no changes in government policy seem likely in the foreseeable future.

Some Minorities Are More Minor than Others

The Wall Street Journal • November 16, 1998 • 800 Words

With the victory of Washington state’s Initiative 200, which ends affirmative action in government hiring, contracting and education, supporters of racial preferences have asked us to imagine an America in which members of some ethnic groups are virtually excluded not only from state university campuses but elite institutions in general.

But no imagination is actually needed, for this is already the case today, and has been for years. In a telling irony, current affirmative action policies are more the cause than the cure for these gross imbalances.

From the very beginnings of affirmative action in the 1960s, its underlying justification has always been that it resolves the problem of “underrepresentation.” The basis for this argument is the view that the elite institutions of our society should reflect the diversity of America’s society, and that if certain groups–such as blacks or women–seem to be receiving less than their statistical share, discrimination (whether conscious or unconscious) is the likely culprit. In fact, many diversity advocates believe that society should correct for such imbalances even absent any discrimination whatsoever.

But for all the endless discussion over the origins and cure for chronic demographic underrepresentation, there has been near total silence regarding the flip side of the issue, namely demographic overrepresentation. The underrepresentation of some groups is an inevitable consequence of the overrepresentation of other groups, and one issue cannot be properly addressed without the other.

Consider Harvard College. Over the past few years, black enrollment has averaged 8% and Hispanic enrollment 7%. Despite Harvard’s longstanding commitment to affirmative action (recently reiterated in a widely discussed new book co-authored by Harvard’s ex-President Derek Bok), these levels are substantially lower than their 12% and 10% representation in the general population, and there are periodic complaints by ethnic activists that Harvard is insufficiently committed to “diversity.”

But these numbers become much less surprising when we examine Harvard’s enrollment more closely. For example, Asians comprise between 2% and 3% of the U.S. population, but nearly 20% of Harvard undergraduates. Then too, between a quarter and a third of Harvard students identify themselves as Jewish, while Jews also represent just 2% to 3% of the overall population. Thus, it appears that Jews and Asians constitute approximately half of Harvard’s student body, leaving the other half for the remaining 95% of America.

Under these circumstances, chronic underrepresentation of other ethnic groups—with or without affirmative action—is mathematically inevitable, and the only real issue is the allocation of such underrepresentation. Since black and Hispanics are virtually guaranteed a certain number of slots, and Harvard also admits a considerable number of foreign students, the number of remaining slots is further reduced. In fact, it seems likely that non-Jewish white Americans represent no more than a quarter of Harvard undergraduates, even though this group constitutes nearly 75% of the population at large, resulting in a degree of underrepresentation far more severe than that of blacks, Hispanics or any other minority groups.

Furthermore, even among non-Jewish whites there is almost certainly a severe skew in representation, with Northeastern WASPs being far better represented than other demographic or religious groups such as Baptists or Southerners. (It’s hard to know for sure, since Harvard doesn’t release breakdowns of the student body by religion.)

These facts should make supporters of affirmative action very uncomfortable. Large numbers of rejected applicants from these underrepresented groups doubtless have much higher admissions scores than many black or Hispanic admittees–as well as the unique cultural experiences prized by diversity advocates–and are much farther from parity with their share of the general population. Thus, current affirmative action policies actually act to increase rather than decrease ethnic underrepresentation at the college.

Other than repealing the laws of mathematics, the only solution available to supporters of affirmative action would be to adopt a policy aimed at drastically reducing the number of Asians and Jews at Harvard, thereby furnishing more spots for other groups. But Asian and Jewish organizations would surely object, and the policy would be controversial to say the least.

This entire ethnic dilemma is present to a greater or lesser degree at most of our other elite educational institutions: Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley and so on. And partly because these universities act as a natural springboard to elite careers in law, medicine, finance and technology, many of these commanding heights of American society seem to exhibit a similar skew in demographic composition.

Seen in this light, the well-known hostility of “angry white males” toward affirmative action programs may represent less the pique of the privileged and more the resentment of the discriminated-against. If the recent Presidential Commission on Race had sought to engage in sincere analysis rather than merely indulge in empty rhetoric, difficult issues such as this one should have been central to their debate. That it was not suggests why the commission has been a failure from the start.

Ron K. Unz, a Silicon Valley software developer, was the author of Proposition 227, the successful California initiative to dismantle bilingual education

No Quotas, No Elite Public High School

How Los Angeles undercut its pathbreaking IHP project

The American Conservative • October 30, 2012 • 1,200 Words

In late September I attended a memorial service for William M. Fitz-Gibbon, a retired public school teacher who had passed away a few weeks earlier, just short of his 78th birthday.

Without doubt Bill Fitz-Gibbon—“Fitz” to everyone—was the individual who had the greatest academic influence on my life, and my feelings were shared by many others, with hundreds of his former students from the last 35 years attending the service, held at Walter Reed Junior High in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. But what made his achievement so remarkable is that his decades of teaching had almost entirely been spent—with only mixed success—trying to climb up the down escalator of American education.

Unlike most MIT science graduates with exceptional IQs, he was drawn to teaching, first at private schools in Switzerland and England and later in suburban Los Angeles. He decided the existing system was inadequate for the most able and saw the need for an academically elite public school similar to Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York. So in 1971, with the approval of his principal and working with two other teachers, he established his major legacy, the Individualized Honors Program (IHP) at Reed in North Hollywood, taking in some 30 seventh graders, mostly from the local area but with some drawn from across Los Angeles.

When these students moved up to the eighth grade, a new group of seventh graders was enrolled, and this was repeated again the following year, with IHP now containing three teachers and close to 100 seventh through ninth graders, representing the tiniest sliver of the half-million-plus Los Angeles Unified School District. And I had become part of that sliver, entering IHP as a seventh grader in 1973.

Within a few years the program had begun to achieve impressive results, with eighth and ninth graders passing Advanced Placement exams for college credit, the same sort of APs normally taken only by the top 11th and 12th graders at other leading schools. Reed’s IHP became the first and only junior high school in America where a sizable fraction of the students were doing college-level work. The obvious next step—part of the plan from the very beginning—was to extend the program to the upper grades, thereby creating a public school whose achievements would rival those of any in the world. But over three decades it never happened, and therein lies a tale.

Although LA schools had never enjoyed the reputation for academic excellence found in some East Coast cities, they had also never faced the same sort of bitter racial struggles. The suburban Valley was entirely middle class and well over 90 percent white in those days, and although the 1965 Watts Riots had been horrifying, they had taken place 30 miles away over the hills—events you saw on television rather than experienced in daily life.

But the ideological tide of the late 1960s had begun seeping into the public education system, gradually replacing the post-Sputnik push for rigorous academic quality with a focus on “experimentation,” with “New Math” and “Whole Language,” while the benchmark for success shifted from excellence to “equity” or “diversity.”

Meanwhile, a long political battle over proposed forced busing for racial integration—possibly involving daily round-trips of 50 miles or more—became the absolute centerpiece of educational politics and provoked a white exodus from the schools. Unlike on the East Coast, virtually all ordinary Angelenos had traditionally attended local public schools, but over a decade or so a substantial fraction nervously switched to newly established private academies. By the time the busing proposals finally died in court, the LAUSD had suffered a huge loss of its previous middle-class enrollment, and the school board had become ideologically polarized to an extreme degree.

This was the landscape in fall 1984 when I returned to California as a Stanford grad student in theoretical physics, after having spent years away on the East Coast and in England. With the IHP track record now long and impressive, I believed the time might be right to create the intended high school, and working with the IHP teachers and a couple of other IHP alumni, we began the project.

At first, things went extremely well. IHP’s academic results were amazing, but had never been noticed by the media, so sending out a few simple press releases quickly attracted outstanding coverage, including a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times and a full-page article in Time.

With such strong media coverage, we gradually recruited an impressive advisory board of supporters, including six Nobel Laureates, the president of Caltech, the president of the American Physical Society, a past chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and a former president of the Harvard Law Review. Leading local high-technology companies endorsed the effort, and prominent university professors expressed interest in teaching at the school part-time, including a Caltech Nobel Laureate.

By 1986, we had developed an outline of our proposed School for Advanced Studies and its full curriculum. Even more importantly, we had attracted the backing of the Los Angeles-based Weingart Foundation, which offered to provide $3.5 million in supplemental private funding to help establish the program.

All that remained was receiving authorization from the Los Angeles School Board, but that last hurdle proved insurmountable. For nearly two decades, the board had been bitterly split down the middle between right-wing and left-wing factions. Although the conservatives generally supported our effort, they hardly considered it a major priority, while some of the “progressives” hated it, viewing it as the worst sort of educational elitism.

In particular, they demanded that students be selected by strict racial proportions, which we believed would destroy the program. One of the front-page newspaper articles quoted board member Jackie Goldberg as saying, “If they don’t want quotas, they don’t want a public school.” With LAUSD refusing to allow the school, we explored various other options, but none of them materialized, and our efforts eventually faded away.

The Los Angeles School Board members went back to fighting over unionization issues and planning their future races for city council.

Bill Fitz-Gibbon spent another 20 years teaching at IHP, always hoping to extend the program to high school, but with no more luck than before.

And I became so disgusted at our failure that a college friend finally persuaded me to take a summer job writing software on Wall Street, a decision that unexpectedly marked my permanent defection from a planned academic career in theoretical physics.

The only long-term consequence of our years of effort was that ABC soon created a successful television sitcom called “Head of the Class,” which ran from 1986 to 1991 and featured ten ultra-bright students in a public school program called “IHP.” The show launched the career of Robin Givens, Mike Tyson’s future wife, while one of the other students was actually played by a Reed IHP graduate.

Naturally, the show itself was set in New York City, since everyone knows that a high-powered academic program like that could never exist in an educational backwater such as Los Angeles.

Ron Unz is publisher of the The American Conservative and founder of Unz.org.

The Myth of American Meritocracy

Are elite university admissions based on meritocracy and diversity as claimed?

The American Conservative • November 28, 2012 • 26,200 Words

Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on their final exam.[1] Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as “unprecedented.”

But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America’s most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.

During this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America’s richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent.[2] This situation, sometimes described as a “winner take all society,” leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their children will reach the winners’ circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges.[3] On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas are handed out.[4]

The Battle for Elite College Admissions

As a direct consequence, the war over college admissions has become astonishingly fierce, with many middle- or upper-middle class families investing quantities of time and money that would have seemed unimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to an all-against-all arms race that immiserates the student and exhausts the parents. The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites. Over the last thirty years, America’s test-prep companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to their less able children. Similarly, the enormous annual tuition of $35,000 charged by elite private schools such as Dalton or Exeter is less for a superior high school education than for the hope of a greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League.[5] Many New York City parents even go to enormous efforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program, seeking early placement on the educational conveyer belt which eventually leads to Harvard.[6] Others cut corners in a more direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.[7]

But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America. Thus, the huge Harvard cheating scandal, and perhaps also the endless series of financial, business, and political scandals which have rocked our country over the last decade or more, even while our national economy has stagnated.

Just a few years ago Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden published The Price of Admission, a devastating account of the corrupt admissions practices at so many of our leading universities, in which every sort of non-academic or financial factor plays a role in privileging the privileged and thereby squeezing out those high-ability, hard-working students who lack any special hook. In one particularly egregious case, a wealthy New Jersey real estate developer, later sent to Federal prison on political corruption charges, paid Harvard $2.5 million to help ensure admission of his completely under-qualified son.[8] When we consider that Harvard’s existing endowment was then at $15 billion and earning almost $7 million each day in investment earnings, we see that a culture of financial corruption has developed an absurd illogic of its own, in which senior Harvard administrators sell their university’s honor for just a few hours worth of its regular annual income, the equivalent of a Harvard instructor raising a grade for a hundred dollars in cash.

An admissions system based on non-academic factors often amounting to institutionalized venality would seem strange or even unthinkable among the top universities of most other advanced nations in Europe or Asia, though such practices are widespread in much of the corrupt Third World. The notion of a wealthy family buying their son his entrance into the Grandes Ecoles of France or the top Japanese universities would be an absurdity, and the academic rectitude of Europe’s Nordic or Germanic nations is even more severe, with those far more egalitarian societies anyway tending to deemphasize university rankings.

Or consider the case of China. There, legions of angry microbloggers endlessly denounce the official corruption and abuse which permeate so much of the economic system. But we almost never hear accusations of favoritism in university admissions, and this impression of strict meritocracy determined by the results of the national Gaokao college entrance examination has been confirmed to me by individuals familiar with that country. Since all the world’s written exams may ultimately derive from China’s old imperial examination system, which was kept remarkably clean for 1300 years, such practices are hardly surprising.[9] Attending a prestigious college is regarded by ordinary Chinese as their children’s greatest hope of rapid upward mobility and is therefore often a focus of enormous family effort; 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 the evidence of college admissions corruption presented in Golden’s book is quite telling, the focus is almost entirely on current practices, and largely anecdotal rather than statistical. For a broader historical perspective, we should consider The Chosen by Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel, an exhaustive and award-winning 2005 narrative history of the last century of admissions policy at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (I will henceforth sometimes abbreviate these “top three” most elite schools as “HYP”).

Karabel’s massive documentation—over 700 pages and 3000 endnotes—establishes the remarkable fact that America’s uniquely complex and subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert ethnic tribal warfare. During the 1920s, the established Northeastern Anglo-Saxon elites who then dominated the Ivy League wished to sharply curtail the rapidly growing numbers of Jewish students, but their initial attempts to impose simple numerical quotas provoked enormous controversy and faculty opposition.[10] Therefore, the approach subsequently taken by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and his peers was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration of all aspects of each individual applicant; the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired. As a consequence, university leaders could honestly deny the existence of any racial or religious quotas, while still managing to reduce Jewish enrollment to a much lower level, and thereafter hold it almost constant during the decades which followed.[11] For example, the Jewish portion of Harvard’s entering class dropped from nearly 30 percent in 1925 to 15 percent the following year and remained roughly static until the period of the Second World War.[12]

As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the major changes in admissions policy which later followed were usually determined by factors of raw political power and the balance of contending forces rather than any idealistic considerations. For example, in the aftermath of World War II, Jewish organizations and their allies mobilized their political and media resources to pressure the universities into increasing their ethnic enrollment by modifying the weight assigned to various academic and non-academic factors, raising the importance of the former over the latter. Then a decade or two later, this exact process was repeated in the opposite direction, as the early 1960s saw black activists and their liberal political allies pressure universities to bring their racial minority enrollments into closer alignment with America’s national population by partially shifting away from their recently enshrined focus on purely academic considerations. Indeed, Karabel notes that the most sudden and extreme increase in minority enrollment took place at Yale in the years 1968–69, and was largely due to fears of race riots in heavily black New Haven, which surrounded the campus.[13]

Philosophical consistency appears notably absent in many of the prominent figures involved in these admissions battles, with both liberals and conservatives sometimes favoring academic merit and sometimes non-academic factors, whichever would produce the particular ethnic student mix they desired for personal or ideological reasons. Different political blocs waged long battles for control of particular universities, and sudden large shifts in admissions rates occurred as these groups gained or lost influence within the university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissions staff in 1965 and the following year Jewish numbers nearly doubled.[14]

At times, external judicial or political forces would be summoned to override university admissions policy, often succeeding in this aim. Karabel’s own ideological leanings are hardly invisible, as he hails efforts by state legislatures to force Ivy League schools to lift their de facto Jewish quotas, but seems to regard later legislative attacks on “affirmative action” as unreasonable assaults on academic freedom.[15] The massively footnoted text of The Chosen might lead one to paraphrase Clausewitz and conclude that our elite college admissions policy often consists of ethnic warfare waged by other means, or even that it could be summarized as a simple Leninesque question of “Who, Whom?”

Although nearly all of Karabel’s study is focused on the earlier history of admissions policy at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with the developments of the last three decades being covered in just a few dozen pages, he finds complete continuity down to the present day, with the notorious opacity of the admissions process still allowing most private universities to admit whomever they want for whatever reasons they want, even if the reasons and the admissions decisions may eventually change over the years. Despite these plain facts, Harvard and the other top Ivy League schools today publicly deny any hint of discrimination along racial or ethnic lines, except insofar as they acknowledge providing an admissions boost to under-represented racial minorities, such as blacks or Hispanics. But given the enormous control these institutions exert on our larger society, we should test these claims against the evidence of the actual enrollment statistics.

Asian-Americans as the “New Jews”

The overwhelming focus of Karabel’s book is on changes in Jewish undergraduate percentages at each university, and this is probably less due to his own ethnic heritage than because the data provides an extremely simple means of charting the ebb and flow of admissions policy: Jews were a high-performing group, whose numbers could only be restricted by major deviations from an objective meritocratic standard.

Obviously, anti-Jewish discrimination in admissions no longer exists at any of these institutions, but a roughly analogous situation may be found with a group whom Golden and others have sometimes labeled “The New Jews,” namely Asian-Americans. Since their strong academic performance is coupled with relatively little political power, they would be obvious candidates for discrimination in the harsh realpolitik of university admissions as documented by Karabel, and indeed he briefly raises the possibility of an anti-Asian admissions bias, before concluding that the elite universities are apparently correct in denying that it exists.[16]

There certainly does seem considerable anecdotal evidence that many Asians perceive their chances of elite admission as being drastically reduced by their racial origins.[17] For example, our national newspapers have revealed that students of part-Asian background have regularly attempted to conceal the non-white side of their ancestry when applying to Harvard and other elite universities out of concern it would greatly reduce their chances of admission.[18] Indeed, widespread perceptions of racial discrimination are almost certainly the primary factor behind the huge growth in the number of students refusing to reveal their racial background at top universities, with the percentage of Harvard students classified as “race unknown” having risen from almost nothing to a regular 5–15 percent of all undergraduates over the last twenty years, with similar levels reached at other elite schools.

Such fears that checking the “Asian” box on an admissions application may lead to rejection are hardly unreasonable, given that studies have documented a large gap between the average test scores of whites and Asians successfully admitted to elite universities. Princeton sociologist Thomas J. Espenshade and his colleagues have demonstrated that among undergraduates at highly selective schools such as the Ivy League, white students have mean scores 310 points higher on the 1600 SAT scale than their black classmates, but Asian students average 140 points above whites.[19] The former gap is an automatic consequence of officially acknowledged affirmative action policies, while the latter appears somewhat mysterious.

These broad statistical differences in the admission requirements for Asians are given a human face in Golden’s discussions of this subject, in which he recounts numerous examples of Asian-American students who overcame dire family poverty, immigrant adversity, and other enormous personal hardships to achieve stellar academic performance and extracurricular triumphs, only to be rejected by all their top university choices. His chapter is actually entitled “The New Jews,” and he notes the considerable irony that a university such as Vanderbilt will announce a public goal of greatly increasing its Jewish enrollment and nearly triple those numbers in just four years, while showing very little interest in admitting high-performing Asian students.[20]

All these elite universities strongly deny the existence of any sort of racial discrimination against Asians in the admissions process, let alone an “Asian quota,” with senior administrators instead claiming that the potential of each student is individually evaluated via a holistic process far superior to any mechanical reliance on grades or test scores; but such public postures are identical to those taken by their academic predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s as documented by Karabel. Fortunately, we can investigate the plausibility of these claims by examining the decades of officially reported enrollment data available from the website of the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES).

The ethnic composition of Harvard undergraduates certainly follows a highly intriguing pattern. Harvard had always had a significant Asian-American enrollment, generally running around 5 percent when I had attended in the early 1980s. But during the following decade, the size of America’s Asian middle class grew rapidly, leading to a sharp rise in applications and admissions, with Asians exceeding 10 percent of undergraduates by the late 1980s and crossing the 20 percent threshold by 1993. However, from that year forward, the Asian numbers went into reverse, generally stagnating or declining during the two decades which followed, with the official 2011 figure being 17.2 percent.[21]

Even more surprising has been the sheer constancy of these percentages, with almost every year from 1995–2011 showing an Asian enrollment within a single point of the 16.5 percent average, despite huge fluctuations in the number of applications and the inevitable uncertainty surrounding which students will accept admission. By contrast, prior to 1993 Asian enrollment had often changed quite substantially from year to year. It is interesting to note that this exactly replicates the historical pattern observed by Karabel, in which Jewish enrollment rose very rapidly, leading to imposition of an informal quota system, after which the number of Jews fell substantially, and thereafter remained roughly constant for decades. On the face of it, ethnic enrollment levels which widely diverge from academic performance data or application rates and which remain remarkably static over time provide obvious circumstantial evidence for at least a de facto ethnic quota system.

In another strong historical parallel, all the other Ivy League universities seem to have gone through similar shifts in Asian enrollment at similar times and reached a similar plateau over the last couple of decades. As mentioned, the share of Asians at Harvard peaked at over 20 percent in 1993, then immediately declined and thereafter remained roughly constant at a level 3–5 points lower. Asians at Yale reached a 16.8 percent maximum in that same year, and soon dropped by about 3 points to a roughly constant level. The Columbia peak also came in 1993 and the Cornell peak in 1995, in both cases followed by the same substantial drop, and the same is true for most of their East Coast peers. During the mid- to late-1980s, there had been some public controversy in the media regarding allegations of anti-Asian discrimination in the Ivy League, and the Federal Government eventually even opened an investigation into the matter.[22] But once that investigation was closed in 1991, Asian enrollments across all those universities rapidly converged to the same level of approximately 16 percent, and remained roughly static thereafter (See chart below). In fact, the yearly fluctuations in Asian enrollments are often smaller than were the changes in Jewish numbers during the “quota era” of the past,[23] and are roughly the same relative size as the fluctuations in black enrollments, even though the latter are heavily influenced by the publicly declared “ethnic diversity goals” of those same institutions.

The largely constant Asian numbers at these elite colleges are particularly strange when we consider that the underlying population of Asians in America has been anything but static, instead growing at the fastest pace of any American racial group, having increased by almost 50 percent during the last decade, and more than doubling since 1993. Obviously, the relevant ratio would be to the 18–21 age cohort, but adjusting for this factor changes little: based on Census data, the college-age ratio of Asians to whites increased by 94 percent between 1994 and 2011, even while the ratio of Asians to whites at Harvard and Columbia fell over these same years.[24]

Put another way, the percentage of college-age Asian-Americans attending Harvard peaked around 1993, and has since dropped by over 50 percent, a decline somewhat larger than the fall in Jewish enrollment which followed the imposition of secret quotas in 1925.[25] And we have noted the parallel trends in the other Ivy League schools, which also replicates the historical pattern.

Trends of Asian enrollment at Caltech and the Ivy League universities, compared with growth of Asian college-age population; Asian age cohort population figure

s are based on Census CPS and given the small sample size, are subject to considerable yearly statistical fluctuations. Source: Appendices B and C.

Furthermore, during this exact same period a large portion of the Asian-American population moved from first-generation immigrant poverty into the ranks of the middle class, greatly raising their educational aspirations for their children. Although elite universities generally refuse to release their applicant totals for different racial groups, some data occasionally becomes available. Princeton’s records show that between 1980 and 1989, Asian-American applications increased by over 400 percent compared to just 8 percent for other groups, with an even more rapid increase for Brown during 1980-1987, while Harvard’s Asian applicants increased over 250 percent between 1976 and 1985.[26] It seems likely that the statistics for other Ivy League schools would have followed a similar pattern and these trends would have at least partially continued over the decades which followed, just as the Asian presence has skyrocketed at selective public feeder schools such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York City and also at the top East Coast prep schools. Yet none of these huge changes in the underlying pool of Asian applicants seemed to have had noticeable impact on the number admitted to Harvard or most of the Ivy League.

Estimating Asian Merit

One obvious possible explanation for these trends might be a decline in average Asian scholastic performance, which would certainly be possible if more and more Asian students from the lower levels of the ability pool were pursuing an elite education.[27] The mean SAT scores for Asian students show no such large decline, but since we would expect elite universities to draw their students from near the absolute top of the performance curve, average scores by race are potentially less significant than the Asian fraction of America’s highest performing students.

To the extent that the hundred thousand or so undergraduates at Ivy League schools and their approximate peers are selected by academic merit, they would mostly be drawn from the top one-half to one percent of their American age-cohort, and this is the appropriate pool to consider. It is perfectly possible that a particular ethnic population might have a relatively high mean SAT score, while still being somewhat less well represented in that top percent or so of measured ability; racial performance does not necessarily follow an exact “bell curve” distribution. For one thing, a Census category such as “Asian” is hardly homogenous or monolithic, with South Asians and East Asians such as Chinese and Koreans generally having much higher performance compared to other groups such as Filipinos, Vietnamese, or Cambodians, just as the various types of “Hispanics” such as Cubans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans differ widely in their socio-economic and academic profiles. Furthermore, the percentage of a given group taking the SAT may change over time, and the larger the percentage taking that test, the more that total will include weaker students, thereby depressing the average score.

Fortunately, allegations of anti-Asian admissions bias have become a topic of widespread and heated debate on the Internet, and disgruntled Asian-American activists have diligently located various types of data to support their accusations, with the recent ethnic distribution of National Merit Scholarship (NMS) semifinalists being among the most persuasive. Students receiving this official designation represent approximately the top one-half of one percent of a state’s high school students as determined by their scores on the PSAT, twin brother to the SAT. Each year, the NMS Corporation distributes the names and schools of these semifinalists for each state, and dozens of these listings have been tracked down and linked on the Internet by determined activists, who have then sometimes estimated the ethnic distribution of the semifinalists by examining their family names.[28] Obviously, such a name analysis provides merely an approximate result, but the figures are striking enough to warrant the exercise. (All these NMS semifinalist estimates are discussed in Appendix E.)[29]

For example, California has a population comparable to that of the next two largest states combined, and its 2010 total of 2,003 NMS semifinalists included well over 1,100 East Asian or South Asian family names. California may be one of the most heavily Asian states, but even so Asians of high school age are still outnumbered by whites roughly 3-to-1, while there were far more high scoring Asians. Put another way, although Asians represented only about 11 percent of California high school students, they constituted almost 60 percent of the top scoring ones. California’s list of NMS semifinalists from 2012 also followed a very similar ethnic pattern. Obviously, such an analysis based on last names is hardly precise, but it is probably correct to within a few percent, which is sufficient for our crude analytical purposes.

In addition, the number of test-takers is sufficiently large that an examination of especially distinctive last names allows us to pinpoint and roughly quantify the academic performance of different Asian groups. For example, the name “Nguyen” is uniquely Vietnamese and carried by about 1 in 3.6 of all Americans of that ethnicity, while “Kim” is just as uniquely Korean, with one in 5.5 Korean-Americans bearing that name.[30] By comparing the prevalence of these particular names on the California NMS semifinalist lists with the total size of the corresponding California ethnicities, we can estimate that California Vietnamese are significantly more likely than whites to score very highly on such tests, while Koreans seem to do eight times better than whites and California’s Chinese even better still. (All these results rely upon the simplifying assumption that these different Asian groups are roughly proportional in their numbers of high school seniors.)

Interestingly enough, these Asian performance ratios are remarkably similar to those worked out by Nathaniel Weyl in his 1989 book The Geography of American Achievement, in which he estimated that Korean and Chinese names were over-represented by 1000 percent or more on the complete 1987 lists of national NMS semifinalists, while Vietnamese names were only somewhat more likely to appear than the white average.[31] This consistency is quite impressive when we consider that America’s Asian population has tripled since the late 1980s, with major changes as well in socio-economic distribution and other characteristics.

The results for states other than California reflect this same huge abundance of high performing Asian students. In Texas, Asians are just 3.8 percent of the population but were over a quarter of the NMS semifinalists in 2010, while the 2.4 percent of Florida Asians provided between 10 percent and 16 percent of the top students in the six years from 2008 to 2013 for which I have been able to obtain the NMS lists. Even in New York, which contains one of our nation’s most affluent and highly educated white populations and also remains by far the most heavily Jewish state, Asian over-representation was enormous: the Asian 7.3 percent of the population—many of them impoverished immigrant families—accounted for almost one-third of all top scoring New York students.

America’s eight largest states contain nearly half our total population as well as over 60 percent of all Asian-Americans, and each has at least one NMS semifinalist list available for the years 2010–2012. Asians account for just 6 percent of the population in these states, but contribute almost one-third of all the names on these rosters of high performing students. Even this result may be a substantial underestimate, since over half these Asians are found in gigantic California, where extremely stiff academic competition has driven the qualifying NMS semifinalist threshold score to nearly the highest in the country; if students were selected based on a single nationwide standard, Asian numbers would surely be much higher. This pattern extends to the aggregate of the twenty-five states whose lists are available, with Asians constituting 5 percent of the total population but almost 28 percent of semifinalists. Extrapolating these state results to the national total, we would expect 25–30 percent of America’s highest scoring high school seniors to be of Asian origin.[32] This figure is far above the current Asian enrollment at Harvard or the rest of the Ivy League.

Ironically enough, the methodology used to select these NMS semifinalists may considerably understate the actual number of very high-ability Asian students. According to testing experts, the three main subcomponents of intellectual ability are verbal, mathematical, and visuospatial, with the last of these representing the mental manipulation of objects. Yet the qualifying NMS scores are based on math, reading, and writing tests, with the last two both corresponding to verbal ability, and without any test of visuospatial skills. Even leaving aside the language difficulties which students from an immigrant background might face, East Asians tend to be weakest in the verbal category and strongest in the visuospatial, so NMS semifinalists are being selected by a process which excludes the strongest Asian component and doubles the weight of the weakest.[33]

This evidence of a massively disproportionate Asian presence among top-performing students only increases if we examine the winners of national academic competitions, especially those in mathematics and science, where judging is the most objective. Each year, America picks its five strongest students to represent our country in the International Math Olympiad, and during the three decades since 1980, some 34 percent of these team members have been Asian-American, with the corresponding figure for the International Computing Olympiad being 27 percent. The Intel Science Talent Search, begun in 1942 under the auspices of the Westinghouse Corporation, is America’s most prestigious high school science competition, and since 1980 some 32 percent of the 1320 finalists have been of Asian ancestry (see Appendix F).

Given that Asians accounted for just 1.5 percent of the population in 1980 and often lived in relatively impoverished immigrant families, the longer-term historical trends are even more striking. Asians were less than 10 percent of U.S. Math Olympiad winners during the 1980s, but rose to a striking 58 percent of the total during the last thirteen years 2000–2012. For the Computing Olympiad, Asian winners averaged about 20 percent of the total during most of the 1990s and 2000s, but grew to 50 percent during 2009–2010 and a remarkable 75 percent during 2011–2012.

The statistical trend for the Science Talent Search finalists, numbering many thousands of top science students, has been the clearest: Asians constituted 22 percent of the total in the 1980s, 29 percent in the 1990s, 36 percent in the 2000s, and 64 percent in the 2010s. In particular science subjects, the Physics Olympiad winners follow a similar trajectory, with Asians accounting for 23 percent of the winners during the 1980s, 25 percent during the 1990s, 46 percent during the 2000s, and a remarkable 81 percent since 2010. The 2003–2012 Biology Olympiad winners were 68 percent Asian and Asians took an astonishing 90 percent of the top spots in the recent Chemistry Olympiads. Some 61 percent of the Siemens AP Awards from 2002–2011 went to Asians, including thirteen of the fourteen top national prizes.

Yet even while all these specific Asian-American academic achievement trends were rising at such an impressive pace, the relative enrollment of Asians at Harvard was plummeting, dropping by over half during the last twenty years, with a range of similar declines also occurring at Yale, Cornell, and most other Ivy League universities. Columbia, in the heart of heavily Asian New York City, showed the steepest decline of all.

There may even be a logical connection between these two contradictory trends. On the one hand, America over the last two decades has produced a rapidly increasing population of college-age Asians, whose families are increasingly affluent, well-educated, and eager to secure an elite education for their children. But on the other hand, it appears that these leading academic institutions have placed a rather strict upper limit on actual Asian enrollments, forcing these Asian students to compete more and more fiercely for a very restricted number of openings. This has sparked a massive Asian-American arms-race in academic performance at high schools throughout the country, as seen above in the skyrocketing math and science competition results. When a far greater volume of applicants is squeezed into a pipeline of fixed size, the pressure can grow enormously.

The implications of such massive pressure may be seen in a widely-discussed front page 2005 Wall Street Journal story entitled “The New White Flight.”[34] The article described the extreme academic intensity at several predominantly Asian high schools in Cupertino and other towns in Silicon Valley, and the resulting exodus of white students, who preferred to avoid such an exceptionally focused and competitive academic environment, which included such severe educational tension. But should the families of those Asian students be blamed if according to Espensade and his colleagues their children require far higher academic performance than their white classmates to have a similar chance of gaining admission to selective colleges?

Although the “Asian Tiger Mom” behavior described by author Amy Chua provoked widespread hostility and ridicule, consider the situation from her perspective. Being herself a Harvard graduate, she would like her daughters to follow in her own Ivy League footsteps, but is probably aware that the vast growth in Asian applicants with no corresponding increase in allocated Asian slots requires heroic efforts to shape the perfect application package. Since Chua’s husband is not Asian, she could obviously encourage her children to improve their admissions chances by concealing their ethnic identity during the application process; but this would surely represent an enormous personal humiliation for a proud and highly successful Illinois-born American of Chinese ancestry.

The claim that most elite American universities employ a de facto Asian quota system is certainly an inflammatory charge in our society. Indeed, our media and cultural elites view any accusations of “racial discrimination” as being among the most horrific of all possible charges, sometimes even regarded as more serious than mass murder.[35] So before concluding that these accusations are probably true and considering possible social remedies, we should carefully reconsider their plausibility, given that they are largely based upon a mixture of circumstantial statistical evidence and the individual anecdotal cases presented by Golden and a small handful of other critical journalists. One obvious approach is to examine enrollment figures at those universities which for one reason or another may follow a different policy.

According to incoming student test scores and recent percentages of National Merit Scholars, four American universities stand at the absolute summit of average student quality—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Caltech, the California Institute of Technology; and of these Caltech probably ranks first among equals.[36] Those three top Ivies continue to employ the same admissions system which Karabel describes as “opaque,” “flexible,” and allowing enormous “discretion,”[37] a system originally established to restrict the admission of high-performing Jews. But Caltech selects its students by strict academic standards, with Golden praising it for being America’s shining example of a purely meritocratic university, almost untouched by the financial or political corruption so widespread in our other elite institutions. And since the beginning of the 1990s, Caltech’s Asian-American enrollment has risen almost exactly in line with the growth of America’s underlying Asian population, with Asians now constituting nearly 40 percent of each class (See chart on p. 18).

Obviously, the Caltech curriculum is narrowly focused on mathematics, science, and engineering, and since Asians tend to be especially strong in those subjects, the enrollment statistics might be somewhat distorted compared to a more academically balanced university. Therefore, we should also consider the enrollment figures for the highly-regarded University of California system, particularly its five most prestigious and selective campuses: Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Davis, and Irvine. The 1996 passage of Proposition 209 had outlawed the use of race or ethnicity in admissions decisions, and while administrative compliance has certainly not been absolute—Golden noted the evidence of some continued anti-Asian discrimination—the practices do seem to have moved in the general direction of race-blind meritocracy.[38] And the 2011 Asian-American enrollment at those five elite campuses ranged from 34 percent to 49 percent, with a weighted average of almost exactly 40 percent, identical to that of Caltech.[39]

In considering these statistics, we must take into account that California is one of our most heavily Asian states, containing over one-quarter of the total national population, but also that a substantial fraction of UC students are drawn from other parts of the country. The recent percentage of Asian NMS semifinalists in California has ranged between 55 percent and 60 percent, while for the rest of America the figure is probably closer to 20 percent, so an overall elite-campus UC Asian-American enrollment of around 40 percent seems reasonably close to what a fully meritocratic admissions system might be expected to produce.

By contrast, consider the anomalous admissions statistics for Columbia. New York City contains America’s largest urban Asian population, and Asians are one-third or more of the entire state’s top scoring high school students. Over the last couple of decades, the local Asian population has doubled in size and Asians now constitute over two-thirds of the students attending the most selective local high schools such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, perhaps triple the levels during the mid-1980s.[40] Yet whereas in 1993 Asians made up 22.7 percent of Columbia’s undergraduates, the total had dropped to 15.6 percent by 2011. These figures seem extremely difficult to explain except as evidence of sharp racial bias.

Asian-Americans and Jews

A natural question to consider is the surprising lack of attention this issue seems to have attracted, despite such remarkably telling statistics and several articles over the years in major newspapers by Golden and other prominent journalists. One would think that a widespread practice of racial discrimination by America’s most elite private universities—themselves leading bastions of “Political Correctness” and strident anti-racist ideology—would attract much more public scrutiny, especially given their long prior history of very similar exclusionary policies with regard to Jewish enrollment.[41] Without such scrutiny and the political mobilization it generates, the status quo seems unlikely to change.[42]

Indeed, Karabel convincingly demonstrates that the collapse of the long-standing Jewish quotas in the Ivy League during the decade following World War II only occurred as a result of massive media and political pressure, pressure surely facilitated by very heavy Jewish ownership of America’s major media organs, including all three television networks, eight of nine major Hollywood studios, and many of the leading newspapers, including both the New York Times and the Washington Post. By contrast, Asian-Americans today neither own nor control even a single significant media outlet, and they constitute an almost invisible minority in films, television, radio, and print. For most Americans, what the media does not report simply does not exist, and there is virtually no major media coverage of what appear to be de facto Asian quotas at our top academic institutions.

But before we conclude that our elite media organs are engaging in an enormous “conspiracy of silence” regarding this egregious pattern of racial discrimination at our most prestigious universities, we should explore alternate explanations for these striking results. Perhaps we are considering the evidence from entirely the wrong perspective, and ignoring the most obvious—and relatively innocuous—explanation.

In recent decades, the notion of basing admissions on “colorblind” meritocratic standards such as standardized academic test scores has hardly been an uncontroversial position, with advocates for a fully “diversified” student body being far more prominent within the academic community. Indeed, one of the main attacks against California’s 1996 Proposition 209 was that its requirement of race-neutrality in admissions would destroy the ethnic diversity of California’s higher education system, and the measure was vigorously opposed by the vast majority of vocal university academics, both within that state and throughout the nation. Most leading progressives have long argued that the students selected by our elite institutions should at least roughly approximate the distribution of America’s national population, requiring that special consideration be given to underrepresented or underprivileged groups of all types.

We must remember that at all the universities discussed above, Asian students are already enrolled in numbers far above their 5 percent share of the national population, and the Iron Law of Arithmetic is that percentages must always total to one hundred. So if additional slots were allocated to Asian applicants, these must necessarily come from some other group, perhaps blacks raised in the ghettos of Detroit or desperately poor Appalachian whites, who might be the first in their families to attend college. These days in America, most Asians are a heavily urbanized, highly affluent population,[43] overwhelmingly part of the middle- or upper-middle class, and boosting their Harvard numbers from three times their share of the population up to five or six might not be regarded as the best policy when other groups are far needier. To be sure, the broad racial category “Asian” hides enormous internal complexity—with Chinese, Koreans, and South Asians being far more successful than Filipinos, Vietnamese, or Cambodians—but that is just as true of the equally broad “white” or “Hispanic” labels, which also conceal much more than they reveal.

Furthermore, elite universities explicitly claim to consider a wide range of other admissions factors besides academic performance. Geographical diversity would certainly hurt Asian chances since nearly half their population lives in just the three states of California, New York, and Texas.[44] Top athletes gain a strong admissions edge, and few Asians are found in the upper ranks of basketball, football, baseball, and other leading sports, an occasional Jeremy Lin notwithstanding. Since most Asians come from a recent immigrant background, they would rarely receive the “legacy boost” going to students whose families have been attending the Ivy League for generations. And it is perfectly possible that ideological considerations of diversity and equity might make administrators reluctant to allow any particular group to become too heavily over-represented relative to its share of the general population. So perhaps highly-qualified Asians are not being rejected as Asians, but simply due to these pre-existing ideological and structural policies of our top universities, whether or not we happen to agree with them.[45] In fact, when an Asian student rejected by Harvard filed a complaint of racial discrimination with the U.S. Department of Education earlier this year, the Harvard Crimson denounced his charges as “ludicrous,” arguing that student diversity was a crucial educational goal and that affirmative action impacted Asians no more than any other applicant group.[46]

The best means of testing this hypothesis would be to compare Asian admissions with those of a somewhat similar control group. One obvious candidate would be the population of elite East Coast WASPs which once dominated the Ivy League. Members of this group should also be negatively impacted by admissions preferences directed towards applicants from rural or impoverished backgrounds, but there seems considerable anecdotal evidence that they are still heavily over-represented in the Ivy League relative to their academic performance or athletic prowess, strengthening the suspicion that Asian applicants are receiving unfair treatment. However, solid statistical data regarding this elite WASP subpopulation is almost non-existent, and anyway the boundaries of the category are quite imprecise and fluid across generations. For example, the two wealthy Winklevoss twins of Greenwich, Conn. and Harvard Facebook fame might appear to be perfect examples of this social class, but their grandfather actually had an eighth-grade education and came from a long line of impoverished coalminers in rural Pennsylvania.[47]

Fortunately, an alternate comparison population is readily available, namely that of American Jews,[48] a group which is both reasonably well-defined and one which possesses excellent statistical information, gathered by various Jewish organizations and academic scholars. In particular, Hillel, the nationwide Jewish student organization with chapters on most major university campuses, has for decades been providing extensive data on Jewish enrollment levels. Since Karabel’s own historical analysis focuses so very heavily on Jewish admissions, his book also serves as a compendium of useful quantitative data drawn from these and similar sources.[49]

Once we begin separating out the Jewish portion of Ivy League enrollment, our picture of the overall demographics of the student bodies is completely transformed. Indeed, Karabel opens the final chapter of his book by performing exactly this calculation and noting the extreme irony that the WASP demographic group which had once so completely dominated America’s elite universities and “virtually all the major institutions of American life” had by 2000 become “a small and beleaguered minority at Harvard,” being actually fewer in number than the Jews whose presence they had once sought to restrict.[50] Very similar results seem to apply all across the Ivy League, with the disproportion often being even greater than the particular example emphasized by Karabel.

In fact, Harvard reported that 45.0 percent of its undergraduates in 2011 were white Americans, but since Jews were 25 percent of the student body, the enrollment of non-Jewish whites might have been as low as 20 percent, though the true figure was probably somewhat higher.[51] The Jewish levels for Yale and Columbia were also around 25 percent, while white Gentiles were 22 percent at the former and just 15 percent at the latter. The remainder of the Ivy League followed this same general pattern.

This overrepresentation of Jews is really quite extraordinary, since the group currently constitutes just 2.1 percent of the general population and about 1.8 percent of college-age Americans.[52] Thus, although Asian-American high school graduates each year outnumber their Jewish classmates nearly three-to-one, American Jews are far more numerous at Harvard and throughout the Ivy League. Both groups are highly urbanized, generally affluent, and geographically concentrated within a few states, so the “diversity” factors considered above would hardly seem to apply; yet Jews seem to fare much better at the admissions office.

Even more remarkable are the historical trajectories. As noted earlier, America’s Asian population has been growing rapidly over the last couple of decades, so the substantial decline in reported Ivy League Asian enrollment has actually constituted a huge drop relative to their fraction of the population. Meanwhile, the population of American Jews has been approximately constant in numbers, and aging along with the rest of the white population, leading to a sharp decline in the national proportion of college-age Jews, falling from 2.6 percent in 1972 and 2.2 percent in 1992 to just 1.8 percent in 2012. Nevertheless, total Jewish enrollment at elite universities has held constant or actually increased, indicating a large rise in relative Jewish admissions. In fact, if we aggregate the reported enrollment figures, we discover that 4 percent of all college-age American Jews are currently enrolled in the Ivy League, compared to just 1 percent of Asians and about 0.1 percent of whites of Christian background.[53]

One reasonable explanation for these remarkable statistics might be that although Asian-Americans are a high-performing academic group, American Jews may be far higher-performing, perhaps not unlikely for an ethnicity that gave the world Einstein, Freud, and so many other prominent intellectual figures. Thus, if we assume that our elite universities reserve a portion of their slots for “diversity” while allocating the remainder based on “academic merit,” Jews might be handily beating Asians (and everyone else) in the latter competition. Indeed, the average Jewish IQ has been widely reported in the range of 110–115, implying a huge abundance of individuals at the upper reaches of the distribution of intellect. So perhaps what had seemed like a clear pattern of anti-Asian discrimination is actually just the workings of academic meritocracy, at least when combined with a fixed allocation of “diversity admissions.”

The easiest means of exploring this hypothesis is to repeat much of our earlier examination of Asian academic performance, but now to include Jews as part of our analysis. Although Jewish names are not quite as absolutely distinctive as East or South Asian ones, they can be determined with reasonably good accuracy, so long as we are careful to note ambiguous cases and recognize that our estimates may easily be off by a small amount; furthermore, we can utilize especially distinctive names as a validation check. But strangely enough, when we perform this sort of analysis, it becomes somewhat difficult to locate major current evidence of the celebrated Jewish intellect and academic achievement discussed at such considerable length by Karabel and many other authors.

For example, consider California, second only to New York in the total number of its Jews, and with its Jewish percentage far above the national average. Over the last couple of years, blogger Steve Sailer and some of his commenters have examined the complete 2010 and 2012 NMS semifinalist lists of the 2000 or so top-scoring California high school seniors for ethnicity, and discovered that as few as 4–5 percent of the names seem to be Jewish, a figure not so dramatically different than the state’s 3.3 percent Jewish population, and an estimate which I have personally confirmed.[54] Meanwhile, the state’s 13 percent Asians account for over 57 percent of the top performing students. Thus, it appears that California Asians are perhaps three times as likely as Jews to do extremely well on academic tests, and this result remains unchanged if we adjust for the age distributions of the two populations.

One means of corroborating these surprising results is to consider the ratios of particularly distinctive ethnic names, and Sailer reported such exact findings made by one of his Jewish readers. For example, across the 2000-odd top scoring California students in 2010, there was just a single NMS semifinalist named Cohen, and also one each for Levy, Kaplan, and a last name beginning with “Gold.” Meanwhile, there were 49 Wangs and 36 Kims, plus a vast number of other highly distinctive Asian names. But according to Census data, the combined number of American Cohens and Levys together outnumber the Wangs almost two-to-one, and the same is true for the four most common names beginning with “Gold.” Put another way, California contains nearly one-fifth of all American Jews, hence almost 60,000 Cohens, Kaplans, Levys, Goldens, Goldsteins, Goldbergs, Goldmans, and Golds, and this population produced only 4 NMS semifinalists, a ratio almost identical to that produced by our general last name estimates. The 2012 California NMS semifinalist lists yield approximately the same ratios.

When we consider the apparent number of Jewish students across the NMS semifinalist lists of other major states, we get roughly similar results. New York has always been the center of the American Jewish community, and at 8.4 percent is half again as heavily Jewish as any other state, while probably containing a large fraction of America’s Jewish financial and intellectual elite. Just as we might expect, the 2011 roster of New York NMS semifinalists is disproportionately filled with Jewish names, constituting about 21 percent of the total, a ratio twice as high as for any other state whose figures are available. But even here, New York’s smaller and much less affluent Asian population is far better represented, providing around 34 percent of the top scoring students. Jews and Asians are today about equal in number within New York City but whereas a generation ago, elite local public schools such as Stuyvesant were very heavily Jewish, today Jews are outnumbered at least several times over by Asians.[55]

This same pattern of relative Asian and Jewish performance on aptitude exams generally appears in the other major states whose recent NMS semifinalist lists I have located and examined, though there is considerable individual variability, presumably due to the particular local characteristics of the Asian and Jewish populations. Across six years of Florida results, Asian students are more than twice as likely to be high scorers compared to their Jewish classmates, with the disparity being nearly as great in Pennsylvania. The relative advantage of Asians is a huge factor of 5.0 in Michigan and 4.1 in Ohio, while in Illinois Asians still do 150 percent as well as Jews. Among our largest states, only in Texas is the Asian performance as low as 120 percent, although Jews are the group that actually does much better in several smaller states, usually those in which the Jewish population is tiny.

As noted earlier, NMS semifinalist lists are available for a total of twenty-five states, including the eight largest, which together contain 75 percent of our national population, as well as 81 percent of American Jews and 80 percent of Asian-Americans, and across this total population Asians are almost twice as likely to be top scoring students as Jews. Extrapolating these results to the nation as a whole would produce a similar ratio, especially when we consider that Asian-rich California has among the toughest NMS semifinalist qualification thresholds. Meanwhile, the national number of Jewish semifinalists comes out at less than 6 percent of the total based on direct inspection of the individual names, with estimates based on either the particularly distinctive names considered by Sailer or the full set of such highly distinctive names used by Weyl yielding entirely consistent figures. Weyl had also found this same relative pattern of high Jewish academic performance being greatly exceeded by even higher Asian performance, with Koreans and Chinese being three or four times as likely as Jews to reach NMS semifinalist status in the late 1980s, though the overall Asian numbers were still quite small at the time.[56]

Earlier we had noted that the tests used to select NMS semifinalists actually tilted substantially against Asian students by double-weighting verbal skills and excluding visuospatial ability, but in the case of Jews this same testing-bias has exactly the opposite impact. Jewish ability tends to be exceptionally strong in its verbal component and mediocre at best in the visuospatial,[57] so the NMS semifinalist selection methodology would seem ideally designed to absolutely maximize the number of high-scoring Jews compared to other whites or (especially) East Asians. Thus, the number of high-ability Jews we are finding should be regarded as an extreme upper bound to a more neutrally-derived total.

But suppose these estimates are correct, and Asians overall are indeed twice as likely as Jews to rank among America’s highest performing students. We must also consider that America’s Asian population is far larger in size, representing roughly 5 percent of college-age students, compared to just 1.8 percent for Jews. Therefore, assuming an admissions system based on strictest objective meritocracy, we would expect our elite academic institutions to contain nearly five Asians for every Jew; but instead, the Jews are far more numerous, in some important cases by almost a factor of two. This raises obvious suspicions about the fairness of the Ivy League admissions process.

Once again, we can turn to the enrollment figures for strictly meritocratic Caltech as a test of our estimates. The campus is located in the Los Angeles area, home to one of America’s largest and most successful Jewish communities, and Jews have traditionally been strongly drawn to the natural sciences. Indeed, at least three of Caltech’s last six presidents have been of Jewish origin, and the same is true for two of its most renowned faculty members, theoretical physics Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. But Caltech’s current undergraduates are just 5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have been around this level for some years; meanwhile, Asian enrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger. It is intriguing that the school which admits students based on the strictest, most objective academic standards has by a very wide margin the lowest Jewish enrollment for any elite university.

Let us next turn to the five most selective campuses of the University of California system, whose admissions standards shifted substantially toward objective meritocracy following the 1996 passage of Prop. 209. The average Jewish enrollment is just over 8 percent, or roughly one-third that of the 25 percent found at Harvard and most of the Ivy League, whose admissions standards are supposedly far tougher. Meanwhile, some 40 percent of the students on these UC campuses are Asian, a figure almost five times as high. Once again, almost no elite university in the country has a Jewish enrollment as low as the average for these highly selective UC campuses.[58]

Another interesting example is MIT, whose students probably rank fifth in academic strength, just below the three HYP schools and Caltech, and whose admissions standards are far closer to a meritocratic ideal than is found in most elite schools, though perhaps not quite as pristine as those of its Caltech rival. Karabel notes that MIT has always had a far more meritocratic admissions system than nearby Harvard, tending to draw those students who were academic stars even if socially undistinguished. As an example, in the 1930s Feynman had been rejected by his top choice of Columbia possibly due to its Jewish quota, and instead enrolled at MIT.[59] But today, MIT’s enrollment is just 9 percent Jewish, a figure lower than that anywhere in the Ivy League, while Asians are nearly three times as numerous, despite the school being located in one of the most heavily Jewish parts of the country.

The Strange Collapse of Jewish Academic Achievement

From my own perspective, I found these statistical results surprising, even shocking.

I had always been well aware of the very heavy Jewish presence at elite academic institutions. But the underwhelming percentage of Jewish students who today achieve high scores on academic aptitude tests was totally unexpected, and very different from the impressions I had formed during my own high school and college years a generation or so ago. An examination of other available statistics seems to support my recollections and provides evidence for a dramatic recent decline in the academic performance of American Jews

The U.S. Math Olympiad began in 1974, and all the names of the top scoring students are easily available on the Internet. During the 1970s, well over 40 percent of the total were Jewish, and during the 1980s and 1990s, the fraction averaged about one-third. However, during the thirteen years since 2000, just two names out of 78 or 2.5 percent appear to be Jewish. The Putnam Exam is the most difficult and prestigious mathematics competition for American college students, with five or six Putnam winners having been selected each year since 1938. Over 40 percent of the Putnam winners prior to 1950 were Jewish, and during every decade from the 1950s through the 1990s, between 22 percent and 31 percent of the winners seem to have come from that same ethnic background. But since 2000, the percentage has dropped to under 10 percent, without a single likely Jewish name in the last seven years.

This consistent picture of stark ethnic decline recurs when we examine the statistics for the Science Talent Search, which has been selecting 40 students as national finalists for America’s most prestigious high school science award since 1942, thus providing a huge statistical dataset of over 2800 top science students. During every decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jewish students were consistently 22–23 percent of the recipients, with the percentage then declining to 17 percent in the 1990s, 15 percent in the 2000s, and just 7 percent since 2010. Indeed, of the thirty top ranked students over the last three years, only a single one seems likely to have been Jewish. Similarly, Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997, but have fallen to just 5 percent over the last decade, a result which must surely send Richard Feynman spinning in his grave.

Other science competitions provide generally consistent recent results, though without the long track record allowing useful historical comparisons. Over the last dozen years, just 8 percent of the top students in the Biology Olympiad have been Jewish, with none in the last three years. Between 1992 and 2012, only 11 percent of the winners of the Computing Olympiad had Jewish names, as did just 8 percent of the Siemens AP Award winners. And although I have only managed to locate the last two years of Chemistry Olympiad winners, these lists of 40 top students contained not a single probable Jewish name.

Further evidence is supplied by Weyl, who estimated that over 8 percent of the 1987 NMS semifinalists were Jewish,[60] a figure 35 percent higher than found in today’s results. Moreover, in that period the math and verbal scores were weighted equally for qualification purposes, but after 1997 the verbal score was double-weighted,[61] which should have produced a large rise in the number of Jewish semifinalists, given the verbal-loading of Jewish ability. But instead, today’s Jewish numbers are far below those of the late 1980s.

Taken in combination, these trends all provide powerful evidence that over the last decade or more there has been a dramatic collapse in Jewish academic achievement, at least at the high end.

Several possible explanations for this empirical result seem reasonably plausible. Although the innate potential of a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly, achievement is a function of both ability and effort, and today’s overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students may be far less diligent in their work habits or driven in their studies than were their parents or grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing challenges of the immigrant experience. In support of this hypothesis, roughly half of the Jewish Math Olympiad winners from the last two decades have had the sort of highly distinctive names which would tend to mark them as recent immigrants from the Soviet Union or elsewhere, and such names were also very common among the top Jewish science students of the same period, even though this group represents only about 10 percent of current American Jews. Indeed, it seems quite possible that this large sudden influx of very high performing immigrant Jews from the late 1980s onward served to partially mask the rapid concurrent decline of high academic achievement among native American Jews, which otherwise would have become much more clearly evident a decade or so earlier.

This pattern of third or fourth generation American students lacking the academic drive or intensity of their forefathers is hardly surprising, nor unique to Jews. Consider the case of Japanese-Americans, who mostly arrived in America during roughly the same era. America’s Japanese have always been a high-performing group, with a strong academic tradition, and Japan’s international PISA academic scores are today among the highest in the world. But when we examine the list of California’s NMS semifinalists, less than 1 percent of the names are Japanese, roughly in line with their share of the California population.[62] Meanwhile, Chinese, Koreans, and South Asians are 6 percent of California but contribute 50 percent of the top scoring students, an eight-fold better result, with a major likely difference being that they are overwhelmingly of recent immigrant origin. In fact, although ongoing Japanese immigration has been trivial in size, a significant fraction of the top Japanese students have the unassimilated Japanese first names that would tend to indicate they are probably drawn from that tiny group.

In his 1966 book The Creative Elite in America, Weyl used last name analysis to document a similarly remarkable collapse in achievement among America’s Puritan-descended population, which had once provided a hugely disproportionate fraction of our intellectual leadership, but for various reasons went into rapid decline from about 1900 onward. He also mentions the disappearance of the remarkable Scottish intellectual contribution to British life after about 1800. Although the evidence for both these historical parallels seems very strong, the causal factors are not entirely clear, though Weyl does provide some possible explanations.[63]

In some respects, perhaps it was the enormously outsize Jewish academic performance of the past which was highly anomalous, and the more recent partial convergence toward white European norms which is somewhat less surprising. Over the years, claims have been widely circulated that the mean Jewish IQ is a full standard deviation—15 points—above the white average of 100,[64] but this seems to have little basis in reality. Richard Lynn, one of the world’s foremost IQ experts, has performed an exhaustive literature review and located some 32 IQ samples of American Jews, taken from 1920 to 2008. For the first 14 studies conducted during the years 1920–1937, the Jewish IQ came out very close to the white American mean, and it was only in later decades that the average figure rose to the approximate range of 107–111.[65]

In a previous article “Race, IQ & Wealth,” I had suggested that the IQs of ethnic groups appear to be far more malleable than many people would acknowledge, and may be particularly influenced by factors of urbanization, education, and affluence.[66] Given that Jews have always been America’s most heavily urbanized population and became the most affluent during the decades in question, these factors may account for a substantial portion of their huge IQ rise during most of the twentieth century. But with modern electronic technology recently narrowing the gaps in social environment and educational opportunities between America’s rural and urban worlds, we might expect a portion of this difference to gradually dissipate. American Jews are certainly a high-ability population, but the innate advantage they have over other high-ability white populations is probably far smaller than is widely believed.

This conclusion is supported by the General Social Survey (GSS), an online dataset of tens of thousands of American survey responses from the last forty years which includes the Wordsum vocabulary test, a very useful IQ proxy correlating at 0.71. Converted into the corresponding IQ scores, the Wordsum-IQ of Jews is indeed quite high at 109. But Americans of English, Welsh, Scottish, Swedish, and Catholic Irish ancestry also have fairly high mean IQs of 104 or above, and their combined populations outnumber Jews by almost 15-to-1, implying that they would totally dominate the upper reaches of the white American ability distribution, even if we excluded the remaining two-thirds of all American whites, many of whose IQs are also fairly high. Furthermore, all these groups are far less highly urbanized or affluent than Jews,[67] probably indicating that their scores are still artificially depressed to some extent. We should also remember that Jewish intellectual performance tends to be quite skewed, being exceptionally strong in the verbal subcomponent, much lower in math, and completely mediocre in visuospatial ability; thus, a completely verbal-oriented test such as Wordsum would actually tend to exaggerate Jewish IQ.

Stratifying the white American population along religious lines produces similar conclusions. An analysis of the data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that Americans raised in the Episcopal Church actually exceeded Jews in mean IQ, while several other religious categories came quite close, leading to the result that the overwhelming majority of America’s high-ability white population had a non-Jewish background.[68]

Finally, in the case of Jews, these assimilation- or environment-related declines in relative academic performance may have been reinforced by powerful demographic trends. For the last generation or two, typical Jewish women from successful or even ordinary families have married very late and averaged little more than a single child, while the small fraction of Jewish women who are ultra-Orthodox often marry in their teens and then produce seven or eight children.[69] As a consequence, this extremely religious subpopulation has been doubling in size every twenty years, and now easily exceeds 10 percent of the total, including a far higher percentage of younger Jews. But ultra-Orthodox Jews have generally been academically mediocre, often with enormously high rates of poverty and government dependency.[70] Therefore, the combination of these two radically different trends of Jewish reproduction has acted to stabilize the total number of Jewish youngsters, while probably producing a sharp drop in their average academic achievement.

Meritocracy vs. Jews

Although the relative importance of these individual factors behind Jewish academic decline is unclear, the decline itself seems an unmistakable empirical fact, and the widespread unawareness of this fact has had important social consequences.

My casual mental image of today’s top American students is based upon my memories of a generation or so ago, when Jewish students, sometimes including myself, regularly took home a quarter or more of the highest national honors on standardized tests or in prestigious academic competitions; thus, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools might be 25 percent Jewish, based on meritocracy. But the objective evidence indicates that in present day America, only about 6 percent of our top students are Jewish, which now renders such very high Jewish enrollments at elite universities totally absurd and ridiculous. I strongly suspect that a similar time lag effect is responsible for the apparent confusion in many others who have considered the topic.

For example, throughout his very detailed book, Karabel always seems to automatically identify increasing Jewish enrollments with academic meritocracy, and Jewish declines with bias or discrimination, retaining this assumption even when his discussion moves into the 1990s and 2000s. He was born in 1950, graduated Harvard in 1972, and returned there to earn his Ph.D. in 1977, so this may indeed have been the reality during his formative years.[71] But he seems strikingly unaware that the world has changed since then, and that over the last decade or two, meritocracy and Jewish numbers have become opposing forces: the stricter the meritocratic standard, the fewer the Jews admitted.

Most of my preceding analysis has focused on the comparison of Asians with Jews, and I have pointed out that based on factors of objective academic performance and population size, we would expect Asians to outnumber Jews by perhaps five to one at our top national universities; instead, the total Jewish numbers across the Ivy League are actually 40 percent higher. This implies that Jewish enrollment is roughly 600 percent greater relative to Asians than should be expected under a strictly meritocratic admissions system.

Obviously, all these types of analysis may be applied just as easily to a comparison of Jews with non-Jewish whites, and the results turn out to be equally striking. The key factor is that although Jewish academic achievement has apparently plummeted in recent decades, non-Jewish whites seem to have remained relatively unchanged in their performance, which might be expected in such a large and diverse population. As a consequence, the relative proportions of top-performing students have undergone a dramatic shift.

We must bear in mind that the official U.S. Census category of “Non-Hispanic white” (which I will henceforth label “white”) is something of an ethnic hodgepodge, encompassing all the various white European ancestry groups, as well as a substantial admixture of North Africans, Middle Easterners, Iranians, Turks, Armenians, and Afghans. It amounts to everyone who is not black, Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian, and currently includes an estimated 63 percent of all Americans.

Determining the number of whites among NMS semifinalists or winners of various academic competitions is relatively easy. Both Asian and Hispanic names are quite distinctive, and their numbers can be estimated by the methods already discussed. Meanwhile, blacks are substantially outnumbered by Hispanics and they have much weaker academic performance, so they would produce far fewer very high scoring students. Therefore, we can approximate the number of whites by merely subtracting the number of Asian and Hispanic names as well as an estimated black total based on the latter figure, and then determine the number of white Gentiles by also subtracting the Jewish total.

Once we do this and compare the Jewish and non-Jewish white totals for various lists of top academic performers, we notice a striking pattern, with the historical ratios once ranging from near-equality to about one-in-four up until the recent collapse in Jewish performance. For example, among Math Olympiad winners, white Gentiles scarcely outnumbered Jews during the 1970s, and held only a three-to-two edge during the 1980s and 1990s, but since 2000 have become over fifteen times as numerous. Between 1938 and 1999, Putnam Exam winners had averaged about two white Gentiles for every Jew, with the ratios for each decade oscillating between 1.5 and 3.0, then rising to nearly 5-to-1 during 2001–2005, and without a single Jewish name on the winner list from 2006 onward.

The elite science competitions follow a broadly similar pattern. Non-Jewish whites had only outnumbered Jews 2-to-1 among the Physics Olympiad winners during 1986–1997, but the ratio rose to at least 7-to-1 during 2002–2012. Meanwhile, white Gentiles were more numerous by nearly 6-to-1 among 1992–2012 Computing Olympiad winners, 4-to-1 among the 2002–2011 Siemens AP Award winners, and over 3-to-1 among 2003–2012 Biology Olympiad champions. Across the sixty-odd years of America’s Science Talent Search, Jews had regularly been named finalists at a relative rate fifteen- or even twenty-times that of their white Gentile classmates, but over the last decade or so, this has dropped by half.

The evidence of the recent NMS semifinalist lists seems the most conclusive of all, given the huge statistical sample sizes involved. As discussed earlier, these students constitute roughly the highest 0.5 percent in academic ability, the top 16,000 high school seniors who should be enrolling at the Ivy League and America’s other most elite academic universities. In California, white Gentile names outnumber Jewish ones by over 8-to-1; in Texas, over 20-to-1; in Florida and Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in New York, America’s most heavily Jewish state, there are more than two high-ability white Gentile students for every Jewish one. Based on the overall distribution of America’s population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America’s highest ability students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish total of under 6 percent.

Needless to say, these proportions are considerably different from what we actually find among the admitted students at Harvard and its elite peers, which today serve as a direct funnel to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, and finance. Based on reported statistics, Jews approximately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools, which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the official statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Harvard are America’s most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction of their national population than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher academic test scores.

When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America’s recent NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics, foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.

However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all relative to their number of high-ability college-age students.

Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70 percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews.

Furthermore, the Harvard enrollment changes over the last decade have been even more unusual when we compare them to changes in the underlying demographics. Between 2000 and 2011, the relative percentage of college-age blacks enrolled at Harvard dropped by 18 percent, along with declines of 13 percent for Asians and 11 percent for Hispanics, while only whites increased, expanding their relative enrollment by 16 percent. However, this is merely an optical illusion: in fact, the figure for non-Jewish whites slightly declined, while the relative enrollment of Jews increased by over 35 percent, probably reaching the highest level in Harvard’s entire history. Thus, the relative presence of Jews rose sharply while that of all other groups declined, and this occurred during exactly the period when the once-remarkable academic performance of Jewish high school students seemed to suddenly collapse.

Most of the other Ivy League schools appear to follow a fairly similar trajectory. Between 1980 and 2011, the official figures indicate that non-Jewish white enrollment dropped by 63 percent at Yale, 44 percent at Princeton, 52 percent at Dartmouth, 69 percent at Columbia, 62 percent at Cornell, 66 percent at Penn, and 64 percent at Brown. If we confine our attention to the last decade or so, the relative proportion of college-age non-Jewish whites enrolled at Yale has dropped 23 percent since 2000, with drops of 28 percent at Princeton, 18 percent at Dartmouth, 19 percent at Columbia and Penn, 24 percent at Cornell, and 23 percent at Brown. For most of these universities, non-white groups have followed a mixed pattern, mostly increasing but with some substantial drops. I have only located yearly Jewish enrollment percentages back to 2006, but during the six years since then, there is a uniform pattern of often substantial rises: increases of roughly 25 percent at Yale, 45 percent at Columbia, 10 percent at Cornell, 15 percent at Brown, and no declines anywhere.

Fourteen years ago I published a widely-discussed column in the Wall Street Journal highlighting some of the absurdities of our affirmative action system in higher education.[72] In particular, I pointed out that although Jews and Asians then totaled merely 5 percent of the American population, they occupied nearly 50 percent of the slots at Harvard and most of the other elite Ivies, while non-Jewish whites were left as the most under-represented student population, with relative numbers below those of blacks or Hispanics. Since then Jewish academic achievement has seemingly collapsed but relative Jewish enrollment in the Ivies has generally risen, while the exact opposite combination has occurred for both Asians and non-Jewish whites. I find this a strange and unexpected development.

It is important to recognize that all of these enrollment statistics are far less precise than we might ideally desire. As mentioned earlier, over the last couple of decades widespread perceptions of racial bias in admissions have led a significant number of students to refuse to reveal their race, which the official statistics classify as “race unknown.” This group almost certainly consists of Asians and whites, but it is impossible for us to determine the relative proportions, and without this information our above estimates can only be approximate.

Similarly, nearly all our figures on Jewish enrollment were ultimately drawn from the estimates of Hillel, the national Jewish campus organization, and these are obviously approximate. However, the Hillel data is the best we possess for recent decades, and is regularly used by the New York Times and other prominent media outlets, while also serving as the basis for much of Karabel’s award-winning scholarship. Furthermore, so long as any latent bias in the data remained relatively constant, we could still correctly analyze changes over time.

For these sorts of reasons, any of the individual figures provided above should be treated with great caution, but the overall pattern of enrollments—statistics compiled over years and decades and across numerous different universities—seems likely to provide an accurate description of reality.

Elite Colleges Look Neither Like America Nor Like America’s Highest-Ability Students

We are therefore faced with the clear conundrum that Jewish students seem to constitute roughly 6 percent of America’s highest-ability high school graduates and non-Jewish whites around 65–70 percent, but these relative ratios differ by perhaps 1000 percent from the enrollments we actually find at Harvard and the other academic institutions which select America’s future elites. Meanwhile, an ethnic distribution much closer to this apparent ability-ratio is found at Caltech, whose admissions are purely meritocratic, unlike the completely opaque, subjective, and discretionary Ivy League system so effectively described by Karabel, Golden, and others.

One obvious explanatory factor is that the Ivy League is located in the Northeast, a region of the country in which the Jewish fraction of the population is more than twice the national average. However, these schools also constitute America’s leading national universities, so their geographical intake is quite broad, with Harvard drawing less than 40 percent of its American students from its own region, and the others similarly tending to have a nationally distributed enrollment. So this factor would probably explain only a small portion of the discrepancy. Furthermore, MIT utilizes a considerably more meritocratic and objective admissions system than Harvard, and although located just a few miles away has a ratio of Jewish to non-Jewish whites which differs by nearly a factor of four in favor of the latter compared to its crosstown rival.

By the late 1960s Jewish students had become a substantial fraction of most Ivy League schools and today some of their children may be benefiting from legacies. But until about twenty-five years ago, white Gentiles outnumbered their Jewish classmates perhaps as much as 3-to-1, so if anything we might expect the admissions impact of legacies to still favor the former group. Anyway, the research of Espenshade and his colleagues have shown that being a legacy provides an admissions advantage in the range of 19–26 percent,[73] while we are attempting to explain enrollment differences of roughly 1000 percent.

American Jews are certainly more affluent than most other groups, but all Ivy League universities admit their American students on a “need-blind” basis, so perceptions of ability to pay cannot be a factor, even if any evidence existed that Jewish applicants were actually wealthier than their non-Jewish counterparts. Many Jewish alumni are very generous to their alma maters, but so are non-Jews, and indeed nine of the ten largest university donations in history have come from non-Jewish individuals, nearly all in the last fifteen years;[74] thus, mercenary hopes of large future bequests would probably not be influencing these skewed admissions.

Perhaps Jews simply apply to these schools in far greater relative numbers, with successful, educationally-ambitious Jewish families being much more likely to encourage their bright children to aim at the Ivies than the parents of equally bright non-Jews. However, since these elite schools release no information regarding the ethnic or racial skew of their applications, we have no evidence for this hypothesis. And why would high-ability non-Jews be 600 percent or 800 percent more likely to apply to Caltech and MIT than to those other elite schools, which tend to have a far higher national profile?

Anyway, the numbers alone render this explanation implausible. Each year, the Ivy League colleges enroll almost 10,000 American whites and Asians, of whom over 3000 are Jewish. Meanwhile, each year the NMS Corporation selects and publicly names America’s highest-ability 16,000 graduating seniors; of these, fewer than 1000 are Jewish, while almost 15,000 are non-Jewish whites and Asians. Even if every single one of these high-ability Jewish students applied to and enrolled at the Ivy League—with none going to any of America’s other 3000 colleges—Ivy League admissions officers are obviously still dipping rather deep into the lower reaches of the Jewish ability-pool, instead of easily drawing from some 15,000 other publicly identified candidates of far greater ability but different ethnicity. Why would these universities not simply send out inexpensive mailings to these 15,000 top students, encouraging them to apply, especially since their geographical, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds might help to considerably “diversify” undergraduate enrollments, while greatly raising the average student test scores by which these universities supposedly live or die in the competitive college-rankings.

The situation becomes even stranger when we focus on Harvard, which this year accepted fewer than 6 percent of over 34,000 applicants and whose offers of admission are seldom refused. Each Harvard class includes roughly 400 Jews and 800 Asians and non-Jewish whites; this total represents over 40 percent of America’s highest-ability Jewish students, but merely 5 percent of their equally high-ability non-Jewish peers. It is quite possible that a larger percentage of these top Jewish students apply and decide to attend than similar members from these other groups, but it seems wildly implausible that such causes could account for roughly an eight-fold difference in apparent admissions outcome. Harvard’s stated “holistic” admissions policy explicitly takes into account numerous personal characteristics other than straight academic ability, including sports and musical talent. But it seems very unlikely that any remotely neutral application of these principles could produce admissions results whose ethnic skew differs so widely from the underlying meritocratic ratios.

One datapoint strengthening this suspicion of admissions bias has been the plunge in the number of Harvard’s entering National Merit Scholars, a particularly select ability group, which dropped by almost 40 percent between 2002 and 2011, falling from 396 to 248. This exact period saw a collapse in Jewish academic achievement combined with a sharp rise in Jewish Harvard admissions, which together might easily help to explain Harvard’s strange decline in this important measure of highest student quality.

Harvard could obviously fill its entire class with high-scoring valedictorians or National Merit Scholars but chooses not to do so. In 2003, Harvard rejected well over half of all applicants with perfect SAT scores, up from rejecting a quarter a few years earlier, and in 2010 Princeton acknowledged it also admitted only about half.[75] According to Harvard’s dean of admissions, “With the SAT, small differences of 50 or 100 points or more have no significant effect on admissions decisions.”[76] In fact, a former Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard has claimed that by the mid-2000s as few as 5 percent of the students at highly selective universities such as his own were admitted purely based on academic merit.[77]

It is important to note that these current rejection rates of top scoring applicants are vastly higher than during the 1950s or 1960s, when Harvard admitted six of every seven such students and Princeton adopted a 1959 policy in which no high scoring applicant could be refused admission without a detailed review by a faculty committee.[78] An obvious indication of Karabel’s obtuseness is that he describes and condemns the anti-meritocratic policies of the past without apparently noticing that they have actually become far worse today. An admissions framework in which academic merit is not the prime consideration may be directly related to the mystery of why Harvard’s ethnic skew differs in such extreme fashion from that of America’s brightest graduating seniors. In fact, Harvard’s apparent preference for academically weak Jewish applicants seems to be reflected in their performance once they arrive on campus.[79]

Having considered and largely eliminated these several possible explanatory factors, we can only speculate as to the true causes of such seemingly anomalous enrollment statistics at our Ivy League universities. However, we cannot completely exclude the possible explanation that these other top students are simply not wanted at such elite institutions, perhaps because their entrance in large numbers might drastically transform the current ethnic and cultural mix. After all, Karabel devoted hundreds of pages of his text to documenting exactly this pattern of Ivy League admissions behavior during the 1920s and 1930s, so why should we be surprised if it continues today, at least at an unconscious level, but simply with the polarities reversed?

It would be unreasonable to ignore the salient fact that this massive apparent bias in favor of far less-qualified Jewish applicants coincides with an equally massive ethnic skew at the topmost administrative ranks of the universities in question, a situation which once again exactly parallels Karabel’s account from the 1920s. Indeed, Karabel points out that by 1993 Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all had presidents of Jewish ancestry,[80] and the same is true for the current presidents of Yale, Penn, Cornell, and possibly Columbia, as well as Princeton’s president throughout during the 1990s and Yale’s new incoming president, while all three of Harvard’s most recent presidents have either had Jewish origins or a Jewish spouse.[81]

At most universities, a provost is the second-ranking official, being responsible for day-to-day academic operations. Although Princeton’s current president is not Jewish, all seven of the most recent Princeton provosts stretching back to 1977 have had such ancestry, with several of the other Ivies not being far behind.[82] A similar degree of massive overrepresentation is found throughout the other top administrative ranks of the rest of the Ivy League, and across American leading educational institutions in general, and these are the institutions which select our future national elites.

I have not the slightest reason to doubt that the overwhelming majority of these individuals are honest and sincere, and attempt to do their best for their institutions and their students. But as our liberal intellectual elites regularly emphasize, unconscious biases or shared assumptions can become a huge but unnoticed problem when decision-making occurs within a very narrow circle, whose extreme “non-diversity” may lead to lack of introspection, and what else can be said when for the last two decades almost all of the leaders of our most elite universities have been drawn from an ethnic community constituting just 2 percent of America’s population?

As a perfect example of such a situation, consider an amusing incident from the mid-1980s, when Asian groups first noticed a sharp decline in Asian admissions rates to Harvard and accused the university of having begun a quiet effort to restrict Asian numbers, criticism which was vigorously resisted by senior Harvard officials. During this period, Henry Rosovsky, Harvard’s Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (and later Acting President), referred to Asian American students as “no doubt the most over-represented group in the university.”[83] At that point, Harvard’s Asian students were enrolled at 300 percent of parity, while those of Rosovsky’s own ethnicity were probably at 900 percent or more of parity.[84]

Unconscious biases may become especially serious when combined with an admissions system based on the extreme flexibility and subjectivity that exists at these colleges. As mentioned, three of Caltech’s last six presidents have been of Jewish origins, but the objective admissions system has produced no sign of ethnic favoritism, and largely meritocratic MIT also seems unaffected by having had two Jewish presidents of the last five.[85] But when machinery already exists for admitting or rejecting whomever a university wishes, on any grounds whatsoever, that machinery may be unconsciously steered in a particular direction by the shared group biases of the individuals controlling it.

The Disturbing Reality of the Elite College Admission System

Perhaps the most detailed statistical research into the actual admissions practices of American universities has been conducted by Princeton sociology professor Thomas J. Espenshade and his colleagues, whose results were summarized in his 2009 book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, co-authored with Alexandria Walton Radford. Their findings provide an empirical look at the individual factors that dramatically raise or lower the likelihood of acceptance into the leading American universities which select the next generation of our national elites.

The research certainly supports the widespread perception that non-academic factors play a major role in the process, including athletic ability and “legacy” status. But as we saw earlier, even more significant are racial factors, with black ancestry being worth the equivalent of 310 points, Hispanics gaining 130 points, and Asian students being penalized by 140 points, all relative to white applicants on the 1600 point Math and Reading SAT scale.[86]

Universities always emphasize the importance of non-academic (and subjective) “leadership traits” as a central reason why they do not rely upon grades and academic test scores to select at least their white students, arguing that evidence of such personal initiative and leadership should often outweigh somewhat lower academic performance in predicting future success and value to our society. And on the face of it, these claims may seem plausible.

But the difficulty comes from the fact that such subjective factors must necessarily be assessed subjectively, by the particular individuals sitting in the Yale or Columbia admissions offices, and their cultural or ideological background may heavily taint their decision-making. One of Espenshade’s most striking findings was that excelling in certain types of completely mainstream high school activities actually reduced a student’s admission chances by 60–65 percent, apparently because teenagers with such interests were regarded with considerable disfavor by the sort of people employed in admissions; these were ROTC, 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of America, and various similar organizations.[87] Consider that these reported activities were totally mainstream, innocuous, and non-ideological, yet might easily get an applicant rejected, presumably for being cultural markers. When we recognize the overwhelmingly liberal orientation of nearly all our elite universities and the large communities of academics and administrators they employ, we can easily imagine what might become of any applicants who proudly proclaimed their successful leadership roles in an activity associated with conservative Christianity or rightwing politics as their extracurricular claim to fame.

Our imagination is given substance by The Gatekeepers, a fascinating and very disturbing inside look at the admissions system of Wesleyan, an elite liberal arts college in Middleton, Conn. The author was Jacques Steinberg, a veteran National Education Correspondent at the New York Times, and now its editor focusing on college admissions issues. Although Wesleyan definitely ranks a notch or so below the Ivies in selectivity, Steinberg strongly suggests that the admissions decision-making process is very similar, and while his 2002 book described the selection of the Fall 2000 entering class, his afterword to the 2012 edition states that the overall process has remained largely unchanged down to the present day. Whether or not Steinberg himself recognizes it, the most striking fact—which would surely shock students almost anywhere else in the Developed World—is the enormous focus on ideology and ethnic background compared to academic achievement or evidence of intellectual ability, as well as the powerful role of “connections” and clout.

Consider the case of Tiffany Wang, a Chinese immigrant student raised in the Silicon Valley area, where her father worked as an engineer. Although English was not her first language, her SAT scores were over 100 points above the Wesleyan average, and she ranked as a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, putting her in the top 0.5 percent of high school students (not the top 2 percent as Steinberg mistakenly claims). Nevertheless, the admissions officer rated her just so-so in academics, and seemed far more positively impressed by her ethnic activism in the local school’s Asian-American club. Ultimately, he stamped her with a “Reject,” but later admitted to Steinberg that she might have been admitted if he had been aware of the enormous time and effort she had spent campaigning against the death penalty, a political cause near and dear to his own heart. Somehow I suspect that a student who boasted of leadership in pro-death penalty activism among his extracurriculars might have fared rather worse in this process. And presumably for similar reasons, Tiffany was also rejected by all her other prestigious college choices, including Yale, Penn, Duke, and Wellesley, an outcome which greatly surprised and disappointed her immigrant father.[88]

There was also the case of half-Brazilian Julianna Bentes, with slight black ancestry, who came from a middle-class family and attended on a partial scholarship one of America’s most elite prep schools, whose annual tuition now tops $30,000; her SAT scores were somewhat higher than Tiffany’s, and she was an excellent dancer. The combination of her academic ability, dancing talent, and “multiracial” background ranked her as one of America’s top college recruitment prospects, gaining her admission and generous financial packages from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and every other elite university to which she applied, including the University of Chicago’s most prestigious academic scholarship award and a personal opportunity to meet Chelsea Clinton while visiting Stanford, which she did, before ultimately selecting Yale.[89]

Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam, her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion, he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.[90]

In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she “didn’t see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After graduation, she eventually took a job at her father’s successful law firm, thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America’s ruling Ivy League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best.”[91]

Steinberg’s description of the remaining handful of Wesleyan applicants seems to fall into a very similar pattern, indicating that our elite admissions process operates under the principle of “Ideology and Diversity tempered by Corruption.” Certainly the majority of the decisions made seem to demonstrate that although the Maoist doctrine of favoring “Red over Expert” was abandoned decades ago in China, it is still alive and well in America’s elite university admissions process, though sometimes mitigated by factors of wealth and influence.[92] The overwhelmingly liberal orientation of the elite university community, the apparent willingness of many liberals to actively discriminate against non-liberals, and the fact that American Jews remain perhaps the most liberal ethnic community may together help explain a significant portion of our skewed enrollment statistics.[93]

We should also note that although admissions officers are poorly paid, earning less than public school teachers,[94] they nevertheless control a very valuable resource. According to Steinberg’s account, when individual officers are particularly forceful in their advocacy for an obviously under-qualified applicant, their colleagues regularly ask them, perhaps jokingly, “how much are they paying you to get that student admitted?”[95] Indeed, Golden states that admissions officers at top universities are constantly being offered explicit bribes, sometimes even including promises of houses or cruises.[96] And although Steinberg’s presentation of Wesleyan’s admissions practices was glowingly favorable, it may have been more than pure coincidence that the particular admissions officer who was the focus of his reporting decided to seek employment elsewhere just before the book was scheduled to appear in print.[97]

Steinberg’s narrative is engagingly written and he makes no effort to conceal his own ideological orientation, but some of his major lapses are troubling. For example, he accepts without question the notion that Asian-American applicants receive a racial “diversity” boost in elite admissions, though it has been obvious for decades that the exact opposite is true. And in his introduction, he describes the disturbingly exclusionary world of the past, explaining that until the late 1950s Jews “need not have bothered trying” to enroll at Harvard or the other Ivies.[98] Yet in fact, Jews were heavily, often massively over-represented in the Ivy League throughout the entire Twentieth Century, and by 1952 constituted 25 percent of Harvard undergraduates, a rate some 700 percent higher than their share of the general population.[99]

Steinberg is an award-winning journalist who has spent most of the last 15 years covering education for the New York Times, and surely ranks near the very top of his profession; his book was widely reviewed and almost universally praised. For such huge factual errors to pass unnoticed is a very disturbing indication of the knowledge and assumptions of the individuals who shape our public perceptions on the realities of higher education in our society.

In fact, it seems likely that some of these obvious admissions biases we have noticed may be related to the poor human quality and weak academic credentials of many of the university employees making these momentous decisions. As mentioned above, 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.[100] 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.

As additional evidence, we can consider What It Really Takes to Get into the Ivy League, a 2003 advice book written by Chuck Hughes, who spent five years as a Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard, after having himself graduated from that university. Although he strongly emphasizes his own college participation in varsity sports, he never says a word about any personal academic interests, and near the end of his book on elite college admissions, he appears to describe Duke, Northwestern, and Rice as being members of the Ivy League.[101]

A more explicit statement of this exact problem is found in A for Admission, a very candid 1997 description of the admissions process at elite private universities written by Michele A. Hernandez, who had spent four years as Dartmouth’s Assistant Director of Admissions. Near the beginning of her book, Hernandez explains that over half of Ivy League admissions officers are individuals who had not attended such academically challenging universities, nor probably had the intellectual capability to do so, and were sometimes confused about the relative ranking of SAT scores and other basic academic credentials. She also cautions students to avoid any subtlety in their essays, lest their words be misunderstood by their readers in the admissions office, whose degrees are more likely to have been in education than in any serious academic discipline.[102]

It seems quite possible that poorly-paid liberal arts or ethnic-studies majors, probably with few quantitative skills and a vaguely “progressive” ideological focus, could implement highly unfair admissions decisions without even realizing their actions. According to Steinberg, admissions officers seem to assume that an important part of their duty is maximizing non-white enrollment, and this is especially true if they themselves are non-white, while there is no indication that they are actually aware of America’s overall population distribution.[103]

The last point is not a trivial one, since although our country is only about 13 percent black, according to a 2001 Gallup survey most people thought the figure was 33 percent, with the average non-white putting it at 40 percent.[104] This was roughly confirmed by the GSS respondents in 2000, who also believed that nearly 18 percent of Americans were Jewish, a figure more than eight times too large.[105] A very recent 2012 survey found that Americans believe Protestants outnumber Jews in this country by only 2.5 to 1, when the actual ratio is ten times greater.[106]

Such shocking demographic ignorance is hardly confined solely to the uneducated. For example, soon after Karabel’s book appeared, a prominent Massachusetts law school dean with a major interest in ethnic discrimination issues devoted two hours of his televised public affairs program to a detailed discussion of the topic with the author, but at the end let slip that he believed California’s population was 50 percent Asian, an utter absurdity.[107] So perhaps many college administrators may have little idea about which ethnic groups are already enrolled above parity and which are below, instead taking their marching orders from an amorphous academic narrative which valorizes “racial diversity.”

Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s, and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education.[108] These articles included denunciations of Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system.

I suspect that the combined effect of these separate pressures, rather than any planned or intentional bias, is the primary cause of the striking enrollment statistics that we have examined above. In effect, somewhat dim and over-worked admissions officers, generally possessing weak quantitative skills, have been tasked by their academic superiors and media monitors with the twin ideological goals of enrolling Jews and enrolling non-whites, with any major failures risking harsh charges of either “anti-Semitism” or “racism.” But by inescapable logic maximizing the number of Jews and non-whites implies minimizing the number of non-Jewish whites.

Problems with Pure Diversity and Pure Meritocracy

In recent decades, elite college admissions policy has frequently become an ideological battlefield between liberals and conservatives, but I would argue that both these warring camps have been missing the actual reality of the situation.

Conservatives have denounced “affirmative action” policies which emphasize race over academic merit, and thereby lead to the enrollment of lesser qualified blacks and Hispanics over their more qualified white and Asian competitors; they argue that our elite institutions should be color-blind and race-neutral. Meanwhile, liberals have countered that the student body of these institutions should “look like America,” at least approximately, and that ethnic and racial diversity intrinsically provide important educational benefits, at least if all admitted students are reasonably qualified and able to do the work.

My own position has always been strongly in the former camp, supporting meritocracy over diversity in elite admissions. But based on the detailed evidence I have discussed above, it appears that both these ideological values have gradually been overwhelmed and replaced by the influence of corruption and ethnic favoritism, thereby selecting future American elites which are not meritocratic nor diverse, neither being drawn from our most able students nor reasonably reflecting the general American population.

The overwhelming evidence is that the system currently employed by most of our leading universities admits applicants whose ability may be unremarkable but who are beneficiaries of underhanded manipulation and favoritism. Nations which put their future national leadership in the hands of such individuals are likely to encounter enormous economic and social problems, exactly the sort of problems which our own country seems to have increasingly experienced over the last couple of decades. And unless the absurdly skewed enrollments of our elite academic institutions are corrected, the composition of these feeder institutions will ensure that such national problems only continue to grow worse as time passes. We should therefore consider various means of correcting the severe flaws in our academic admissions system, which functions as the primary intake valve of our future national elites.

One obvious approach would be to wave a magic wand and make the existing system “work better” by replacing many thousands of college admissions officers by individuals more competent and less venal, guardians of the common good who would properly balance objective academic merit against other intrinsic student qualities, while avoiding any lapse into rank favoritism. But this same simple solution could always be proposed for any other obviously failing system, including Soviet-style Communism.

A more fundamental change might be to directly adopt the implicit logic of America’s “academic diversity” movement—whose leadership has been overwhelmingly Jewish[109]—and require our elite universities to bring their student bodies into rough conformity with the overall college-age population, ethnicity by ethnicity, in which case the Jewish presence at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League would drop to between 1.5 and 2 percent.[110]

However, even leaving aside the rights and wrongs of such a proposal, it would be extremely difficult to implement in practice. The pattern of American ethnic origins is complex and interwoven, with high intermarriage rates, leading to categories being fluid and ambiguous. Furthermore, such an approach would foster clear absurdities, with wealthy Anglo-Saxons from Greenwich, Conn. being propelled into Yale because they fill the “quota” created on the backs of the impoverished Anglo-Saxons of Appalachia or Mississippi.

An opposite approach would be to rely on strictest objective meritocracy, with elite universities automatically selecting their students in academic rank-order, based on high school grades and performance on standardized exams such as the SAT. This approach would be similar to that used in many other developed countries around the world, but would produce severe social problems of its own.

Consider the notorious examples of the single-minded academic focus and testing-frenzy which are already sometimes found at many predominantly Asian immigrant high schools, involving endless cram-courses and massive psychological pressure. This seems very similar to the stories of extreme educational effort found in countries such as Japan, South Korea, and China, where educational success is an overriding social value and elite admissions are fully determined by rank-order academic performance. At present, these severe educational pressures on American teenagers have been largely confined to a portion of our small Asian-American population and perhaps some of their non-Asian schoolmates, but if Harvard and its peers all selected their students based on such criteria, a huge fraction of American students would be forced to adopt similar work-habits or lose any hope of gaining admission. Do we really want to produce an entire nation of “Asian Tiger Moms” of all ethnicities and backgrounds, probably with horrible consequences for the future mental health, personal creativity, and even long-term academic performance of the next generation?

Also, we would expect such a system to heavily favor those students enrolled at our finest secondary schools, whose families could afford the best private tutors and cram-courses, and with parents willing to push them to expend the last ounce of their personal effort in endless, constant studying. These crucial factors, along with innate ability, are hardly distributed evenly among America’s highly diverse population of over 300 million, whether along geographical, socio-economic, or ethnic lines, and the result would probably be an extremely unbalanced enrollment within the ranks of our top universities, perhaps one even more unbalanced than that of today. Although American cultural elites may currently pay too much lip service to “diversity” as a value, there is also such a thing as too little educational diversity. Do we really want a system in which all of America’s top 100 universities selected their students much like Caltech does today, and therefore had a similar academic environment?

We should also consider that under such a selection system, any interest or involvement not directly contributing to the academic transcript—including activities associated with artistic talent, sports ability, or extra-curricular leadership—would disappear from our top universities, since students who devoted any significant time to those pursuits would tend to lose out to those who did not. Even those highest-ability students who gained admission would tend to forego the benefits of encountering classmates with a somewhat more balanced mix of interests and abilities, a group closer to the American mainstream, and might therefore develop a very one-sided and unrealistic view of our national population. And if every student admitted to Harvard believed, not without some justification, that he had been objectively determined to be among the smartest and hardest working 0.05 percent of all Americans his age, that might not be the best psychological starting point for a teenager just entering his adult life and future career.

These same problems would also manifest themselves in an admissions system based on strict meritocracy as adjusted by socio-economic status, which Richard Kahlenberg prominently advocated in his 1996 book The Remedy, and various other writings. Although this approach has always seemed reasonably attractive to me and the results would certainly provide more socio-economical balance than straight meritocracy, other “diversity” enhancements might be minimal. We should remember that a significant fraction of our Asian immigrant population combines very low socio-economic status with extremely strong academic performance and educational focus, so it seems likely that this small group would capture a hugely disproportionate share of all admissions spots influenced by these modifying factors, which may or may not be fully realized by advocates of this approach.

An Inner Ring and an Outer Ring

But if selecting our future elites by purest “diversity” wouldn’t work, and using purest “meritocracy” would seem an equally bad idea, what would be the right approach to take as a replacement for today’s complex mixture of diversity, meritocracy, favoritism, and corruption?

Perhaps an important starting point would be to recognize that in any normal distribution curve, numbers widen greatly and differences become far less significant below the very top. Today’s academic supporters of “affirmative action” frequently claim that beneath the strongest tier of academic applicants to Yale or Stanford, the differences between particular students become relatively small, only slightly indicative of how they will perform at the college if they are enrolled;[111] and this claim is not entirely false. A large fraction of all the students applying have demonstrated that they have the ability and commitment to adequately perform the college work in question, and although they are unlikely to graduate in the top 5 percent of Princeton’s class, the same is also true of the vast majority of their classmates. The average student at Harvard is going to be an average Harvard student, and perhaps it would be better if a large majority of the admitted students would not find this prospect a horrifying disappointment after their previously stellar career of having always been the biggest student fish in their smallish academic ponds.

The notion of top universities only selecting a slice of their students based on purest academic merit certainly seems to be the standard today, and was so in the past as well. Karabel recounts how during the 1950s and 1960s, Harvard reserved about 10 percent of its spots for “top brains,” while selecting the remainder based on a mixture of different factors.[112] In Choosing Elites, Robert Klitgaard indicates that roughly this same approach continued into the 1980s, with only a fraction of admitted students being classified and admitted as “first-class scholars.”[113] As already mentioned, according to Hughes, who served five years as a Harvard Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard, by the mid-2000s only 5 percent or less of Harvard undergraduates were selected purely on academic merit, with extracurricular activities and a wide variety of unspecified other criteria being used to choose among the other 80–85 percent of applicants who could actually handle the academic work; and this same pattern is found at most other highly selective universities.[114] Given a widening funnel of ability, it is absurd to base admissions decisions on just a small difference of twenty or thirty points on the SAT, which merely encourages students to spend thousands of hours cramming in order to gain those extra crucial twenty or thirty points over their competitors.

But if our elite colleges were to select only a portion of their students based on purest academic merit, how should they pick the remainder, merely by flipping a coin? Actually, that might not be such a terrible idea, at least compared with the current system, in which these decisions are often seemingly based on massive biases and sometimes even outright corruption. After all, if we are seeking a student body which is at least somewhat diverse and reasonably representative of the American population, random selection is hardly the least effective means of ensuring that outcome. And the result would be true diversity, rather than the dishonest and ridiculous pseudo-diversity of our existing system.

The notion of using random selection to overcome the risk of unfair bias has been used for centuries, including in our own country, and is regularly found in matters of the greatest civic importance, especially those involving life and death. Our jury system relies on the random selection of a handful of ordinary citizens to determine the guilt or innocence of even the most eminent and powerful individuals, as well as to render corporate verdicts with penalties reaching into the billions. The millions of Americans ordered to fight and perhaps die in our major wars were generally called into the military by the process of a random draft lottery. And today, the enormous growth of games of chance and financial lotteries, often government-run, have become an unfortunate but very popular aspect of our entire economic system. Compared to these situations, requiring an excellent but hardly spectacular student to take his chances on winning a spot at Harvard or Yale hardly seems unreasonable.

In The Big Test, journalist Nicholas Lemann traces the history of meritocratic admissions policy, and the philosophical conflicts which liberals faced once that policy first came into direct conflict with the racial diversity they also favored, beginning when the DeFunis “reverse discrimination” case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974. At that point, one of the high court’s strongest liberal voices was Justice William O. Douglas, and he repeatedly considered the possible use of random lotteries as the fairest means of allocating college admissions slots below the top tier of most highly qualified applicants.[115]

Let us explore the likely social implications of such an admissions policy, focusing solely on Harvard and following a very simple model, in which (say) 300 slots or around 20 percent of each entering class are allocated based on pure academic merit (the “Inner Ring”), with the remaining 1300 slots being randomly selected from the 30,000 or so American applicants considered able to reasonably perform at the school’s required academic level and thereby benefit from a Harvard education (the “Outer Ring”).

First, we must recognize that the 300 applicants admitted by straight merit would be an exceptionally select group, representing just the top 2 percent of America’s 16,000 NMS semifinalists. Also, almost any American students in this group or even reasonably close would be very well aware of that fact, and more importantly, nearly all other students would realize they were far too distant to have any chance of reaching that level, no matter how hard they studied or how many hours they crammed, thus freeing them from any terrible academic pressure. Under today’s system, the opaque and haphazard nature of the admissions process persuades tens of thousands of students they might have a realistic shot at Harvard if only they would study a bit harder or participate in one more resume-stuffing extracurricular,[116] but that would no longer be the case, and they would be able to relax a bit more during their high school years, just so long as they did well enough to qualify and try their luck as one of the “Outer Ring” of applicants.

The 300 Inner Ring students would certainly be quite different in all sorts of ways from the average high school student, even aside from their greater academic ability and drive; they might not be “diverse” in any sense of the word, whether geographically, ethnically, or socio-economically. But the remaining 1300 Outer Ring students would represent a random cross-section of the tens of thousands of students who applied for admission and had reasonably good academic ability, and since they would constitute 80 percent of the enrollment, Harvard would almost certainly become far more diverse and representative of America’s total population in almost all ways than is the case today, when 30 percent of its students come from private schools, often the most elite and expensive ones.[117]

Furthermore, the vast majority of Harvard graduates—and everyone who later dealt with them—would know perfectly well that they had merely been “lucky” in gaining their admission, thereby tempering the sort of arrogance found among too many of today’s elite college graduates. And our vast and growing parasitic infrastructure of expensive cram-schools, private tutors, special academies, and college application consultants would quickly be reduced to what was merited by their real academic value, which may actually be close to nil. A general armistice would have been declared in America’s endlessly growing elite admissions arms-race.

Under such a system, Harvard might no longer boast of having America’s top Lacrosse player or a Carnegie Hall violinist or a Senatorial scion. But the class would be filled with the sort of reasonably talented and reasonably serious athletes, musicians, and activists drawn as a cross-section from the tens of thousands of qualified applicants, thereby providing a far more normal and healthier range of students.

The terrible family pressure which students, especially immigrant students, often today endure in the college admissions process would be greatly reduced. Even the most ambitious parents would usually recognize that their sons and daughters are unlikely to ever outrank 99.99 percent of their fellow students academically, so their only hope of reaching a school like Harvard would be the same as that of everyone else, via the admissions lottery. And losing in a random drawing can hardly be a source of major shame to any family.

One of the most harmful aspects of recent American society has been the growth of a winner-take-all mentality, in which finishing even just slightly below the top rung at any stage of the career ladder seems to amount to economic and sometimes personal failure. An aspect of this is that our most elite businesses tend to only recruit from the top universities, assuming that these possess a near-monopoly on the brightest and most talented students, even though it actually appears that favoritism and corruption these days are huge factors in admission. But if it were explicitly known that the vast majority of Harvard students had merely been winners in the application lottery, top businesses would begin to cast a much wider net in their employment outreach, and while the average Harvard student would probably be academically stronger than the average graduate of a state college, the gap would no longer be seen as so enormous, with individuals being judged more on their own merits and actual achievements. A Harvard student who graduated magna cum laude would surely have many doors open before him, but not one who graduated in the bottom half of his class.

This same approach of an Inner Ring and an Outer Ring of admissions could similarly be applied to most of America’s other selective colleges, perhaps with some variations in the relative sizes of the two groups. It is possible that some universities such as Caltech, which today selects its 200 entering freshmen by purely meritocratic academic rank-order, might prefer to retain that system, in which case the Inner Ring would constitute the entire enrollment. Other universities, which glorify the extremes of total diversity, might choose to select almost all their students by random lot. But for most, the sort of split enrollment I have outlined might work reasonably well.

Since colleges would still be positioned in a hierarchy of national excellence and prestige, those students whose academic record just missed placing them within the Inner Ring of a Harvard or a Yale would almost certainly gain automatic admission to a Columbia, Cornell, or Duke, and the same sort of cascading effect would be found down through all subsequent layers of selectivity. Thus, although America’s top couple of thousand students each year would not all be found among the 4000 entering Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, they would at least gain admission to some Ivy or its equivalent, in contrast to the shocking examples of admissions injustice recounted by Golden.

Since essays, personal statements, lists of extracurricular achievements and so many other uniquely complex and time-consuming elements of the American admissions process would no longer exist, students could easily apply to long lists of possible colleges, ranking them in order of personal preference. Meanwhile, the colleges themselves could dispense with nearly their entire admissions staff, since the only remaining part of the admissions process would be determining the academic ranking of the tiny fraction of top applicants, which could be performed quickly and easily. Harvard currently receives almost 35,000 applications, which must each be individually read and evaluated in a massive undertaking, but applying a crude automatic filter of grades and test scores would easily winnow these down to the 1,000 plausible candidates for those 300 Inner Ring slots, allowing a careful evaluation of those highest-performing students on pure academic grounds.

Eliminating at a stroke the enormous expense and complexity of our baroque admissions process might actually raise the quality of the students attending elite colleges by drawing more applicants into the system, especially if, as I suggest elsewhere, tuition at our top private colleges were drastically reduced or even eliminated (See “Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund”).

The late James Q. Wilson certainly ranked as one of America’s most highly-regarded social scientists of the second half of the twentieth century, and when he was awarded the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Social Sciences in 2011, his remarks provided some fascinating details of his own educational background. Although an outstanding high school student in Southern California, no one in his family had ever previously attended college nor had he himself given it any thought, instead starting work in his father’s auto repair shop after graduation in order to learn the trade of a car mechanic. However, one of his teachers arranged his admission to a small college on a full scholarship, which launched him on his stellar academic career.[118]

It seems likely that the vast paperwork and expense of today’s admissions system, with its endless forms, intrusive questionnaires, fee-waiver-applications, and general bureaucracy intimidates many bright students, especially those from impoverished or immigrant backgrounds, and deters them from even considering an application to our elite colleges, especially since they perhaps wrongly assume that they would stand no chance of success. But filling out a few very simple forms and having their test scores and grades scores automatically forwarded to a list of possible universities would give them at least the same chance in the lottery as any other applicant whose academic skills were adequate.

Following the 1991 collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union, some observers noted with unease that the United States was left as about the only remaining large and fully-functional multi-ethnic society, and the subsequent collapse and disintegration of ethnically diverse Yugoslavia merely strengthened these concerns. China is sometimes portrayed by the ignorant American media as having large and restive minority populations, but it is 92 percent Han Chinese, and if we exclude a few outlying or thinly populated provinces—the equivalents of Alaska, Hawaii, and New Mexico—closer to 95 percent Han, with all its top leadership drawn from that same background and therefore possessing a natural alignment of interests. Without doubt, America’s great success despite its multiplicity of ethnic nationalities is almost unique in modern human history. But such success should not be taken for granted.

Many of the Jewish writers who focus on the history of elite university admissions, including Karabel, Steinberg, and Lemann, have critiqued and rebuked the America of the first half of the Twentieth Century for having been governed by a narrow WASP ascendency, which overwhelmingly dominated and controlled the commanding heights of business, finance, education, and politics; and some of their criticisms are not unreasonable. But we should bear in mind that this dominant group of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—largely descended from among the earliest American settlers and which had gradually absorbed and assimilated substantial elements of Celtic, Dutch, German, and French background—was generally aligned in culture, religion, ideology, and ancestry with perhaps 60 percent of America’s total population at the time, and therefore hardly represented an alien presence.[119] By contrast, a similarly overwhelming domination by a tiny segment of America’s current population, one which is completely misaligned in all these respects, seems far less inherently stable, especially when the institutional roots of such domination have continually increased despite the collapse of the supposedly meritocratic justification. This does not seem like a recipe for a healthy and successful society, nor one which will even long survive in anything like its current form.

Power corrupts and an extreme concentration of power even more so, especially when that concentration of power is endlessly praised and glorified by the major media and the prominent intellectuals which together constitute such an important element of that power. But as time goes by and more and more Americans notice that they are poorer and more indebted than they have ever been before, the blandishments of such propaganda machinery will eventually lose effectiveness, much as did the similar propaganda organs of the decaying Soviet state. Kahlenberg quotes Pat Moynihan as noting that the stagnant American earnings between 1970 and 1985 represented “the longest stretch of ‘flat’ income in the history of the European settlement of North America.”[120] The only difference today is that this period of economic stagnation has now extended nearly three times as long, and has also been combined with numerous social, moral, and foreign policy disasters.

Over the last few decades America’s ruling elites have been produced largely as a consequence of the particular selection methods adopted by our top national universities in the late 1960s. Leaving aside the question of whether these methods have been fair or have instead been based on corruption and ethnic favoritism, the elites they have produced have clearly done a very poor job of leading our country, and we must change the methods used to select them. Conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. once famously quipped that he would rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 names listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard. So perhaps an important step in solving our national problems would be to apply a similar method to selecting the vast majority of Harvard’s students.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative.

Quantitative Sources and Methods Appendices

- Quantitative Sources and Methods Appendices

Primary Bibliography

The Shape of the River[1998] William G. Bowen and Derek Bok

Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education [2005] William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother [2011] Amy Chua

No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal [2009] Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford

The Price of Admission [2006] Daniel Golden

Twilight of the Elites [2012] Christopher Hayes

A Is For Admission [1997] Michele A. Hernandez

Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street [2009]

Karen Ho

Asian Americans in Higher Education and at Work [1988] Jayjia Hsia

What It Really Takes to Get into the Ivy League [2003] Chuck Hughes

The Chosen [2005] Jerome Karabel

Choosing Elites [1985] Robert Klitgaard

The Big Test [1999] Nicholas Lemann

The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement [2011] Richard Lynn

How to Be a High School Superstar [2010] Cal Newport

Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale [1985] Dan A. Oren

How They Got Into Harvard [2005] The Harvard Crimson

The Gatekeepers (2002/2012) Jacques Steinberg

The Half-Opened Door (1979/2010) Marcia Graham Synnott

The Retreat from Race (1992/1998) Dana Y. Takagi

The Abilities and Achievements of Orientals in North America [1982] Philip E. Vernon

The Creative Elite in America [1966] Nathaniel Weyl

The Geography of American Achievement [1989] Nathaniel Weyl

References

[1] “Harvard Says 125 Students May Have Cheated on a Final Exam,” Richard Perez-Pena and Jess Bidgood, The New York Times, August 30, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/education/harvard-says-125-students-may-have-cheated-on-exam.html

[2] By 2010, the top 1% of Americans possessed 35.4% of the national net wealth, while the bottom 95% held 36.9%. See Edward N. Wolff, “The Asset Price Meltdown and the Wealth of the Middle Class,” New York University, August 26, 2012: http://appam.confex.com/appam/2012/webprogram/Paper2134.html .

[3]See Ho [2009] pp. 11, 13, 40-69 passim, 256 for an extensive discussion of the college background and recruitment choices made by Wall Street firms in recent years. According to her “ethnography” of Wall Street, major financial firms recruit very heavily from Harvard and Princeton, somewhat less at the remaining Ivy League schools and a few others such as Stanford and MIT, and rarely anywhere else, partly because they believe admission to elite universities provide evidence of “smartness,” which Wall Street values above all else (p. 38).

The claim that attendance at an Ivy League or other elite university provides a substantial advantage over similarly talented individuals has been disputed by the recent research of Stacy Dale and Alan B. Krueger, but their findings are based on students who graduated college almost two decades ago, and probably do not capture the dramatic recent changes in the American economy and Wall Street practices since that time. See David Leonhardt, “Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges,” The New York Times, February 21, 2011: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-value-of-elite-colleges/ .

[4] Ezra Klein, “Wall Street Steps In When Ivy League Fails,” Washington Post, February 16, 2012: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/wall-street-steps-in-when-ivy-league-fails/2012/02/16/gIQAX2weIR_story.html

[5] Austin Bramwell, “Top of the Class,” The American Conservative, March 13, 2012: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/top-of-the-class/

[6] As an example of these extreme efforts, see “NYC’s Kindergarten Wars,” The New York Post/PageSix Magazine, October 5, 2008: http://www.nypost.com/pagesixmag/issues/20081005/NYCs+Kindergarten+Wars

[7] Jenny Anderson and Peter Applebome, “Exam Cheating on Long Island Hardly a Secret,” The New York Times, December 1, 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/education/on-long-island-sat-cheating-was-hardly-a-secret.html

[8] Golden [2006] pp. 44-48.

[9] Ssu-yu Teng, “Chinese Influence on the Western Examination System,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Sept. 1943, pp. 267-312.

[10] Karabel [2005] pp. 89-109.

[11] Oren [1985] p. 62.

[12] Karabel [2005] p. 126.

[13] Karabel [2005] pp. 387-391.

[14] Karabel [2005] p. 364

[15] Karabel [2005] pp. 93, 194-195, 486-499.

[16] Karabel [2005] pp. 524-525.

[17] Admittedly, surveys show that the vast majority of Asian-Americans do not believe their racial background hurts their chances of college admission, but such factors would obviously apply primarily only at the elite, highly selective universities, which only a small fraction of Asians seek to attend. See “The Rise of Asian Americans,” Pew Research Center, June 19, 2012: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/ .

[18] Jesse Washington, “Some Asians’ College Strategy: Don’t Check ‘Asian,’” The Associated Press, December 3, 1011:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-12-03/asian-students-college-applications/51620236/1 . See also Jon Marcus, “Competitive Disadvantage,” The Boston Globe, April 17, 2011: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04/17/high_achieving_asian

_americans_are_being_shut_out_of_top_schools/ and Scott Jaschik, “Is It Bias? Is It Legal?,” Inside Higher Ed, February 3, 2012: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/03/federal-probe-raises-new-questions-discrimination-against-asian-american-applicants .

[19] Espanshade [2009] p. 92-93.

[20] Golden [2006] p. 200.

[21] The elite university enrollment statistics for Asians and other racial and ethnic groups derived from the NCES data are provided in Appendix C. All the Asian figures provided by the NCES exclude “mixed race” individuals, who were previously included in the “Race Unknown” category but since 2009 have been provided separately.

[22] Hsia [1988] pp. 93-148, Takagi (1992/1998).

[23] For example, see Oren [1985] pp. 320-322 and Synnott (1979/2010) pp. 112,195.

[24] A portion of this decline in relative Asian enrollment may be apparent rather than real. As noted earlier, some Asian applicants, especially those of mixed parentage and without an identifying Asian name, may attempt to conceal their non-white ancestry in hopes of enhancing their likelihood of admission. But such a situation can hardly be used to justify Ivy League policy, and since the numbers are unknown, we must generally confine our analysis to the officially reported statistics.

[25] It should be noted that some former Ivy League admissions officers strongly deny such charges of anti-Asian bias. For example, Chuck Hughes, who spent five years as a Harvard Senior Admissions Officer, claims in his 2003 book that Asian American applicants—just like blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, and other non-whites—actually receive a beneficial “tip” in evaluating their application packages. It should also be noted that Hughes strongly emphasizes his own enthusiastic participation in varsity sports as a Harvard undergraduate, while avoiding mention of any academic interests. See Hughes [2003] pp. 86, 145.

[26] Hsia [1988] pp. 98-99; Karabel [2005] p. 500.

[27] Indeed, Dean L. Fred Jewett of Harvard suggested in 1985 that among Asians “family pressure makes more marginal students apply” but provided no evidence for this claim, which seems contradicted by the objective evidence. See Hsia [1988] p. 97.

[28] College Confidential, September 16, 2011:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13210307-post724.html .

[29] One apparent difficulty in such Asian surname analysis might be the case of mixed-race individuals with Asian names, but this difficulty is quite insignificant. First, mixed-race Asians are only about 15% of the total Asian population, and are excluded from our Asian statistics for college enrollments. Meanwhile, until quite recently, the overwhelming majority of marriages between Asians and non-Asians involved an Asian wife, hence the last names of any children would tend not to be Asian and would be excluded from our list analysis. Thus, both our college enrollment figures and our academic performance estimates tend to exclude part-Asians and should be fully consistent.

[30] The 2000 Census lists 310,125 Nguyens, or about 1 in 3.6 of the total Vietnamese population of 1,122,528. Meanwhile, there were 194,067 Kims, representing 1 in 5.5 of the 1,076,872 Koreans.

[31] Weyl [1987] pp. 26-27.

[32] Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White [1997] pp. 398-400 provides some racial statistics on the past distribution of top SAT scores which would strongly support this conclusion. In 1981, Asians were just 2% of the college-age population but accounted for over 4% of students with Verbal scores of 700 or above and 11% of those with Math scores of 750 or above. By 1995, college-age Asians were still just 3% of the total, but produced over 14% of those high Verbal scores and a remarkable 28% of the high Math scores. Since Asian-Americans have now increased to roughly 5% of students of college age and have also become much more affluent, we would expect such figures to be far higher today.

[33] Although the primary measure of human “fluid intelligence”—so-called “g”—is measured consistently across different groups, for reasons not entirely clear the three principal subcomponents of Verbal, Mathematical, and Visuospatial abilities sometimes vary substantially across racial or ethnic lines. For example, East Asians tend to be especially strong in Visuospatial ability but much less so in Verbal ability, Jews are extremely strong in Verbal but mediocre in Visuospatial skills, while most white Europeans tend to be intermediate in both these different categories. See Vernon [1982] pp. 20-21, 160-163, 178-180, 272-277.

[34] Suein Hwang, “The New White Flight,” The Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2005: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113236377590902105-search.html .

[35] At his 1992 Milwaukee trial, Jeffrey Dahmer freely admitted torturing, killing, and cannibalizing 17 young men, but vigorously denied he had selected his mostly black victims out of any racial bias. In a more typical case, after black Connecticut truck driver Omar Thornton massacred five of his white co-workers, the media focused considerable attention on whether they had been innocent victims or “racists” as Thornton had alleged.

[36] In recent years, the Reading and Writing SAT scores for entering freshmen at all four universities have been almost identical, while the Math SAT scores at Caltech have been significantly higher, as have been the percentages of National Merit Scholars. See the NCES website: http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ and Steve Hsu, “Elite Universities and Human Capital Mongering,” October 10, 2010: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/10/elite-universities-and-human-capital.html .

[37] Indeed, the 1988 official register of Harvard, intended for prospective applicants, actually described the Harvard admissions process as “complex, subjective, and sometimes difficult to comprehend.” See Takagi (1992/1998) p. 63.

[38] As Asian applications to the University of California system grew rapidly during the 1980s, there were major efforts to replace a simple and objective meritocratic admissions system with a “holistic” and opaque system, closer to that of the Ivies, which had the initial effect of sharply reducing Asian admissions. See Hsia [1988] pp. 106-119, Takagi (1992/1998). However, political resistance by Asian groups in California and especially the subsequent passage of Proposition 209 eventually overcame these policies.

[39] Earlier this month, a lengthy New York Times article on Asian admissions issues written by the newspaper’s former Education Editor argued that the use of objective admissions standards had caused the Berkeley and UCLA campuses to become more than half Asian, and suggested that this had led to adverse social and educational consequences. However, this claim contains serious factual errors, given that the 2011 Asian undergraduate enrollments were just 37% and 34%  respectively, and had never come close to half at any point in history. See Ethan Bronner, “Asian-Americans in the Argument,” The New York Times, November 4, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/affirmative-action-a-complicated-issue-for-asian-americans.html .

[40] Asians are currently 72% of the students at Stuyvesant and 63% at Bronx Science, while the latter school was just 20% Asian in 1986. See Kyle Spencer, “For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones,” The New York Times, October 28, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/a-grueling-admissions-test-highlights-a-racial-divide.html and Deborah Anderluh, “High School for Gifted Kids May Open in L.A.,” The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, September 28, 1986:

.

[41] In the mid-1980s, charges that anti-Asian discrimination in the UC system were similar to the old “Jewish quotas” of the Ivy League quickly provoked television network coverage. See Takagi (1992/1998) pp. 50-51.

[42] Media coverage played a huge role in influencing the growth and outcome of the battle over the admissions of Asians to the UC system. See Takagi (1992/1998) pp.49-51, 74-77, 100-103.

[43] Asian-Americans had 2010 median annual household income of $66,000, about 22% higher than the white figure and were almost 60% more likely to have graduated from college, in each case ranking the highest of any racial group. See “The Rise of Asian Americans,” Pew Research Center, June 19, 2012: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/ .

[44] In defending Harvard against 1980s accusations of anti-Asian discrimination in admissions, Dean Fred Jewett made exactly this point regarding the impact of Asian geographical concentration. See Takagi (1992/1998) p. 69.

[45] These were exactly the arguments made by a relatively recent Harvard graduate who had served as Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Independent and also reported on admissions practices. See Matthew Yglesias, “Harvard and Princeton Clearly Discriminate Against Asian Applicants; the Question Is Whether It’s Illegal,” Slate.com, February 14, 2012: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/02/14/harvard_and_princeton_clearly_

discriminate_against_asian_appliants_the_question_is_whether_it_s_illegal.html.

[46] Daniel Golden, “Harvard Targeted in U.S. Asian-American Discrimination Probe, Bloomberg News, February 2, 2012: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-02/harvard-targeted-in-u-s-asian-american-discrimination-probe.html ; Daniel E. Slotnik, “Do Asian-Americans Face Bias in Admissions at Elite Colleges?,” The New York Times, February 8, 2012: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/do-asian-americans-face-bias-in-admissions-at-elite-colleges/ ; Editorial, “A Ludicrous Lawsuit,” The Harvard Crimson, February 8, 2012: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/8/lawsuit-admissions-fair/ .

[47] Dana Vachon, “The Code of the Winklevii,” Vanity Fair, December 2011: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/12/winklevosses-201112 .

[48] For decades, comparing and contrasting Asian-Americans with Jews has been a commonplace in public policy analysis, given that both groups are small but high-performing minorities in American society. See, for example, “The Triumph of Asian-Americans” and “Asians and Jews,” David A. Bell, The New Republic, July 15-22, 1985 and Michael Barone, The New Americans [2001] pp. 193-274. Indeed, one-third of Barone’s book consists of the section entitled “Jews and Asians.” Most recently, the entire front page of the Wall Street Journal Weekly Review section was devoted to exactly this topic; see Lee Siegel, “Rise of the Tiger Nation,” Wall Street Journal, October 27-28, 2012: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204076204578076613986930932.html .

[49] Jewish enrollment estimates for elite universities are summarized in Appendix D.

[50] Karabel [2005] p. 536.

[51] Since the overwhelming majority of Harvard’s foreign students are drawn from non-white countries or countries with negligible Jewish populations, it is likely that nearly all the Jewish students reported by Hillel are American. However, 6.2% of Harvard undergraduates refused to report their race in 2011, and many of these, possibly a majority, may actually be white. This “Race Unknown” category has typically ranged between 5% and 15% of Harvard undergraduates over the last couple of decades, with roughly similar numbers at most other Ivy League schools.

[52] For all these Jewish demographic estimates, see Appendix B.

[53] The combined undergraduate enrollment of the eight Ivy League universities includes roughly 12,000 Jews, 9,000 Asians, and 13,000 non-Jewish whites, as well as 5,000 students whose racial background is unknown. The population of college-age Americans consists of roughly 10 million whites, including 300,000 Jews, and 800,000 Asians.

[54] Steve Sailer, “National Merit Semifinalists by School and Name,” September 18, 2010: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/09/national-merit-semifinalists-by-school.html ; “The Far East Rises in the West,” Takimag.com, February 29, 2012: http://takimag.com/article/the_far_east_rises_in_the_west_steve_sailer/print ; “More Views on California Surnames of Semifinalists,” February 29, 2012: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/02/more-views-on-california-sunrnames-of.html . Obviously such a Jewish surname analysis would miss the children of intermarried families in which the husband was non-Jewish, hence only count half the half-Jews. However, any such errors introduced are probably small relative to the broader uncertainty in defining and estimating total Jewish numbers, the ambiguity in identifying Jewish names, and the likely estimation errors in the Jewish college enrollment statistics.

[55] Fernanda Santos, “To Be Black at Stuyvesant High,” The New York Times, February 25, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/education/black-at-stuyvesant-high-one-girls-experience.html . In 2012, Asians were 72.5% of Stuyvesant students, with all whites at just 24%, of whom an unspecified fraction were Jewish. Charles Murray has noted that in 1954, Jewish children comprised 24/28 or 85% of the highest-scoring students in NYC on a citywide IQ test, although at that point Jews were probably a little less than 30% of the city’s total white population, so a similar degree of over-representation at the local elite academic schools seems plausible. See Charles Murray, “Jewish Genius,” Commentary, April 2007.

[56] Weyl [1989] p. 26-27.

[57] Vernon [1982] 160-162, 178-179, 273; Richard Lynn, “The Intelligence of American Jews,” Personality and Individual Differences, January 2004; Margaret E. Backman, “Patterns of Mental Abilities: Ethnic, Socioeconomic, and Sex Differences,” American Educational Research Journal, Winter 1972.

[58] Evidence that these low Jewish enrollments are due to meritocratic admissions factors rather than merely lack of possible applicants may be seen if we compare different UC campuses. Berkeley and UCLA are the most selective, and at those Jewish enrollment averages about 9.5% or about one-quarter the Asian total; meanwhile, Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara are much less selective, and the Jewish percentages are nearly twice as high and also close to the local Asian figures. Jewish enrollments are also very substantial at the lower-tier California State University system, with numbers being much higher both at CS Northridge than nearby UCLA and at San Diego State compared to UCSD. Large numbers of Jewish students also attend the schools in the lowest-tier community college system as well, such as Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley. If these Jewish students had had higher academic performance, most would almost certainly have selected the much more prestigious University of California campuses.

[59] Kimball A. Milton and Jagdish Mehra, Climbing the Mountain: The Scientific Biography of Julian Schwinger, 2003, p. 218.

[60] Weyl [1989] p. 26-27 estimates Jews as having a “performance coefficient” of 339 on the 1987 NMS semifinalist list. Since Jews were then approximately 2.4% of the American population, they would have been roughly 8.1% of the 1987 NMS semifinalists.

[61] David W. Murray, “The War Against Testing,” Commentary, September 1998.

[62] California contains a large fraction of America’s mainland Japanese-Americans, who represent approximately 1.1% of the state’s population, while roughly 0.8% of the state’s NMS semifinalists have Japanese surnames. However, the older mean age of this group implies that it probably represents a relatively reduced fraction of the high school population.

[63] Weyl [1966] pp. 53-54, 83-84.

[64] Most recently, Judge Richard Posner, one of America’s most highly regarded jurists, made such a claim that Jews have a mean IQ of 115 on his blog, together with an even more absurd claim that the same was also true for Asian-Americans. See “Rating Teachers,” The Becker-Posner Blog, September 23, 2012, http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/rating-teachersposner.html .

[65] Lynn [2011] pp. 274-278.

[66] Ron Unz, “Race, IQ, and Wealth,” The American Conservative, August 2012: http://www.unz.com/article/race-iq-and-wealth/ .

[67] For example, the GSS indicates that just 3% of Jews live in rural areas, a tenth of the overall white rate, while Jews are over twice as likely to live in major cities or suburbs than the general white population.

[68] Helmuth Nyborg, “The Intelligence-Religiosity Nexus: A Representative Study of White Adolescent Americans,”

Intelligence [2009] pp. 81-93.

[69] See Appendix A.

[70] Sam Roberts, “A Village With the Numbers, Not the Image, of the Poorest Place,” The New York Times, April 20, 2011:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/nyregion/kiryas-joel-a-village-with-the-numbers-not-the-image-of-the-poorest-place.html .

[71] See Appendix G.

[72] Ron Unz, “Some Minorities Are More Minor Than Others,” The Wall Street Journal, November 16, 1998: http://www.unz.com/article/some-minorities-are-more-minor-than-others/ .

[73] Espenshade [2009] p. 113.

[74] See http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2012/02/21/the-10-most-generous-college-donations-of-all-time/ .

[75] Hughes [2003] p. 31. In 2003, roughly 450 students with perfect SAT scores of 1600 applied to Harvard, and fewer than 200 were accepted. For the 2000 rates, see Steinberg [2002] p. 220, and for the case of Princeton, see Kim Clark, “Do Elite Private Colleges Discriminate Against Asian Students?,” US News & World Report, October 7, 2009: http://www.usnews.com/education/articles/2009/10/07/do-elite-private-colleges-discriminate-against-asian-students .

[76] William R. Fitzsimmons, “Guidance Office: Answers From Harvard’s Dean, Part 2,” The New York Times, September 11, 2009: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/harvarddean-part2/

[77] Hughes [2003] 49, 57-58.

[78] Karabel [2005] pp. 292, 311.

[79] Privacy considerations prevent the public release of information on honors degrees awarded to graduates, but the top 10% of each Harvard class is inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the national honors society, and the university’s PBK rosters of the last fifty years are available on the Internet: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k19082&pageid=icb.page189954 . Thirty or forty years ago, Jewish names were very common on the PBK lists, but more recently they have dropped to fairly low levels. It appears that Harvard’s non-Jewish whites are now perhaps five times as likely as their Jewish classmates to achieve such high academic performance, with Asian students doing nearly as well. See Appendix G.

In recent years, Jewish conservatives have often been in the forefront of accusations that ethnic favoritism leads elite academic institutions to unfairly admit large numbers of blacks and Hispanics, who subsequently underperform once on campus. But perhaps such critics should consider looking into a mirror.

[80] Karabel [2005] p. 667n95.

[81] Harvard’s most recent presidents have been Neil Rudenstine (1991-2001), Larry Summers (2001-2006), and Drew Faust (2007-present); the first two were of Jewish ancestry, while the last has been married to Charles E. Rosenberg since 1980. Richard Levin has served as president of Yale since 1993, as did Harold Shapiro at Princeton (1988-2001), while the current presidents of Penn and Cornell are Amy Gutmann (2004-present), and David Skorton (2006-present) respectively, all of Jewish origins, as is Yale’s newly named incoming president Peter Salovey. In addition, former NYC Mayor Ed Koch identified Columbia President Lee Bollinger (2002-present) as being of Jewish ancestry in an angry column regarding Iran, but I have been unable to independently verify that claim. See Ed Koch, “Columbia Prez Should Have Stood Up for America, Too,” Jewish World Review, September 26, 2007.

[82] Princeton’s last seven provosts have been Neil Rudenstine (1977-1987), Paul Benacerraf (1988-1991), Hugo Sonnenschein (1991-1993), Stephen Goldfeld (1993-1995), Jeremiah Ostriker (1995-2001), Amy Guttmann (2001-2004), and Christopher Eisgruber (2004-present), and all were of Jewish ancestry. Four of Harvard’s last five provosts have had similar ethnicity, as well as three of three at Brown and two of five at Yale, including in each case the current officeholder.

[83] Fox Butterfield, “Harvard’s ‘Core’ Dean Glances Back,” The New York Times, June 2, 1984.

[84] See Appendix D. It is also curious that the weighty 1998 defense of preferential ethnic admissions policies at elite institutions written by former Harvard President Derek Bok and former Princeton President William G. Bowen contains no mention whatsoever of the widespread claims of anti-Asian discrimination at their own institutions, and does not even include a single reference to “Jews” in their very detailed index. See Bowen [1998].

[85] Three of Caltech’s most recent six presidents have been Harold Brown (1969-1977), Marvin Goldberger (1978-1987), and David Baltimore (1997-2006), all of Jewish ancestry. Two of MIT’s most recent five presidents have been Jerome Wiesner (1971–1980) and Leo Reif (2012–present), who have the same ethnic background.

[86] Espenshade [2009] pp. 92-93.

[87] Espenshade [2009] p. 126.

[88] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 124-136, 219-220.

[89] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 27-38, 204-210, 243-252.

[90] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 38-47, 173-195, 256-257.

[91] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 258-261, 281-282, 298-299.

[92] For example, Harvard President Derek Bok once denigrated the compensatory rational for affirmative action, instead praising “diversity” as “the hallmark” and the “core” of a university experience. As a positive instance of such “diversity,” he cited the benefits of enrolling a friend of his who had served as a captain of the women’s track team, and came from a background wealthy enough that she celebrated her birthday with a trip to Italy. See Kahlenberg [1996] p. 29.

[93] See Howard Kurtz, “College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds,” The Washington Post, March 29, 2005: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar28.html ; Emily Esfahani Smith, “Survey Shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement,” The Washington Times, August 1, 2012: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/liberal-majority-on-campus-yes-were-biased/ ; Eric Alterman, “Think Again: Jews Are Still Liberal,” The Center for American Progress, April 19, 2012: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/media/news/2012/04/19/11420/think-again-jews-are-still-liberal/ .

[94] Steinberg (2002/2012) p. 9.

[95] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 181-182.

[96] Golden [2006] p. 60.

[97] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 282-284.

[98] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. xiii, 130-131.

[99] See Appendix D.

[100] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 59-63, 265-266.

[101] Hughes [2003] p. 86, 202.

[102] Hernandez [1997] pp. 1-5. She suggests that the Harvard is the only Ivy League university in which a majority of the Admissions Officers tend to have an Ivy League background.

[103] Steinberg [2002] p. 131, 177-178.

[104] Joseph Carroll, “Public Overestimates U.S. Black and Hispanic Populations,” Gallup News Service, June 4, 2001.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/4435/public-overestimates-us-black-hispanic-populations.aspx

[105] Razib Khan, “How Many Minorities Are There in the USA?,” Discover Magazine/GNXP Blog, January 7, 2012: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/01/how-many-minorities-are-there-in-the-usa/ .

[106] Grey Matter Research Consulting, September 13, 2012

[107] Dean Lawrence R. Velvel of the Masschusetts School of Law interviewing Prof. Jerome Karabel on “Books of Our Time,” a public affairs show. The remarks described appear in the last nine minutes of the second hour segment. Hour One: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8911761293819497494 ; Hour Two: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4805892219974282 .

[108] “Sharp Drop in Jewish Enrollment at Princeton U. Stirs Concern,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 7, 1999; Ben Gose, “Princeton Tries to Explain a Drop in Jewish Enrollment,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 14, 1999; Caroline C. Pam, “Enrollment of Jews at Princeton Drops by 40% in 15 Years,” The New York Observer, May 31, 1999; Karen W. Arenson, “Princeton Puzzle: Where Have Jewish Students Gone?,” The New York Times, June 2, 1999. It should be noted that Princeton’s president at the time was Harold Shapiro, of Jewish ancestry, and just a few years earlier, the university had opened a $4.5 million Center for Jewish Life. See Synnott (1979/2010) p. xxvi-xxvii.

[109] See William Lind, “The Origins of Political Correctness,” February 5, 2000, Accuracy in Academia: http://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/ . Nearly all the figures mentioned were of Jewish origins.

[110] As discussed earlier, the recent accusations of Harvard racial discrimination from a rejected Asian applicant were denounced as “ludicrous” and “surreal” by the student editors of the Harvard Crimson, who emphasized the tremendous importance of affirmative action policies in maintaining student ethnic “diversity” at elite colleges and pointed out that Asians were anyway already over-represented by 200% relative to their portion of the American population. It so happens that the two top names on the Crimson masthead both came from an ethnic group over-represented at Harvard by nearly 1300%.

[111] For example, Bowen [1998] p. 37-39 attempts to compare the academic strength of black students admitted under affirmative action policies with the bottom decile of admitted white students, as a proxy for those whites rejected under affirmative action, and notes that the gap is smaller than often believed. The authors, former presidents of Harvard and Princeton, also emphasize that the crucial factor is to ensure that all admitted are above a high academic threshold and able to reasonably perform the work in question (p. 23). One obvious problem with this analysis is that if elite universities admit many under-qualified white students based on favoritism or corruption, these would constitute the bottom decile in question, and the comparison made would merely highlight this fact.

[112] Karabel [2005] p. 292.

[113] Klitgaard [1985] pp. 23-30.

[114] Hughes [2003] pp. 15, 49, 56. Also, in 1990 Harvard officials told federal investigators that 80-90% of applicants could probably do the academic work and 50-60% could do superb work. See Takagi (1992/1998) p. 194.

[115] Lemann [1999] pp. 206-207.

[116] Examples of the extreme effort students take in building their resumes for elite college admissions purposes are discussed throughout Newport [2010] and Harvard Crimson Editors [2005].

[117] See for example Austin Bramwell, “Top of the Class,” The American Conservative, March 13, 2012: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/top-of-the-class/ .

[118] Quoted in Heather Higgins, “Remembering James Q. Wilson,” US News and World Report, March 5, 2012: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2012/03/05/remembering-james-q-wilson .

[119] The quota provisions of the 1924 Immigration Act were based on the national origins of the existing American population and therefore required a detailed analysis of existing ethnicities, and the totals for 1920 are presented in Madison Grant, Conquest of a Continent [1933] pp. 278-280. Around that time, well over one-third of all Americans were of British ancestry, 80 percent were Protestant, and 85% of whites had origins in Northwestern Europe.

[120] Quoted in Kahlenberg [1996] p. 115.

Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund

Harvard's academic mission is dwarfed by its $30 billion endowment.

The American Conservative • December 4, 2012 • 1,300 Words

From its 1636 foundation Harvard had always ranked as America’s oldest and most prestigious college, even as it gradually grew in size and academic quality during the first three centuries of its existence. The widespread destruction brought about by the Second World War laid low its traditional European rivals, and not long after celebrating its third centennial, Harvard had become the world’s greatest university.

Harvard only improved its standing during the successful American postwar decades, and by its 350th anniversary in 1986 was almost universally recognized as the leader of the world’s academic community. But over the decade or two which followed, it quietly embarked upon a late-life career change, transforming itself into one of the world’s largest hedge funds, with some sort of school or college or something attached off to one side for tax reasons.

The numbers tell the story. Each September, Harvard’s 6,600 undergraduates begin their classes at the Ivy-covered walls of its traditional Cambridge campus owing annual tuition of around $37,000 for the privilege, up from just $13,000 in 1990. Thus, over the last two decades, total tuition income (in current dollars) has increased from about $150 million to almost $250 million, with a substantial fraction of this list-price amount being discounted in the form of the university’s own financial aid to the families of its less wealthy students.

Meanwhile, during most of these years, Harvard’s own endowment has annually grown by five or ten or even twenty times that figure, rendering net tuition from those thousands of students a mere financial bagatelle, having almost no impact on the university’s cash-flow or balance-sheet position. If all the students disappeared tomorrow—or were forced to pay double their current tuition—the impact would be negligible compared to the crucial fluctuations in the mortgage-derivatives market or the international cost-of-funds index.

A very similar conclusion may be drawn by examining the expense side of the university’s financial statement. Harvard’s Division of Arts and Sciences—the central core of academic activity—contains approximately 450 full professors, whose annual salaries tend to average the highest at any university in America. Each year, these hundreds of great scholars and teachers receive aggregate total pay of around $85 million. But in fiscal 2004, just the five top managers of the Harvard endowment fund shared total compensation of $78 million, an amount which was also roughly 100 times the salary of Harvard’s own president. These figures clearly demonstrate the relative importance accorded to the financial and academic sides of Harvard’s activities.

Unlike universities, the business model of large and aggressive hedge funds is notoriously volatile, and during the 2008 Financial Crisis, Harvard lost $11 billion on its net holdings, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy as its highly illiquid assets could not easily be redeployed to cover hundreds of millions of dollars in ongoing capital commitments to various private equity funds. The desperate hedge fund—ahem, academic institution—was forced to borrow $2.5 billion from the credit markets, lay off hundreds of university employees, and completely halt construction work on a huge expansion project, ultimately surviving and later recovering in much the same way as did Goldman Sachs or Citibank.

During all these untoward events, the dollars being paid in by physics majors and being paid out to professors of medieval French literature were of no significance whatsoever, and if institutional investors had balked at the massive bond sales, both groups might have arrived at the classroom one morning only to see a “Closed for Bankruptcy” notice, while Cerberus Capital Management and the Blackstone Group began furiously bidding for the liquidated real estate properties and private equity holdings of what had once been America’s most storied center of learning. Meanwhile, Bill Gates might have swooped in and acquired the unimportant educational properties themselves for a song, afterward renaming the campus itself Microsoft U.-East.

It is commendable that so many former students feel gratitude to their academic alma mater, but personal loyalty to a wealthy hedge fund is somewhat less warranted, and if Harvard’s residual and de minimis educational activities provide it with enormous tax advantages, perhaps those activities should be brought into greater alignment with benefit to our society. The typical private foundation is legally required to spend 5 percent of its assets on charitable activities, and with Harvard’s endowment now back over $30 billion, that sum would come to around $1.5 billion annually. This is many times the total amount of undergraduate tuition, which should obviously be eliminated, thereby removing a substantial financial barrier to enrollment or even application.

One of the major supposed reasons Harvard disproportionately admits the children of the wealthy or those of its alumni is the desperate need to maintain its educational quality by soliciting donations, and the endless irritations of fund-raising drives are an inevitable accompaniment to the reunion process. But the all-time record for a total alumni class contribution was set earlier this year by the Class of 1977 at just $68.7 million, or about 0.2 percent of the existing endowment; and even the aggregate amount of annual alumni donations to support the college is quite trivial compared to the overall income and expenditure statement.

There is also the Internet gossip of an explicit “Harvard Price,” a specific donation dollar amount which would get your son or daughter admitted. 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. Daniel Golden’s The Price of Admission provides a specific example which tends to generally confirm this disturbing belief.

But if such claims are true, then Harvard is following an absurd policy, selling off its good name and reputation for just pennies on the dollar, not least because the sums involved represent merely a day or two of its regular endowment income. Harvard surely ranks as the grandest academic name in the world, carrying a weight of prestige that could be leveraged to extract far greater revenue at far lower cost of academic dignity.

Suppose, for example, that instead of such surreptitious and penny-ante wheeling and dealing, Harvard simply auctioned off a single admissions slot each year to the highest blind bidder on the international markets. I suspect that the same sorts of individuals who currently pay $50 million or $100 million for a splotchy painting they can hang on their walls would surely be willing to spend a similar amount to have their son or daughter embossed with the Harvard stamp of approval. The key factor is that such prestige goods are almost entirely positional in value, with most of the benefit derived from the satisfaction of having outbid your rival Internet billionaires, oil sheikhs, or Russian oligarchs, so the higher the price goes, the more valuable the commodity becomes. And since the goal would be to extract as much money as possible from the wealthy bidders, a non-refundable bidding deposit of 2 percent or 5 percent, win or lose, might double or triple the total dollars raised.

Thus, instead of extracting steep net tuition from thousands of undergraduates (and perhaps quietly selling a handful of spots each year for a few million dollars each), Harvard could probably raise just as much revenue by enrolling a single under-qualified student in a process which would publicly establish the gigantic financial value contained in a Harvard diploma. It’s even quite likely that a useful side-benefit of the publicity would be a large rise in Harvard’s total applicants, including those of highest quality, as families all across the country and the world sought to obtain at zero cost the exact same product which a billionaire had just bought for $70 million.

If Harvard wishes to retain its primary existence as a gigantic profit-maximizing hedge fund, that is well and good, but meanwhile perhaps it should be required to provide a free top quality college education to a few thousand deserving students as a minor community service.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative.

Harvard as Hedge Fund: Harvard Replies

The American Conservative • December 10, 2012 • 1,600 Words

The reaction to my long Meritocracy cover story followed a very unusual pattern.

On the one hand, the piece received just a fraction of the major links and web discussions which several of my previous articles have attracted, and many of these seemed curiously abbreviated or oblique, sometimes describing my article as being quite important without explaining why it was important or even indicating what it said. Perhaps the 30,000 word article was just too long for most people to have fully read, causing them to focus merely on the points I made in the first few sections, and they will eventually get around to reading the rest.

But although the links and commentary were few, the traffic itself was enormous, at least for me. During just its first week, my Meritocracy piece attracted several times the total pageviews that my influential Hispanic Crime article had received during its first full year, along with over 2000 Facebook Likes and many hundreds of Tweets. There were also numerous comments, and some of the commenters described it as “the article which everyone is talking about” and presumably reading. But apparently few people are writing about it, at least in other than anonymous commenter fashion.

I will reserve further discussion of my Meritocracy article for the future. For now, the more immediate story is the remarkable sudden response to my 1300 word Harvard as Hedge Fund sidebar.

Late Friday afternoon, the piece was prominently featured on the Business Insider and CNBC websites, and soon redistributed on twitter by a large throng of individuals, some of them prominent journalists. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted “very jealous I did not write this article” to his 175,000 followers, Pulitizer Prize winner Bart Gellman described it as “eye opening,” and New York Times economic policy reporter Annie Lowrey sent the phrase “Harvard as a giant hedge fund plus a wee research university.” All in all, I’d think that mention of the piece may have reached a million or more Americans over the weekend.

Public scrutiny brings results, and on Sunday afternoon Kevin Galvin, Harvard University’s Senior Director for Communications, emailed TAC an unhappy letter to the editor, which he had apparently drafted in consultation with Lex Suvanto, the Chief Marketing Officer of the Abernathy MacGregor Group, Harvard’s external strategic communications firm. It appears that the urgency of defending Harvard’s reputation as America’s foremost “hedgefundersity” was simply too great to wait until Monday morning. I provide below the letter, together with my own reply.

Mr. Unz,

Your recent article regarding Harvard was brought to my attention and, leaving aside the premise entirely, I wanted to point out a few inaccuracies and request that they be corrected.

You base your calculations regarding top-paid managers at the Harvard Management Company on data that is eight years old. It has been well-documented that compensation policies at HMC have changed significantly in the intervening years and the figure you use for HMC compensation is so badly out of date as to be misleading in an article that is trying to make a case about contemporary circumstances.

While writing about the overall University’s finances, you make comparisons to the faculty of only one School, and the figure you cite for that area of the University is not accurate. The number of full professors at the University, which would seem to be the proper point of comparison, totals about 1,050. The number of full professors in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences totals about 550. Of course, that’s still apples to oranges if you are comparing it to 2004 data for HMC.

You also state in more than one instance that the institution was “on the verge of bankruptcy” following the global financial downturn of 2008. That is obviously untrue: Even after that tumultuous fiscal year HMC reported that the endowment totaled $27 billion.

Finally, at the end of your article, you seem to be trying to make the case that an institution of higher education with the resources of Harvard should help deserving students defray the cost of their education. I think you must be aware of Harvard’s robust financial aid program as you make passing reference to it higher up in the piece, but you leave the impression that the University has done nothing to address this topic. The details of the program show that since 2004 Harvard has dramatically reduced the amount that families are expected to pay to send a child to Harvard College. Harvard will spend $172 million on financial aid this year, and it has a policy of “zero contribution” from families with normal assets making $65,000 or less annually. Families with incomes up to $150,000 will pay from zero to 10 percent of their income, depending on individual family circumstances.

I hope that you will be able to clear up some of the misconceptions created by your piece.

Respectfully,

Kevin Galvin

Senior Director

Harvard Public Affairs & Communications

My Reply, sent to Kevin Galvin of Harvard University and Lex Suvanto of the Abernathy MacGregor Group:

Dear Mr. Galvin,

Thank you for your letter to the editor disputing certain aspects of my article “Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund.”

First, despite your claims to the contrary, Harvard’s extremely difficult financial situation during the 2008 Financial Crisis was widely reported by the major media, including in a February 2009 cover story in Forbes. That article described Harvard as “desperate for cash,” “begging for a return of money,” and in a “cash-raising panic.” According to Forbes, Harvard’s “multibillion-dollar bet on interest rates” had gone sour, and the university was getting margin calls for additional liquid collateral, collateral which it did not have. Furthermore, Harvard was burdened with $11 billion in ongoing capital commitments to private equity funds, and had no sure source of cash to cover these in a falling market. The endowment faced the classic problem of a mismatch between short-term liabilities and long-term assets, worsened by the collapsing market values of those illiquid assets. Hedge funds or investment banks frequently fail for exactly this reason, but such financial death spirals are less common for academic institutions.

Some investment firms such as Bear Stearns, Lehman, and Washington Mutual went under during the Financial Crisis, while the Wall Street Bailout saved others such as Morgan Stanley, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs. As a byproduct of the Bailout, asset prices and financial markets stabilized, allowing Harvard to tap the international bond markets for $2.5 billion in late 2008 and survive. But even so, Harvard’s losses totaled $11 billion for the year, while the university’s huge new debt burden required annual interest payments of $88 million, more than the combined salaries of all full professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

As a university, Harvard is rapidly approaching its 400th anniversary. But I suspect that the average life expectancy of heavily-leveraged hedge-funds is probably a decade or two at the most.

Regarding some of your other points, you are absolutely correct that my 2004 figure of $78 million in compensation paid to Harvard’s top five fund managers was specific to that year and that such compensation has varied considerably over time. For example, in 2003 Harvard’s top managers were paid $107 million, while in 2005 their pay fell to just $57 million. Then in 2008, the year in which they lost $11 billion and brought Harvard to the verge of bankruptcy, their pay dropped to merely $27 million. Over the last few years, their combined compensation seems to have stayed roughly in the $20 million annual range; meanwhile, Harvard’s aggregate net investment loss during the last five years has totaled over $6 billion. And for 2004, the year for which I was making the comparison, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences had 454 full professors, a total which I described as “approximately 450.” You are correct that the number has risen somewhat since then..

Given the thoroughness of your response, I must assume that you and your staff otherwise concede the accuracy of all my remaining factual claims, though you may certainly dispute their interpretation.

As I pointed out in my piece, the total net tuition annually paid by Harvard’s 6600 undergraduates is absolutely negligible in comparison to Harvard’s annual income or expenses, let alone Harvard’s vast endowment, and its disappearance would have no noticeable impact on the university’s finances. In fact, I suspect tuition income might even be less than just the annual interest which Harvard owes on the billions of dollars worth of bonds it sold to avert bankruptcy in 2008. Therefore, I see no logical reason why Harvard should not simply eliminate its entire complex and confusing machinery of “financial aid” by simply eliminating its entire undergraduate tuition.

Finally, I was rather surprised that you chose to focus all of your attention on my short sidebar analyzing Harvard’s finances rather than discuss my main 30,000 word cover story, The Myth of American Meritocracy, which strongly suggests a clear pattern of ongoing racial and ethnic discrimination in Harvard College admissions. I have already distributed a summary of some of my major findings, and this has been published on various websites, including that of Steve Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics. Earlier this year, Prof. Hsu had been selected by The New York Times to discuss the problem of racial discrimination against Asian-Americans in elite university admissions in their forum on American higher education.

I will be very interested in receiving Harvard’s official response to these very serious charges of racial discrimination in Harvard admissions policy.

Sincerely Yours,

Ron Unz

Publisher, The American Conservative

Statistics Indicate an Ivy League Asian Quota

The New York Times • December 19, 2012 • 700 Words

Just as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the existence of “Jewish quotas,” top officials at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of “Asian quotas.”  But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary.

Each year, American universities provide their racial enrollment data to the National Center for Education Statistics, which makes this information available online.  After the Justice Department closed an investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University discriminated against Asian-American applicants, Harvard’s reported enrollment of Asian-Americans began gradually declining, falling from 20.6 percent in 1993 to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade.

This decline might seem small.  But these same years brought a huge increase in America’s college-age Asian population, which roughly doubled between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic white numbers remained almost unchanged.  Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last two decades, while the percentage of whites changed little.  This decline in relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of Harvard’s 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to 15 percent.

The percentages of college-age Asian-Americans enrolled at most of the other Ivy League schools also fell during this same period, and over the last few years Asian enrollments across these different universities have converged to a very similar level and remained static over time.  This raises suspicions of a joint Ivy League policy to restrict Asian-American numbers to a particular percentage.

Meanwhile, the California Institute of Technology follows a highly selective but strictly race-neutral admissions policy, and its enrollment of Asian-Americans has grown almost exactly in line with the growth of the Asian-American population.

The last 20 years have brought a huge rise in the number of Asians winning top academic awards in our high schools or being named National Merit Scholarship semifinalists.  It seems quite suspicious that none of trends have been reflected in their increased enrollment at Harvard and other top Ivy League universities.

Some individuals have suggested that Asian-Americans no longer apply to the Ivy League in large numbers and this explains their reduced presence.  The prestigious University of California system routinely releases the racial totals for its college applicants, which allows the public to examine admission rates by race.  During the 1980s,  Ivy League colleges sometimes did so as well, but more recently have begun keeping these figures secret.  If Harvard and the other Ivy League schools simply released their racial application totals for the last 20 years, we might easily resolve the disturbing suspicion that they have quietly implemented a system of “Asian-American quotas.”

Since the Ivy League universities currently release their yearly racial totals both for admissions and for enrollments, I cannot see what plausible excuse they might have against also releasing their racial application totals.  This would allow us to examine the trends of racial admission rates for the last couple of decades, and decide whether or not these seemed suspicious.

Between 1980 and 1987 the Brown University admissions rate for Asian-American applicants dropped by over 40% compared with that for all other racial groups.  This discovery provoked considerable media scrutiny during the 1980s and eventually contributed to a federal investigation into anti-Asian discrimination at elite colleges. Perhaps as a consequence, the Ivy League has steadfastly refused to release any subsequent admissions rate figures, raising obvious suspicions that they might have something to hide.

Last week, Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, one of America’s most prominent social scientists, argued that the statistical data seems to demonstrate a clear pattern of racial discrimination against Asian-American applicants to Ivy League universities.  Now this New York Times forum has raised exactly the same question, including similar charges by former Delaware Lt. Governor S.B. Woo, who served as Founding President of 80-20, one of America’s leading Asian-American advocacy organizations.

American academics and journalists all across the political spectrum should begin asking Harvard and the other Ivy League universities to release the racial application totals which might substantiate their claims that they have not adopted “Asian-American quotas.”

Meritocracy: David Brooks' Sidney Award and Other Reactions

The American Conservative • December 26, 2012 • 700 Words

Late Monday night I received a most remarkable and unexpected Christmas present delivered straight from august offices of the New York Times, as David Brooks, one of America’s most prominent center-right journalists, named my recent piece “The Myth of American Meritocracy” as one of the winners of his annual Sidney Awards for outstanding articles of 2012.

Just days earlier, the New York Times had run a major op-ed by Prof. Carolyn Chen of Northwestern calling attention to evidence of racial discrimination against Asian-Americans in elite admissions and a six-sided forum discussing the same topic, with the former ranking as the #1 most emailed Times article of the day and the latter having already attracted nearly 800 comments. It does appear that the Great Gray Lady of New York City is now turning a highly skeptical gaze to the selection policies of America’s leading universities, and I suspect that many Ivy League admissions departments may have a busy holiday season beginning to answer the worried questions of their various presidents and provosts.

Over the last couple of weeks, other prominent publication such as Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, and Business Insider have also focused their attention on the strong statistical evidence I found for the existence of “Asian Quotas” across the Ivy League, as did AEI’s Charles Murray, and quite a number of individual bloggers and pundits.

Reactions to the broader range of issues I had raised in my lengthy original piece included a wide spectrum of responses. A brief, early posting by free market economist Tyler Cowen provoked an astonishing 365 comments, hotly debating almost all aspects of the article, and several postings by blogger Steve Sailer similarly unleashed many hundreds of additional agitated or angry comments. Meanwhile, Arthur Kling, another prominent free market economist, had a couple of long and thoughtful columns, somewhat foreshadowing the focus of David Brooks’ column.

Other reactions have been much more surprising. For example, an Ivy League graduate named Daniel Luzer published a review under the title “Elite College Admissions Are Unfair, Sure…We Still Shouldn’t Care”, arguing against any concern with “who goes to Yale or Dartmouth” since “admission to the elite is necessarily unfair.” According to his analysis, although “It’s true that a Yale degree might help a great deal with securing a good job at Goldman Sachs…all we need to worry about from a policy perspective is what you need to be a bank branch manager in suburban Atlanta.” He even termed it “ridiculous” to believe that “If admission to elite colleges are unfair…changing that admissions process will make society more equitable” since “Entrance into a tiny group that controls a disproportionate amount of wealth and political power can never be just” and “Admission to the upper class is, for all societies and throughout all time, unfair.”

Such equanimity with a totally unjust social system for allocating opportunities to reach the commanding heights of Goldman Sachs might seem implausibly arrogant and obtuse if it published in the most reactionary of conservative journals.  But the author is actually an editor at the liberal Washington Monthly and his views appeared in the purportedly progressive Huffington Post. It seems that these days “establishment neo-liberalism” sometimes bears an uncanny resemblence to the privileged musings once found at the royal court of Louis XVI.

These views become particularly bizarre when we consider that over the last few years, the average American family has lost some 47% of its accumulated net wealth, now being poorer in real terms than at any time since the late 1960s. And at least a portion of this economic disaster has clearly been due to the machinations of Luzer’s former classmates now ensconced, fairly or not, at Goldman Sachs.

As I have been telling my friends for years now, American elite misbehavior has reached such absurdly egregrious levels that I easily foresee the possibility of a sharp “discontinuity” in our immediate national future, perhaps one of a very unfortunate character. The unabashed public views of individual DC “progressives” such as Daniel Luzer certainly do not soften that stark opinion.

Meritocracy: Picking Our Elites at Random?

Doing so would be just as arbitrary as college admissions at present

The American Conservative • January 2, 2013 • 2,100 Words

Given the enormous length of my Meritocracy package—over 35,000 words including sidebar, endnotes, and appendices—it’s hardly surprising that certain parts have received a great deal of discussion, while others have not.

For example, my suggestion that our top universities now operated more as hedge-funds than as educational institutions was widely distributed and discussed, as was my analysis of the strong statistical evidence pointing to the existence of “Asian quotas.”  However, I more generally characterized our current elite admissions system as “a complex mixture of diversity, meritocracy, favoritism, and corruption,” and proposed a possible replacement, which has received very little attention at all.

I would fully concede that my case for the benefits of my suggested elite admissions lottery is quite speculative compared to my documentation of the flaws of the current system; but I feel the idea is sufficiently original and intriguing that it should receive a bit more discussion. Fortunately, this may now be starting to occur, with an Indian academic recently exploring the applicability of my admissions proposal to his own country’s elite universities, while being much less interested in the bulk of my article.

Should we admit students through a lottery, Dheeraj Sanghi

Another Asian-American blogger also found my suggestion quite appealing, while detailed rebuttals and alternate suggestions had previously been suggested by professors at Harvard and at George Mason University.

A possible solution to affirmative action and anti-Asian racism, BigWowo

Should Harvard start admitting kids at random?, Andrew Gelman

College Admissions Markets, Robin Hanson/OvercomingBias

Since so many of my readers may have nodded off long before reaching twenty-five or more pages into my printed text or its web equivalent, perhaps I should briefly recapitulate the analysis presented in the last portion of my article.

My basic argument is a simple one. To the extent that academic ability and performance follow a normal distribution curve, there are relatively few individuals at the very high end, but names grow much thicker in density as we move below that top tiny slice.  Therefore, a purely meritocratic system—admitting applicants in exact rank-order based on some set of objective academic measures such as standardized exams—is quite precise and accurate in selecting the topmost students but far less so below that level, with small differences generally separating the accepted from the rejected.

As a direct result, such a system places enormous pressure on students to spend weeks or years of their lives cramming to gain those few extra points necessary for success, inevitably leading to an arms-race situation, which forces all of their ambitious peers to do likewise. The result is the widespread immiseration of generations of students, often with little true academic gain, a situation already found in the societies of Japan, South Korea, and China, as well as in certain heavily immigrant school systems in our own country.

Worse still, given such enormous bunching of performance markers at the crucial threshold, it is quite likely that in many cases careless errors or other extraneous factors may play the largest role in success or failure, leading to a quasi-random admissions process for the majority of students rather than one based on true intrinsic ability and potential.

Therefore, my rather original suggestion is to cut this Gordian Knot of pure meritocracy and replace such a costly and sometimes capricious system with a simple direct lottery among those students who are below the top tier of exceptionally talented applicants but still above the academic threshold necessary to perform reasonably well and benefit from the classes at a Harvard or a Yale. And as an automatic byproduct, such an admissions lottery among the vast number of reasonably qualified applicants would ensure a truly randomized national “diversity” in the elite student bodies, rather than the fake “pseudo-diversity” produced by the corrupt and biased current admissions system.

And if a Harvard admitted (say) its top 300 students based on purest academic merit but filled the 1300 remaining students of its class by lot from among 30,000 or more reasonably qualified applicants, the selection process would require just a tiny fraction of current administrative effort and the overall class would probably be much stronger than what results from the current system, in which former admissions officers have claimed that just 5% or fewer of the students gain entrance on purely academic criteria.

Meanwhile, only the tiniest slice of America’s most absolutely talented students would even be in the running for those few hundred top slots, allowing the remaining 99.99% to relax quite a bit along with their parents, since losing a lottery is hardly a cause for personal for familial shame. And the rather more representative mix of student abilities and backgrounds at elite universities might also temper the arrogance of those who do find themselves within the winners’ circle while forcing employers to look more closely at individual records rather than merely relying upon the name of the college on the diploma.  Leading businesses would necessarily draw their applicants from a far wider range of universities, thereby reducing the increasingly incestuous nature of our national governing elites.

This last point is a very serious one. My article had referenced a book by cultural anthropologist Karen Ho, suggesting that in recent years leading firms on Wall Street selected their employees only from a tiny handful of America’s most prestigious colleges, but I have now come across a much more quantitative and detailed academic journal article by Lauren Rivera, a management professor at Northwestern, making exactly the same case, and extending it to the elite portions of American business and law as well.

In effect, Rivera documents how the commanding heights of the American economy are increasingly closed to those who do not graduate from a few elite schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, while employers don’t particularly care how students actually did in college after admission.  Combined with a biased admissions process, such an apparent system of elite selection seems almost tailor-made for negative national consequences, and physicist Steve Hsu had already noticed and discussed the Rivera paper when it first appeared early in 2011:

Credentialism and Elite Employment, Steve Hsu

Credentialism and Elite Performance, Steve Hsu

The Deal: The Debate Over Elite Schools and Jobs, Steve Hsu

Now the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and if the actual real-world results produced by our national elites over the last generation or so had been reasonably good, or even merely acceptable, then we might just grit our teeth and accept the totally unfair and biased system used to pick them.  But instead our national trajectory has been dreadful, though rarely brought to public attention by our elite media, whose controlling leadership is now usually drawn from much the same background and selection process.

Consider, for example, the recent research findings by Edward Wolff, a highly-regarded finance professor at NYU, which focused on the wealth distribution of American households.  Not only did he show that by 2010 the combined net worth of our top 1% had grown nearly as large as that of the bottom 95%, but that the largest component of this change had been the massive impoverishment of the overwhelming majority of Americans, with the median American family having lost at least 47% of their wealth over the last few years.  Even this figure is almost certainly a substantial underestimate, since home equity represents the bulk middle class family assets, and housing prices have generally continued their decline since 2010.

Some of Wolff’s other results are just as striking, demonstrating that in real terms average American wealth is now lower than it was in the late 1960s: the typical American family is poorer today than their counterpart of the Kennedy-Johnson era.  Indeed, in 2010 nearly a quarter of all American households were totally destitute, with zero or negative total net worth.

And once again, the likely picture in 2013 is probably bleaker since the 2010 figures showed that over 37% of all households had net worth of under $10,000, implying that two years of further housing decline have probably pushed many more families over the brink of financial ruin.  Wolff’s historical estimates only stretch back to 1962, and the 2010 rate of financial destitution was far worse than at any point since that year.  So it actually appears that the “American dream” has become perhaps fifty years of net impoverishment, an absolutely astonishing development.

Wolff’s research has been reported here and there around the Internet, but has been almost totally ignored by the New York Times or the other major newspapers which I read every morning, let alone received the appropriate banner headlines, presumably on the astute Brezhevian theory that if you draw the blinds on your stalled train, you can then just pretend it is still moving.  But even those who quote Wolff may have missed some of his most depressing comparative implications.

Even in a country as stable and well-documented as the U.S., performing historical wealth calculations is a major research undertaking, and I doubt that similar estimates would be easy to produce, or even necessarily meaningful, for many other countries around the world given the endless wars and political upheavals of the last half century.  But estimates of the rise in real per capita GDP do exist, along with the standard Gini measure of inequality.  Taken together, these provide some insight into how mean wealth might diverge from the median, and the likely trends in the latter, giving us a grim benchmark by which to evaluate relative American economic performance.

As mentioned above, it appears likely that the average American family is now poorer today than had been the case fifty years ago, and this puts them in quite rarified international company.  Outside of Myanmar or Afghanistan, I cannot think of a single country located anywhere in Europe or Asia for which such a dismal economic trajectory would seem likely. So by this not unreasonable measure, the peoples of Albania and Bangladesh have probably done better over the last half century than have our own, and the same is true for most countries in Latin America.

Obviously, ordinary Americans had been the world’s most affluent people in the early 1960s, and it is much easier for the poor to catch up than for the rich to stay ahead. But if the average American is poorer today than he was fifty years ago, while the citizens of the overwhelming majority of European, Asian, and even Latin American countries have grown far richer, we must ask ourselves if our ruling elites have performed adequately in their duties. Perhaps random names picked out of the phone book would not have done any worse.

P.S. For those who might believe I am too harsh in my criticism of our elite media, allow me to provide a single illustrative example.

Last week, Floyd Norris, chief financial correspondent of the New York Times, published a year-end quantitative analysis of our comparative economic condition, carrying the soothing title “In a 5-Year Comparison, the U.S. Recovery Fares Well.”  Given that reading large font headlines is easy while examining data less so, I suspect that all too many NYT readers took a quick glance, clucked their tongues at the endless gloomy naysayers of the Left and Right, and turned the page feeling much more comfortable about America’s future.

Unfortunately, the actual data presented in the charts told a somewhat different story. Norris focused on GDP growth rates during 2008-2012, and divided the major economies of the world into the good, the so-so, and the bad.  Unsurprisingly, China came out as the best of the best, having grown over 50% during that period, while America was at the bottom of the so-so group, with a total growth rate of only 2.5%, although avoiding the net recessionary outcomes of Japan, France, and several other major European nations.  So perhaps the headline writer had ingested a bit too much holiday cheer, but at least we ended up on the positive side of the economic ledger.

Or did we?  Few Americans fully realize that our population growth rate is exceptionally high for a developed nation, being double that of China.  When considering national prosperity, the relevant statistic to consider is obviously per capita GDP not raw GDP, and adjusting Norris’s figures for increase in national population would reduce our own net growth rate to negative levels, pushing us firmly into his “No Recovery” group of economic laggards, and rendering his cheerful headline even more ludicrous.

The whole notion of failing to adjust economic growth for population growth seems widespread in our media, perhaps because it helps hide our economic failures, yet it makes absolutely no sense, unless we wish to claim that India is really three times richer than Switzerland.  Perhaps from the NYT’s perspective, there is a quick and easy solution to our impoverished middle class and stagnant economy, one which would deliver an immediate 8% jump in our national GDP—merge with Mexico!

Meritocracy: "Endangered Jewish Genius"

The American Conservative • January 9, 2013 • 700 Words

As I had previously mentioned, the length and range of topics covered in my Meritocracy package resulted in a wide dispersion of responses, many of which seemed to contain almost no overlap in their discussions.  Just as in the fable of the Blind Men and the Elephant, a casual reader might almost assume that the reviews were referencing entirely different articles, with some of the writers focusing exclusively on my statistical evidence for the existence of Asian quotas, others on my claims that our top schools had become “hedgefundiversities,” and still others on my proposal for an admissions lottery to balance the competing goals of meritocracy and diversity while reducing favoritism and corruption.

For exactly these reasons, it is hardly surprising that many Jewish writers should focus primarily upon my findings regarding the recent trajectory of Jewish academic performance, and the evidence of its decline or even collapse over the last couple of decades.  This certainly constituted the biggest personal surprise I had encountered in my research, and others seem just as shocked as I had been.

Just yesterday, Rabbi Benjamin Blech, a professor of Talmud Studies at Yeshiva University, published a thousand word column entitled “Endangered Jewish Genius,” which has already attracted almost 400 Facebook Likes in just 24 hours.  Unsurprisingly, he finds evidence of a Jewish intellectual decline to be “so depressing,” and reasonably attributes much of this dismal result to the replacement of a traditional focus on learning by American popular culture, seeing “Maimonides give way to Madonna” and “the people of the book” become the “people of the buck.”

Earlier, Arnold Kling, a prominent free market economist, had devoted two columns to my article, with the second also focusing on the same topic of Jewish intellectual decline

College Admissions, Merit, and Ethnicity, Arnold Kling/askblog

The Decline of Jewish Genius?, Arnold Kling/askblog

I suspect that this same aspect of my article had also drawn the attention of NYU’s Berman Jewish Policy center, which began featuring my article on its website within days of publication.

Similarly, Shmuel Rosner of the Jewish Journal, America’s largest Jewish newspaper outside NYC, had highlighted my article in his year-end column and urged people to take the time to read it

The Ivy League’s Jewish Problem, Shmuel Rosner/Jewish Journal

Journalist Philip Weiss had published a lengthy column on my piece, again with a focus on the Jewish aspects of my analysis

The Meritocracy Is Rigged, Philip Weiss/MondoWeiss

Even the Israeli press showed interest, with a columnist for Israel Hayom—established a few years ago by Sheldon Adelson and now Israel’s largest newspaper—devoting almost 1500 words to a detailed summary of my overall arguments, once again with a focus on the Jewish aspects of my analysis.

Jews, Asians and Affirmative Action, Richard Baehr/Israel Hayom

On a somewhat different matter, I’ve very pleased to announce that the Yale Political Union has asked me to defend my article at one of their large political debates on the evening of January 29th, while the Yale Law School has also invited me to make a presentation before their students and faculty members early on the afternoon of the 30th,  co-sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Asian-Pacific American students association.  Both these events are open to the public, and anyone interested in attending should contact the university for the precise times and locations.

Finally, one of the major texts I had relied upon in producing my article was Robert Klitgaard’s 1985 CHOOSING ELITES, often found on lists of the most influential books of the last few decades.  As one of America’s leading experts on meritocracy,  elites, and corruption, he had served as a Special Assistant to Harvard President Derek Bok, held professorships at Harvard and Yale, and most recently had retired as president of the Claremont Graduate University.  Given such prestigious credentials, I was surprised and very gratified to discover he had sent out a highly favorable tweet on my article:

Robert Klitgaard ‏@RobertKlitgaard

You will be stunned by this analysis of Asian underrepresentation and Jewish overrepresentation at elite colleges.

Meritocracy: A Science Perspective and More University Data

The American Conservative • January 17, 2013 • 500 Words

Although my Meritocracy article focused primarily on public policy issues—the admissions systems of our elite academic institutions—it necessarily touched on some scientific ones as well. Therefore, it is quite heartening to see that a detailed 1500 word summary and discussion of the piece has now been published by the Genetic Literary Project, affiliated with George Mason University, and written by its Executive Director, Jon Entine.  Entine, an award-winning former broadcast and print science journalist, has previously authored several prominent books focusing on the interplay between genetic and ethnic issues, including Taboo in 2001 and Abraham’s Children in 2007.

And as someone who has been a continuous subscriber to The Economist since 1979, I was extremely gratified at the very generous remarks made by one of its current top editors, who also went on to describe TAC as “the most interesting conservative mag in America.”

In addition, I was recently contacted by one of the undergraduate editors of the student newspaper at a top American university outside the Ivy League, who was interested in exploring the racial admissions statistics at her own school.  Unfortunately, although such data is all available on the website of the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), the format provided is extremely cumbersome and difficult to use, and originally took me quite a while to process for my own investigation.

Although the student was ultimately able to obtain the desired figures from her own school administrators, I decided to address the issue in a more general way, and have now provided a small utility on my personal website, allowing anyone to quickly locate the 1980-2011 racial enrollment trends for any of the thousands of universities in America: just type in part of the name, press Search, and click on the desired choice.  One hopes that many investigative journalists—including those currently attending the colleges in question—will begin casting a suspicious eye on the allegedly unbiased admissions decisions made each year by America’s leading and often holier-than-thou academic institutions.

Finally, as I recently pointed out, it appears likely that the average American family is poorer today in real dollar terms than they were fifty years ago, an astonishing development, and one which is perhaps almost unique among the countries of either Europe or Asia, rich and poor alike.  Strangely enough, this untoward trend has received negligible coverage in the major political American media, with one reason presumably being the enormous current prosperity enjoyed in the Washington D.C. region, whose general affluence has greatly blossomed over the last decade, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, and now ranks according to many measures as the wealthiest area of the country.  Capital cities that grow richer and richer as the rest of their countries grow poorer and poorer have most commonly been found in the less successful Third World countries of the post-WWII Era, which may or may not be an indicator of anything.  But in any event, the perspective of the parasite is always quite different than the perspective of the host.

As a very minor byproduct of these trends, office rents have been steadily rising in the DC environs, and The American Conservative has therefore been forced to relocate, moving into shared office space with the liberal American Prospect, a strange-bedfellows human-interest situation which drew a recent notice in the New York Times.

Meritocracy: "Asians as the New Jews, Jews as the New WASPs"

The American Conservative • January 24, 2013 • 700 Words

As all writers know, a good title should be both descriptive and provocative, and both these considerations certainly apply to Russell Nieli’s very detailed 2200 word review of my Meritocracy article “Asians as the New Jews, Jews as the New WASPs,” recently published on Minding the Campus, a prominent education-oriented webzine affiliated with The Manhattan Institute.

Dr. Nieli, a Senior Preceptor and Lecturer at Princeton, has written widely about these same issues of the apparent unfairness and institutional biases in current elite college admissions, and his book, Wounds That Will Not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide was published late last year by Encounter Books, to considerable critical acclaim.  During the preparation of my own article, I found his numerous reviews and columns an invaluable resource, and I would highly recommend his current review as the best single summary of my own research findings, and one provided in a format far more accessible than my own 30,000 word exposition.

One of my arguments has been that when a nation’s elites are selected in a corrupt or incompetent manner, a natural result is the selection of corrupt or incompetent elites, and the recent history of our own unfortunate country does not seem to contradict such a hypothesis.  This theme—the massive failings of America’s ruling class elites, Democratic and Republican alike—was one of the main points raised in a recent Forbes interview with Angelo Codevilla of Boston University, a prominent conservative intellectual, with his summary points being reprinted on numerous conservative websites.  A couple of years ago, Prof. Codevilla had published a powerful and widely discussed article “The Ruling Class” arguing that America’s ruling elites had abandoned and betrayed our country, and the piece was later published as a book, containing a foreword by Rush Limbaugh.  I was therefore very gratified to have him now cite my elite college analysis as further supporting evidence that our rulers have grown just as insular and arrogant in their incompetence as their late Soviet counterparts.

Several other writers from various points on the ideological spectrum have also drawn somewhat similar conclusions from my research findings:

- “Bias against WASP(C)s”, Alexandria: Crossroads of Civilization

- “Report from Newport, RI: American WASPs—Dispossessed, Degenerate…Or Both”, Peter Sayles/VDare

- “Ron Unz on the illusory American meritocracy”, Kevin MacDonald/Occidental Observer

- “Ron Unz in the New York Times”, Kevin MacDonald/Occidental Observer

Meanwhile, the debate over the racial composition of American universities continues, with a business editor at The Atlantic yesterday publishing an article on that topic, also  provided as part of The National Journal’s continuing series on The Next America.  Although the title argued that the charts demonstrate that America’s top colleges “massively distort” our “racial evolution,” several of his commenters and a critical blogger pointed out that the analysis provided was actually somewhat superficial.  Among other elements, college enrollment levels were compared to America’s racial numbers as a whole, rather than the far more relevant college-age cohort, hardly a minor factor given the huge differences in age-distribution between (say) whites and Hispanics.  Furthermore, differences in regional distribution were ignored, and these are obviously a major reason that the University of Texas is almost five times as heavily Hispanic as the University of Michigan, as were differences in academic achievement.  So unless we assume that all American ethnic groups are exactly equal in their age structure, regional distribution, and academic achievement, the charts included were colorful but not necessarily very informative.

For those who want to explore such college racial enrollment trends in greater detail, I recently made available a simple tool to do so, which provides the official 1980-2011 NCES data for thousands of American colleges in a more convenient format.  Some prominent scholars have now tweeted out the existence of this tool, and given its growing popularity, I have now moved it to a more convenient location, and the old link has been redirected.

Lastly, the details of my January 29th debate before the Yale Political Union have now been finalized, with the YPU officers selecting the specific topic “Resolved: End Affirmative Action in College Admissions.”  Although fully summarizing my own position is obviously difficult in any such short phrase, I suspect that such a provocative and timely title will certainly draw a very substantial audience from the generally liberal political community of Yale University.  As a result, I hope that many of the attendees will not only hear ideas that they do not much like but also ideas that they may have never previously encountered, and all of this will be to the good.

Meritocracy: Response to Prof. Gelman on Jewish Elite Overrepresentation

The American Conservative • February 13, 2013 • 2,800 Words

One noticeable disappointment in the ongoing discussion of my Meritocracy article has been the relative lack of critical commentary.  Both my previous Hispanic Crime and Race/IQ series had unleashed vast outpouring of harsh attacks, thereby assisting me in sharpening and refining my analysis.  But I think that so far the overwhelming majority of the many published responses to my recent research have either been favorable or at least neutral and descriptive.  Fortunately, this somewhat lopsided state of affairs has now begun to change.

Early yesterday morning, Prof. Andrew Gelman, a statistics expert, published a sharp 3,500 word critique of my Jewish results, apparently based almost entirely on the critical analysis provided him by Prof. Jane Mertz and Nurit Baytch.  As it happens, their material has been floating around the Internet for at least the last couple of weeks, and one or two people had previously forwarded it to me; I also discovered that Mertz had left a couple of hostile comments on the TAC website. Since I found their work confused and specious and they never made any effort to publish it anywhere—even if only on a personal blogsite—I never bothered to directly refute it.  But now that Prof. Gelman has published major portions of it backed by his own imprimatur, I will undertake to do so.

I had actually already addressed some of these issues less than two weeks ago in a previous 1900 word column defending my techniques of Jewish surname analysis, but since neither Mertz, Baytch, nor Gelman seems to have bothered reading the piece, I must apologize for being forced to partly repeat myself.

First, Weyl Analysis—the use of extremely distinctive ethnic surnames to determine prevalence—is obviously a sampling technique, and can only be applied effectively on extremely large datasets.  In my own case, none of the Olympiad or other competition lists were remotely large enough for this purpose, so any estimate of Jewish numbers could only be performed by direct surname inspection, which raises obvious questions about the accuracy of the latter approach.

In some of her TAC comments Mertz seems to have labored under the serious misunderstanding that except for explicitly Jewish surnames such as Cohen and Levy, I assumed that all other European ones, notably even including “Schwartz,” indicated Gentile origin.  Obviously, if I had followed such an approach, I would be a total laughingstock, so I most certainly did not.  In fact, as I have previously mentioned, the huge historical over-representation of Jews on lists of top academic performers led me to generally assume that nearly all distinctively East European or Germanic names were likely or almost certainly Jewish.  This over-estimation was intended to partially compensate for the substantial fraction of Jews whose surnames—such as Miller, Gordon, or Brody—would be impossible to detect.  For entirely similar reasons, I tended to assume that all “Lees” were actually East Asians, even though that surname is also quite common among American whites and blacks.

As I also pointed out in that previous column, I recently discovered that J.J. Goldberg, editor of The Jewish Forward, had published a column a couple of years ago, using surnames to estimate the number of Jewish Science Talent Search winners across several years, and when I compared his total to mine, they were virtually identical: he found 100 Jews for those ten years while my total was 96.  Such a close match with the editor of America’s leading Jewish newspaper would tend to indicate that my methods are not wildly inaccurate.

However, the best independent check of direct inspection methodology would be to compare it the results from the much more precise Weyl Analysis, and fortunately the combined total of the dozens of NMS lists I located provided well over 20,000 names, a dataset sufficient for that purpose.  Across all those lists, my estimate of the national total of Jewish NMS semifinalists was 5.95% based on direct inspection, and 5.92% and 6.03% based on two separate Weyl Analyses.  These results tend to validate the approximate accuracy of my direct inspection methodology, which strengthens the case for its use on the STS, Olympiad, and other lists, for which Weyl Analysis is inapplicable.

One source of severe confusion on the part of Mertz/Gelman is their listing of eight or nine states in which their estimate of Jewish percentages derived from Weyl Analysis is larger—sometimes significantly larger—than my listed estimates of Jewish percentages based on direct inspection.  But this is exactly what we would expect from applying a sampling technique to several small subgroups: in some cases it will overestimate the true figure. However, if Mertz had provided similar results for the other seventeen states I used, Gelman would have noticed that Weyl Analysis results were smaller—sometimes considerably smaller—than my direct inspection estimates, and these latter states (which Mertz omits) actually include California and Texas whose NMS totals are by far the largest.  Indeed, given the nature of small-size sampling, there are eight states whose Jewish estimates are zero under Weyl Analysis, but often quite significant in my table based on direct inspection.  The key point is that once we aggregate all this sampling across all the different states, the overall statistical results match quite closely, as I described above.  In effect, Mertz is claiming my sampling technique must be wrong because roughly half the time it tends to underestimate the result, without noticing that the other half of the time it tends to overestimate the result. I suspect that if she or anyone else made such a ridiculous logical error in one of Prof. Gelman’s own introductory statistics courses, she would surely be flunked.

One source of estimation error I had emphasized in my Appendix E was that the NMS lists I located covered only 25 states.  But these states included the eight largest, and also contained over 80% of both the Jewish and the Asian populations, providing reasonable grounds for national extrapolation.  After publication, I also managed to locate an NMS list for Massachusetts, and the percentage of Jewish names there was considerably above my extrapolated result.  But MA is a rather small state, containing just 4% of American Jews and 2% of the NMS total, so the impact upon the national Jewish NMS average is negligible.

The next issue which Mertz/Gelman raises is the accuracy of the Jewish undergraduate percentages enrolled at the Ivy League and other major American universities as reported by Hillel, the national Jewish campus organization.  I have myself repeatedly emphasized that the Hillel estimates might certainly be somewhat inaccurate, but that they are the only figures available, and are regularly used by The New York Times and all other elite MSM outlets, while also constituting the basis for Prof. Jerome Karabel’s award-winning scholarship.  So I feel very comfortable in following the lead of every reputable organization and using the Hillel figures, though certainly with some caution.

Let me cite an example from my original article which underscores the credibility of the Hillel figures in elite circles.  During 1999 it was discovered that Hillel’s estimate of the percentage of Jews enrolled at Princeton had dropped from 16% to about 10% over the previous 15 years, and this resulted in a huge national media firestorm, with articles appearing in the NYT, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Observer, as well as four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, all with mention of anti-Semitism bandied about. Princeton’s administration profusely apologized for the decline in Jewish numbers and agreed to completely overhaul its admissions policy as a consequence.  At that point in time Princeton’s president was Jewish, Princeton’s provost was Jewish, and Princeton had just finished building a multi-million-dollar Jewish activities center on campus; but Hillel’s report of a substantial decline in Jewish enrollment was regarded as near-prima facie proof of anti-Jewish bias at the university, especially since the figure was much lower than the figures reported by Hillel for Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

Mertz argues that I should ignore these Hillel estimates—which everyone else always uses—and instead perform Weyl Analysis on the surnames of all of America’s major universities to determine their Jewish enrollments.

But this is a total absurdity.  To the best of my knowledge, American universities do not make their complete lists of past graduates publicly available, and even if they did, the total number of such names for the Ivies, the University of California campuses, and the various other schools I considered would run into the millions over just the few decades I considered. Counting the Jewish names among them all would be insanity.

Next, consider the Mertz/Gelman complaint regarding my estimates of Jewish names on the Math Olympiad and the Putnam, both exams for which long historical datasets exist.  For most of these, the number of winners listed each year is quite small, generally five or six, and obviously surname analysis or any other sort of inspection technique can easily produce errors for a given year, which is why I grouped the results by decade in hopes of minimizing these problems.

In particular, Mertz sharply criticizes me for suggesting a large decline in likely Jewish names, and cites my failure to realize that winner Brian Lawrence had a Jewish mother or that winner Daniel Kane’s family had Anglicized their name generations earlier.  But such criticism is nonsensical, since just as I claimed, neither of those particular names is Jewish.  Such identification error will always be a problem in any small sample analysis, but my argument is that the large decade-by-decade decline in likely Jewish names across every major competition category is probably real rather than merely spurious.

An important part of Mertz’s Jewish identification data was apparently drawn from her lengthy 2008 AMS journal article, which was repeatedly referenced by Mertz/Baytch and which I skimmed.  The overwhelming focus of that article was to rebut the controversial speculation of former Harvard President Larry Summers that men might be somewhat better at math than women.  Mertz and her co-authors demonstrated that generally some 5-10% of America’s top math students have been female, and claimed this refuted Summers, concluding that “the myth that females cannot excel in mathematics must be put to rest” (p. 1258, bold-italics in original).  Frankly, I hardly think that Summers had meant to imply that no female could possibly do well in math, and I doubt he would be shocked that 10% or more of America’s top math students were female.  I mention these points merely to provide some indication of the strongly ideological tendencies that seem to be driving one of my critics.

Although the article focused on gender issues, for reasons not entirely clear Mertz and her co-authors decided to undertake extensive background research (p. 1249) to determine the precise number of full-Jews and part-Jews among the math competition winners, summarizing those findings in exactly the same sort of Jewish/non-Jewish white/Asian tables that appeared in my own article.  As it happens, their exhaustive biographical research determined that 26 of the 1988-2007 American Math Olympiad winners were Jewish or part-Jewish (p. 1253), while my own very casual surname analysis had estimated a figure of 23 for those same years.  All things considered, I hardly view the difference between 23 and 26 as a gigantic discrepancy, nor evidence that my simple surname analysis tends to be wildly inaccurate.

Now let us combine these separate results.

For decades, the Hillel estimates of Jewish enrollments have been accepted as generally accurate by all media outlets, academic scholars, university administrators, and Jewish organizations; in any case, there is no other source of such data across American universities.

Next, the aggregate NMS semifinalist lists, though certainly imperfect, seem the best national dataset of high academic ability students, with the total numbers large enough to allow Weyl Analysis to be performed to determine ethnic distributions. Jewish surnames are hardly as distinctive as East Asian ones, but the almost exact national match between the results from direct inspection and those produced by two different Weyl Analyses lend reasonable confidence to the result.  Under these estimates, the current Jewish share of high-ability American students seems likely to be around 6%, the Asian one at 25-30%, and the white Gentile total at 65-70%.  I would strongly argue that the burden of proof shifts to anyone who argues for a substantially different set of figures.

Both these underlying estimates certainly contain a substantial nimbus of error, and for any result obtained by combining them, such errors would obviously be compounded.  Indeed, if any of the statistical anomalies I found regarding Jewish enrollments had merely been in the 50% or even the 100% range, I would have simply discarded them as quite possibly due to measurement error.  But my actual findings were in an entirely different range.

In one of the scholarly books cited in my original article, there is an extended discussion of the claims of Ivy League discrimination against Asian applicants during the 1980s.  Hsia [1988] pp. 94-119 notes that after the admissions rate for Asians dropped a level substantially below the general rate, many observers viewed this as strong evidence of racial discrimination.  The result was a federal investigation, and the determination of all the Ivy League schools to henceforth keep all their admissions rate figures absolutely secret so as to avoid similar problems in the future.  Apparently an admissions rate anomaly of 20% or more was considered extremely suspicious, and this provides us with a useful benchmark.

Now let us return to the Jewish enrollment figures which were the subject of Prof. Gelman’s lengthy posting.  If we combine the Hillel data with the officially reported racial data, we discover that college-age Jews in America are approximately 3,000% more likely to be enrolled in the Ivy League than their non-Jewish white counterparts.  Even if the Hillel figures are indeed somewhat inaccurate, I strongly doubt that correcting for any such error would reduce the anomaly below the 20% threshold discussed above.  Even correcting for the fact that Jews are more likely to live in the Northeast and Northeasterners are somewhat more likely to attend the Ivy League would have only a small effect.

A natural suggestion would be to normalize these enrollment figures based on the estimated totals of high performing students; but doing so is not entirely obvious.  As I mentioned in my original article, the recent book published by a former Harvard Senior Admissions Officer claimed that these days Ivy League schools select only 5% of their students based solely on demonstrated academic ability, with the remaining 95% selected based on a holistic weighing of individual personal traits using a complex or subjective metric known only to the admissions office.  So if nearly all Ivy League students are selected on amorphous, holistic grounds—rather than objective academic merit—perhaps the Jewish enrollment anomaly of the previous paragraph is actually the correct figure to investigate and somehow attempt to justify.

On the other hand, if we do choose to simply disregard the actual admissions policies practiced in today’s Ivy League and adjust our enrollment figures for high ability students, the anomaly of Jewish over-representation shrinks considerably but still remains rather large.  We are now faced with the additional potential errors inherent in our surname analysis of the NMS lists, but the data indicates there are around ten or twelve high-ability white Gentiles in America for every such high ability Jew.  Meanwhile, the Hillel figures indicate that the number of Jews and non-Jewish whites are approximately the same across the Ivy League.  Thus, adjusting for the number of high ability students lowers the level of apparent Jewish over-representation to roughly 1,000%, a figure still comfortably above the 20% discrepancy threshold that helped spark a federal investigation in the late 1980s regarding Asian students.

As mentioned earlier, one irritating aspect of responding to this lengthy critique was that neither Profs. Mertz nor Gelman had apparently noticed that less than two weeks ago I had already published a similar column on Jewish surname analysis, which dealt with many of these same issues.

Still, they are hardly alone in such carelessness.  By a remarkable coincidence, their critique was published almost simultaneously with that of a critical column by Prof. Kevin MacDonald, whose focus of greatest interest seems very similar to that of Prof. Mertz.  In Prof. MacDonald’s case, he chided me for no longer discussing the Jewish aspects of my analysis.  Apparently he, too, had failed to notice the same column of mine missed by Prof. Mertz.

Given that Profs. MacDonald and Mertz share such a strong commonality of personal interests, yet are both sometimes a bit prone to carelessness, perhaps they should join forces and henceforth work closely together to ensure that none of my future columns accidentally slips by them.

Finally, I should mention that I’ve been invited to give a Chicago Law School presentation next week, focusing on my recent NRO column.  With the talk having the provocative title of “Asian Admissions Quotas: Was Bakke Based on Fraud?” I suspect the turnout will be reasonably good.

Racial Quotas, Harvard, and the Legacy of Bakke

Have three decades of Supreme Court support for affirmative action been based on fraud?

National Review • February 18, 2013 • 800 Words

For almost 35 years, college-admissions decisions in America have been governed by the continuing legacy of University of California v. Bakke, in which a fragmented U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of racial quotas but affirmed the legitimacy of considering race as one factor among several. The justices are now revisiting these crucial national issues in the pending Fisher v. University of Texas decision.

According to many observers, a crucial factor in the original 1978 ruling may have been the amicus brief filed by Harvard University. America’s oldest and most prestigious academic institution emphasized that its “holistic” admissions process allowed for the creation of a racially diversified student body while avoiding any “quota system.” In fact, Justice Lewis Powell’s majority opinion cited Harvard’s approach as exemplary, suggesting it demonstrated that well-intentioned and determined university administrators could achieve ethnic diversity without using quotas.

In the decades that followed, Harvard and its Ivy League allies redoubled their public advocacy of racial diversity via holistic admissions. When California’s Proposition 209 propelled the affirmative-action debate back onto the national stage during the 1990s, Derek Bok and William Bowen, former presidents of Harvard and Princeton respectively, published The Shape of the River, a weighty and influential volume that made the case for achieving academic racial diversity using the non-quota Ivy League methods already endorsed by the high court. Over the years, advocacy of “a holistic admissions system” as practiced by Harvard has become a favored mantra among diversity advocates in higher education.

But what if all these claims were simply fraudulent?

I recently published a lengthy article analyzing the admissions policies of America’s Ivy League universities; one of my main points was that these policies coincide with a very suspicious pattern of Asian-American enrollments.

Over the last 20 years, America’s population of college-age Asian-Americans has roughly doubled; but during this same period, the number admitted to Harvard and most other Ivy League schools has held steady or even declined, despite significant improvement in Asian academic performance. Furthermore, the Asian percentages at all Ivy League schools have recently converged to a very narrow range and remained static over time, which seems quite suspicious.

Meanwhile, the Californian Institute of Technology (Caltech) follows a highly selective but strictly race-neutral admissions policy, and its enrollment of Asian Americans has grown almost exactly in line with the growth of the Asian-American population.

The stark difference between these two admissions policies is evident in this graph of comparative enrollment:

Top officials at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton today strenuously deny the existence of Asian-American quotas, but their predecessors had similarly denied the existence of Jewish quotas in the 1920s, now universally acknowledged to have existed. In fact, the large growth in the Asian-American population means that the fraction attending Harvard has fallen by more than 50 percent since the early 1990s, a decline considerably greater than the decline Jews experienced after the implementation of secret quotas in 1925.

Based on these officially reported enrollment statistics, the evidence of Ivy League racial quotas seems overwhelming to many outside observers. The liberal New York Times recently ran a forum on the topic, and a large majority of its commenters were scathing in their criticism of the Harvard public-relations officer who defended his university’s position.

S.B. Woo, founding president of 80-20, a national Asian-American advocacy organization that strongly supported President Obama’s reelection, participated in the New York Times forum, entitling his contribution “Discrimination Is Obvious.” He argued that “the credibility of elite colleges suffers” when they deny the clear evidence that they “set a quota for Asian students,” and he claimed that “America’s core value of equal opportunity is being trampled.” Liberal and left-wing pundits from publications such as The Atlantic and The Washington Monthly have similarly ridiculed Harvard’s blatant dishonesty in the matter.

Suppose we accept the overwhelming statistical evidence that the admissions offices of Harvard and other Ivy League schools have been quietly following an illegal Asian-American quota system for at least the last couple of decades. During this same period, presidents of these institutions have publicly touted their “non-quota” approach to racial admissions problems, while their top lawyers have filed important amicus briefs making similar legal claims, most recently in the 2012 Fisher case. But if none of these individuals ever noticed that illegal quota activity was occurring under their very noses, how can their opinions carry much weight before either the public or the high court?

If the “Harvard Holistic Model” has actually amounted to racial quotas in disguise, then a central pillar of the modern legal foundation of affirmative action in college admissions going back to Bakke may have been based on fraud. Perhaps the justices of the Supreme Court should take these facts into consideration as they formulate their current ruling in the Fisher case.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative .

Meritocracy: Admitting My Mistakes

The American Conservative • February 21, 2013 • 2,200 Words

In publishing a 30,000 word article covering such a broad range of complex and controversial topics, I was certain that my work would necessarily contain at least a few factual errors or omissions.  The hundreds of individuals examining my material over the last three months have located several, and being from an academic background, I am happy to recognize these:

- On p. 20, I carelessly described America’s yearly Math Olympiad teams as having 5 members, and a sharp-eyed former Olympian noted this was incorrect.  Indeed, over the last 40-odd years, the teams have ranged from 6 to 8 members.  My actual calculations used the correct figures and remain unchanged.

- A central core of my analysis relied upon state NMS semifinalist lists, of which I managed to locate 43 on the Internet.  The legion of commentators who reviewed my findings subsequently managed to locate a 44th, a Massachusetts list that was published in the Boston Globe during 2008.  I have analyzed this additional list and appended the results as an addendum to my Appendix E.  Incorporating this additional data produces no significant change in any of my national estimates.

- On p. 22, I described the five most selective UC Campuses as being Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Davis and Irvine, and analyzed their aggregate ethnic distribution.  Commenters have persuasively argued that the Santa Barbara campus is at least as selective as Davis and Irvine, so it should have been included in my analysis.  Doing so produces no significant change in my overall results.

- Near the beginning of my article I had noted that although complaints about official corruption of every sort are a leading topic on the Chinese Internet and also in Western media coverage, I had never once heard such a claim about admissions to elite Chinese universities.  This led me to conclude that the process was entirely meritocratic, and a couple of individuals with good knowledge of China confirmed this.  However, during one of my recent Yale Law events, a student from China stated that he and his friends were firmly convinced that any of China’s 350 Central Committee members could easily obtain an admissions slot for his friends or relatives, so my claim was incorrect.  This conflicting evidence may be reconciled if the number of such corrupt admissions each year is so tiny—perhaps a few hundred out of over eight million—that it is completely invisible to the general public.  I should note that the New York Times just ran another major story on colleges in China, emphasizing every possible unfair aspect of the system, but nonetheless indicating that admissions were entirely meritocratic and objective.

I fully acknowledge all these unavoidable errors in my work.  But the recent, widely-distributed criticism presented in the main post and lengthy comment-thread of Prof. Andrew Gelman, a prominent Ivy League statistics professor, falls into an entirely different category.

On pp. 26-27, 30 of my article, I had noted strong evidence of a sharp decline in Jewish academic achievement at the very high end, as indicated by the large drop in the number of likely Jewish names among the winners of top math and science competitions during the last six decades, and this is correct.  As an example, I mentioned that during the thirteen years since 2000, just two of the 78 names of Math Olympiad winners appear to be Jewish, and this is also correct.  However, the extensive personal and biographical research of Prof. Janet Mertz, one of my sharpest critics, has determined that “Daniel Kane” is actually a full-Jew, “Brian Lawrence” and “Alison Miller” are half-Jews, and one or two other corrections.  As a result, the decline in actual Jewish performance was from over 40% during the 1970s to 12% during 2000-2012, rather than to the 3% figure I suggested.

Obviously, large statistical errors are unavoidable when simple surname analysis is applied to such tiny sets of names.  If Prof. Mertz were willing to extend her exhaustive research methods from the several dozen individuals she investigated to rigorously determining the precise ethnic background of the more than 4,000 winners of Olympiad, Putnam, and STS competitions from the 1930s to the 2000s whose surnames I examined, I would be very interested in seeing her findings.

In my opinion this one small point, namely the precise number of Jews or part-Jews in the 2000-2012 Math Olympiad lists, seems to be about the only substantial and verifiable charge made against my analysis in the entire lengthy critique.  A crucial part of the critique consists of the claims of an anonymous individual calling himself “NB,” which are based upon his private analysis of non-public data and cannot be externally verified.

The angry criticism of Prof. Mertz and “NB” had been floating around the Internet for some time, and had been widely ignored or dismissed.  For unaccountable reasons, Mertz and “NB” had made no effort to publish their critique anywhere, even if merely on a personal blogsite.  However, last week their charges were excerpted and presented by Prof. Gelman’s on his own blogsite, thereby lending them strong credibility.  One additional source of confusion was that since Gelman was providing a platform for the claims of an anonymous individual, it was sometimes not entirely clear whether he was personally confirming or merely reporting some of the critical remarks in question.

I directly responded to some of these charges in the resulting comment-thread, which grew very lengthy and sometimes heated.  Nearly all the other participants remained anonymous, which hardly improved the tone of the debate.  With well over 100 often lengthy and multiply-nested comments, the discussion eventually became completely unreadable.

Therefore, as a means of resolving my disagreement with Prof. Gelman, I sent him a private email presenting my own framework of estimated results and suggesting that he do the same, thereby allowing us to determine the range of our agreement and disagreement. He responded and suggested that he publish my note as a new posting, followed by his own response, and I agreed: our exchange appears here.  Readers should note that Gelman’s response emphasizes that he had not himself studied any of the matters in question, nor had he formed any opinions about what the correct figures might be, but that he was merely passing along the critical claims of his anonymous Internet correspondent.  I find this exchange highly enlightening, and urge individuals to read it.  Among other aspects, I believe my own note provides a very useful framework of discussion for anyone who wishes to quantitatively challenge my findings.

Gelman’s revised position led one of his agitated commenters to become concerned, urging him not to”run away” from the “fight.”

For whatever reason, Gelman soon posted a follow-up column mostly attacking David Brooks, but also now once again dismissing me as a “political activist” who used “sloppy counting.”  Presumably, someone who was less “sloppy” would have immediately recognized that “Daniel Kane,”  “Brian Lawrence,” and “Alison Miller” are obviously Jewish names.  I find it highly intriguing that although Gelman chose not to substantially engage the 1,000 word framework of my statistical analysis that I offered him for constructive mutual dialogue, he instead preferred to return to the use of insults, while focusing on a single phrase in my 30,000 word analysis, a phrase characterizing a sample of negligible size.  Furthermore, the phrase in question was accurate, unless Gelman actually believes that names such as Daniel Kane and Brian Lawrence “appear to be Jewish.”

Individuals who become emotionally involved with a particular position of ideological or ethnic advocacy may lose their ability to dispassionately analyze data, and this intellectual failing may sometimes even apply to award-winning Ivy League statistics professors.  Meanwhile, litigators who choose to completely ignore the overwhelming volume of the facts in a case but spend all their time angrily pounding the desk on an insignificant one hardly demonstrate the strength of their position.

As it happens, I just returned from a speaking engagement at the University of Chicago Law School, at which I argued that the strong evidence I have demonstrated for the existence of Asian Quotas in the Ivy League may indicate that the landmark 1978 Bakke verdict was decided based on fraud.  The response from the large audience—which included blacks, Hispanics, whites, and Asians—seemed overwhelmingly positive.  However, one or two of the audience members afterward came over and argued with me at considerable length about my Jewish findings, even though these had not even been mentioned in my talk.  Highly-emotional ethnocentric zealotry should be distinguished from neutral scientific inquiry.

On a different matter, I recently read Education and Politics at Harvard, written in 1975 by renowned sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman, and although most of the material was not new to me, I came across one remarkable item.  Conservatives often ascribe any substantial decline of average student quality at top universities to the role of affirmative action in admitting underqualified minorities, and this belief is widely—if quietly—shared in certain quarters.  Therefore, it is always helpful to locate an independent check of its validity.

On p. 319 of the Lipset/Riesman book, Riesman casually notes that each year Harvard enrolls some 700 National Merit Scholars (NMS), who constitute America’s highest performing high school students.  But as I mentioned in my article, Harvard’s NMS total had fallen to 396 in 2002 and just 248 in 2011.  Thus, over three decades Harvard’s number of such top students has dropped by almost two-thirds even while the volume of Harvard applicants has grown enormously.  This is certainly consistent with the recent claim of a former Harvard Senior Admissions Officer that only 5% of students are admitted these days purely based on academic merit.

Could a major part of this decline be due to the impact of affirmative action policies? Nearly all NMS are either white or Asian, and in 1975 Hispanics, blacks, and foreign students probably totaled about 10% of each class, while today the figure is over 25%.  So perhaps that explains at least some of the general decline in NMS numbers.

However, we must also consider a different factor.  Asian enrollment was completely negligible in the 1970s, but over the last decade has probably averaged nearly one-third of the combined white plus Asian total.  Also, there is overwhelming evidence that in recent years, Harvard has imposed sharp restrictions on its Asian numbers, requiring Asians to achieve much stronger academic results to gain entrance.  Therefore, it seems likely Harvard’s NMS are disproportionately Asian, perhaps half or more of the total rather than merely one-third.

Thus, even if we assume that every remaining NMS is white, the trajectory of white student decline is quite remarkable.  During the 1970s, Harvard enrolled 1400 white Americans, of whom 700 or 50% ranked as NMS.  By 2002, the number of whites had dropped to around 850 with just 25% being NMS.  And as of 2011, only 15% of Harvard 800 whites seem to have achieved that national academic distinction.  Obviously, none of this striking decline in the average quality of Harvard’s white students has any connection to “affirmative action” in the usual sense of that word.

Finally, in my companion sidebar I argued that Harvard had gradually become a hedge fund with a football team and a few professors, and suggested that since college tuition constituted a negligible portion of annual revenue, such charges should be eliminated.  Although it makes perfect sense for Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other wealthy “hedgefundiversities” to abolish their tuition, the actual American trend seems in the other direction.

For example, earlier this week the New York Times revealed that Cooper Union, which has provided New Yorkers a free, top-quality education for the past 153 years, had made a decision to begin charging tuition.  The problem was that income from its valuable property holdings no longer covered expenses, and the school’s annual loss had reached the unsustainable level of $12 million per year.

What were those expenses?  Well, during the 2000s the university had taken out a $175 million dollar loan and invested the cash in the stock market just before that the financial collapse; repayment on that loan now runs $10 million per year.  In addition, Cooper Union had recently spent $177 million dollars to erect a hideously ugly but “audacious” modernist-style building as part of its major campus expansion.  So future Cooper Union graduates may be forced into permanent debt-peonage, but they will have received their education in a provocatively-designed building.

We must consider the differing interests of a university’s students and its top administrators.  Students might prefer an education that is free rather than one that costs $10,000 or $20,000 per year, but why should a university president care?  Indeed, the larger the total budget and more expensive the cost to attend, the stronger the case for raising the salary of the president.  And while the direct educational benefits of a $177 million avant-garde architectural centerpiece are probably nil, the enhancements to the cocktail party chatter of the individual who made the bold decision to build it might be enormous.

Such is the pattern when the interests of rulers diverge from those of the ruled, and the former show no concern for the latter.

Meritocracy: Gelman's Sixth Column

The American Conservative • March 1, 2013 • 1,500 Words

For reasons best known to himself, Columbia University statistics professor Andrew Gelman has now seen fit to publish his sixth(!)  lengthy blogsite column discussing or sharply critiquing my analysis of Ivy League university admissions.  Just like most of his previous ones, he seeks to rebut my particular claim that there is a highly suspicious degree of Jewish over-representation in elite college enrollment.

Unfortunately, this latest 3,100 word piece contains new little substance beneath the paired photos of President Obama and House Speaker Boehner.  He continues to avoid the overwhelming bulk of the quantitative evidence I had provided in my 30,000 word Meritocracy analysis, instead producing a mass of obfuscatory verbiage mostly disputing the accuracy of a couple of my scattered sentences here and there, while characterizing my motivation as that of an ideological “political activist” following a pattern of “stubbornness” rather than “scholarly discourse.”  I’m no expert in psychoanalysis, but I believe Gelman’s reaction might be a classic example of what I think Freud called “psychological projection.”

As I had previously mentioned, after our initial blogsite debate became heated I sent Gelman a detailed private note outlining my own quantitative framework and suggesting that he do the same, thereby allowing us to determine exactly where we agreed and disagreed and narrowing down the scope of our dispute.  His response was that he hadn’t really investigated the issue himself and therefore didn’t have any contrasting estimates of his own.  But he asked for permission to publish our private exchange on his blogsite, which I readily granted.

I suggest that neutral observers read this Unz/Gelman exchange for themselves, and decide whether his response is as vacuous as it seems to me, even with the substantial P.S. he afterwards appended.  I believe it also provides a good indication of which of us is playing the role of the dispassionate researcher.  Indeed, Gelman’s complete refusal to engage with my data alarmed one of his agitated and anonymous commenters, who accused Gelman of pursuing an “escape route,” adding “Now that you’ve gotten into the fight don’t run away.”  Perhaps this sort of angry accusation from his erstwhile supporters helps to explain Gelman’s added P.S., plus his two subsequent columns on the subject.

Under normal circumstances it would be perfectly reasonable for Gelman to claim that he is just too busy or uninterested in the topic to produce his own quantitative estimates to compare against my own.  But given that he’s now written well over 10,000 words about my article across six separate postings, that claim begins to grow rather doubtful.

It is obvious that unavoidable emotional attachments, including those of an ethnocentric nature, may easily cloud one’s analytical thinking.  For example, my initial substantive response in the original comment-thread with Gelman had been as follows:

I had claimed that across the combined NMS lists, the Jewish estimates produced by the sampling technique of Weyl Analysis almost exactly matched those produced by direct inspection, thereby validating the latter approach.  You devoted a major section of your column to debunking this claim by pointing out that Weyl Analysis actually produced a substantially higher Jewish estimate than my direct inspection for the 8 states you listed.  However, you neglected to note that Weyl Analysis also produced a substantially *lower* estimate for the other 17 states I used.  This is exactly what one would expect of any sampling technique, and is fully consistent with my claim that the overall averages converged across the very large sample of 25 states.  Your blogsite does describe you as an award-winning Ivy League statistics professor, does it not?

America’s national elites in academics, finance, media, and politics are today drawn overwhelmingly from Harvard (which rejects some 95% of all applicants) and the rest of the Ivy League.  These universities publicly claim that they admit applicants less on objective academic merit than on broad “holistic” factors, which are known only to them.  This policy is partly to ensure that their student body is fully “diverse” and reasonably reflects America’s overall population.

According to Hillel, whose estimates are accepted everywhere, Ivy League undergraduates are 23% Jewish, implying that they are some 3,000% more likely to be enrolled than non-Jewish whites of a similar age.  You challenge the Hillel figures, suggesting that they are probably incorrect.  However, Jews constitute roughly 1.8% of the national college-age population, and unless the true enrollment figure were that low, Jews would be considerably overrepresented.  Given the extremely large gap between 23% and 1.8%, I tend to doubt Hillel’s numbers are off by nearly a factor of 13.

The least troubling possible explanation for the 3,000% overrepresentation of Jewish students is that Jewish academic performance is so enormously greater than that of white Gentiles, they are admitted by the Ivies at correspondingly greater rates, even though the Ivies publicly discount academic performance as an overriding factor in admissions.  The best means of testing this “Jewish out-performance” hypothesis is to estimate the number of Jewish students ranked as NMS semifinalists.  But unless an unreasonably large fraction of top-performing Jewish students actually have completely non-Jewish names, this approach fails.  I would suggest that the burden of proof is upon those who argue that Jewish students are actually 3,000% more likely to be high-performing than their non-Jewish classmates.

Let us consider the following thought-experiment.  The number of college-age Mormons in America is roughly the same as the number of college-age Jews.  Suppose an astonishing fraction of all top Ivy League officials were either Mormons or married to Mormons, while a leading Mormon campus organization reported that young Mormons were 3,000% more likely to be enrolled in the Ivy League than young non-Mormons.  To avoid dark suspicions, one would surely attempt to locate some solid evidence that Mormon students were 3,000% more likely to be top-achievers than non-Mormons, or perhaps were 3,000% more likely to apply to the Ivy League.

To which he responded in part:

Regarding your last point, nobody has shared with me the data you discuss on Mormons.  My impression is that Mormons mostly live far away from Ivy League schools and are less likely to apply to them and that Mormons are not represented in the same proportion as Jews in the various groups that you looked at in your article.  But, again, I haven’t looked at these numbers.

Readers may draw their own conclusions from this.  I’ve been told that Gelman originally studied physics, but perhaps he never encountered the term “thought-experiment.”

Turning to a far more substantive matter, a couple of very prominent academic scholars, both of Jewish background, have indicated that they found my quantitative evidence of Jewish over-representation at the Ivies reasonably persuasive, but were puzzled at the actual mechanism.  After all, relatively few admissions officers are Jewish, and although a huge fraction of the top university officials have that ethnicity, it seems very implausible that they would actually order their subordinates to maintain a particular level of Jewish enrollment.

My short answer is that I just don’t know.  But if I were forced to provide a speculative hypothesis, it would be along the following lines.

First, consider the evidence that most admissions officers are of shockingly unimpressive academic quality, partly because the job usually pays quite badly.  For example, my article had mentioned that the head of admissions at one of America’s most prestigious liberal arts colleges had previously been employed as an animal control officer, and I provided numerous similar examples.

Next, let us consider the revealing 1999 Princeton case, in which it was discovered that Jewish admissions had been gradually drifting downward for the previous decade or two.  The decline partly reflected the changing demographics of the college-age population and was less severe than the decline in non-Jewish white numbers at Harvard, Yale and the rest of the Ivy League, but nonetheless provoked a massive national media firestorm, in which Princeton’s top officials—who were themselves both Jewish—apologized for their university’s apparent “anti-Semitism” and agreed to drastically reform the obviously flawed admissions process.  Presumably, many or most of the responsible admissions officers were terminated, and had to go back to catching raccoons for a living.

The world of elite admissions officers is an extremely small one, and it seems likely that admissions officers at all the other Ivy League and highly selective schools immediately took that lesson to heart, recognizing that any substantial decline in Jewish enrollment might have career-ending consequences.  This would certainly lead to the results we now see in the data.

Consider the analogous reasons that industrial production statistics were very often unreliable in Soviet Russia.  Although officials were probably not ordered to fabricate their numbers, they quickly discovered that those who reported insufficiently positive results risked being purged.

I strongly suspect that if Princeton’s 1999 admissions officers had attempted to persuade Prof. Gelman or his agitated commenters that their sharply declining admission of Jews was simply due to the objective academic weakness of their Jewish applicants, those arguments would have fallen on unsympathetic ears.   And it is far more pleasant to sit in a warm university office selecting America’s future ruling elites than having to wander around the Northeastern countryside during wintertime in search of a possibly rabid dog.

Meritocracy: Dangerous Cancer Statistics

The American Conservative • March 16, 2013 • 1,100 Words

About the only detailed public criticism of my Meritocracy article by an academic has come from Prof. Janet Mertz, a Wisconsin cancer researcher.  Since her analysis draws so heavily upon her own 2008 academic paper on top performing math students, I decided that paper warranted a close examination.

The primary focus of her article was a worldwide gender analysis of top performing math students aimed at refuting the controversial speculations of former Harvard President Larry Summers, who had suggested that men might be better at math than women, at least at the very high end of math ability.  She and her co-authors therefore examined the previous twenty years of the International Math Olympiad, determining the exact number of male and female participants from all the leading countries.  They provided their findings in Table 6 (p. 1252), which I am summarizing below in terms of the male percentages for the aggregate years 1988-2008:

ASIA:

China, 96% male

India, 97% male

Iran, 98% male

Israel, 98% male

Japan, 98% male

Kazakhstan, 99% male

South Korea, 93% male

Taiwan, 95% male

Turkey, 96% male

Vietnam, 97% male

EUROPE:

Belarus, 94% male

Bulgaria, 91% male

Czech Republic, 96% male

Slovakia, 88% male

France 97% male

Germany, 94% male

Hungary, 94% male

Poland, 99% male

Romania, 94% male

Russia/USSR, 88% male

Serbia and Montenegro, 80% male

Ukraine, 93% male

United Kingdom, 93% male

OTHER

Australia, 94% male

Brazil, 96% male

Canada, 90% male

USA, 96% male

INTERNATIONAL AVERAGE, 94.4% male

Now to an untutored eye such as my own, Mertz’s discovery that the top math students of virtually every country have been around 95% male for decades might seem to somewhat confirm rather than refute the distasteful speculations of President Summers; but Mertz had a very different perspective.  Surrounding these basic quantitative facts by 10,000 words of often complex verbiage, she concluded that math performance differences between males and females were overwhelmingly due to culture rather biology, and that at the very high end, women had just as much math ability as men.

She later cited these same research results to support her equal-ability gender claims in subsequent published papers, with her most recent 2012 paper bearing the descriptive title “Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance.”  Most importantly, she claimed in her media interviews that her research had demonstrated that men and women had equal innate ability in mathematics, and that any current differences in performance were due to culture or bias.  Therefore, the press reported that Mertz and her allies had proven Summers wrong, and women had just as much talent in math as men.

One obvious possibility was that I was missing something in Mertz’s research, and somehow misunderstanding her apparent result that 95% of all top math students have always been male and just 5% female.   Perhaps a careful researcher such as Mertz was correct and I was just failing to comprehend her analysis.  Fortunately, there are others with far greater statistical expertise, much better able to judge such matters.

Consider, for example, Prof. Andrew Gelman, an award-winning Ivy League statistics professor.  Over the last month or so, Prof. Gelman has heavily promoted Prof. Mertz’s research on his blogsite, repeatedly pointing to her strong academic credentials in sharp contrast to what he describes as my own background as a “political activist” with “sloppy” research methods.

I therefore dropped Prof. Gelman a respectful note, asking him what he thought of the conclusions that Prof. Mertz drew from her 2008 paper, and whether they seemed warranted by her underlying data.  He replied that he had merely “skimmed” her paper and had no particular opinion on whether she was right or wrong.  With his permission, I am publishing our brief exchange.

Although I am certainly pleased that Gelman now seems to be backpedaling from his criticism of my work—he argues that “sloppy” was never meant to be an insulting adjective—I really wonder what this indicates about his own scholarly methods.  After all, not only had he written four or five separate columns and numerous comments—probably totaling over 15,000 words—promoting Mertz, but he had also repeatedly cited or linked to her 2008 paper.  Shouldn’t he have actually *read* rather than merely “skimmed” her paper and even investigated her use of statistics before he repeatedly used it to denounce my own research?  Perhaps this raises questions about whether he bothered reading my own article before criticizing it.  One suspects that something more than mere dispassionate scholarly interest explains the rapidity with which Gelman wholeheartedly endorsed Mertz’s accusations without apparently bothering to investigate them.

We must ask ourselves what it means for our society when an academic such as Mertz can determine that 95% of all top math students have always been male and then immediately announce that she has proven that men and women have equal mathematical ability at the high end, thereby producing headlines in Science Daily and on popular websites.  Mertz may simply be an agitated ideologue, but those lazy or biased journalists who eagerly promote her absurd claims are just as guilty, and that goes double for seemingly-reputable academics such as Prof. Gelman who lend their names to similar nonsense.

I suspect that Mertz’s tendency to wildly mischaracterize statistical data is confined to her ideological math-feminism and similar matters, but perhaps that I am mistaken.  Her field of professional expertise is cancer research, in which misuse of statistics may have life-or-death consequences.

Suppose Mertz had conducted a study of two different cancer treatments, tested in trials across two dozen countries around the world.  Suppose also the patient death rate for one of those treatments averaged twenty times greater than the other, with the death ratio for nearly all the countries falling in the range between 15-to-1 and 50-to-1.  If Mertz then summarized her results by reporting that the two cancer treatments seemed very similar in effectiveness, there might be very serious consequences for human health.  I do hope that someone of Prof. Gelman’s statistical expertise is keeping close watch to ensure that Mertz’s statistical misfortunes are confined solely to ideological matters and do not contaminate her life-determining medical research.

Finally, on a different matter, NYT columnist David Brooks had been so surprised and impressed with some of my findings that he gave my article a “Sidney award” as among the best of the year. One of my findings had been the collapse of Jewish academic achievement in recent decades, and I had speculated that the exponential growth of the academically unimpressive ultra-Orthodox community might be a major reason. Brooks has now investigated this “Orthodox Surge” in greater detail, and written a column about it.

I also yesterday participated in a well-attended DC Aspen Institute panel on raising the minimum wage.  More about that in a future column.

Meritocracy: The College Admissions Season

The American Conservative • April 9, 2013 • 1,100 Words

The season of college admissions is now upon us, weeks of envelopes fat and thin.

With so many teenagers now discovering their future life-prospects as dealt out by our academic gatekeepers, discussions of the selection process are appearing in our media, and some of these include reference to my own Meritocracy article of almost five months ago, focusing on the same topic.

For example, the Sunday New York Times carried an interesting discussion by columnist Ross Douthat on the Ivies and their role in producing our national elites, which included linked references to my main Meritocracy article as well as my short piece for the NYT Forum on Asian discrimination.

Given that the reach of the electronic media so greatly exceeds the number of people who ever bother reading anything, I was even more pleased to see that Fareed Zakaria’s Sunday CNN television show ran a segment on college admissions, heavily drawing upon the findings of my article; his Time magazine column covered the same topic.  One minor point of confusion was his suggestion that I had ignored the substantial number of Asian students whose fear of racial discrimination causes them to conceal their personal background and are therefore lumped into the “Race Unknown” category.  In fact, I had discussed this and similar possibilities in detail, and provided all the related data.

Assuming that the racial and ethnic distribution of Ivy League admissions this year is roughly in line with the recent past, I would hope that activists and the media finally begin exerting serious pressure on our elite schools to provide their admissions rates broken down by race.  All the campuses of the University of California system freely post such data on the Internet, and I cannot think of any non-sinister reason for the Ivy League to make such strenuous efforts to keep such numbers secret.  My strong suspicion is that release of those ethnic percentages and their historical trajectory would produce such an uproar that the front pages of every major newspaper in America might devote many weeks to the reverberations and recriminations, with senior university administrators replacing certain Catholic archbishops as the leading villains in a decades-long cover-up of truly massive proportions.

Perhaps any aspiring Woodwards and Bernsteins with friends working in Ivy League admissions offices should give some thought to just how nice a Pulitzer Prize or two might look upon their mantle.

On an entirely different matter, Prof. Kevin MacDonald has published an article analyzing differences in European and non-European marriage patterns, which included a lengthy discussion of my own recent China article.  He singled out China’s system of polygamy—in sharp contrast to European monogamy—as playing a central role in shaping the characteristics of the Chinese people over the last two thousand years.  However, I think his analysis is largely incorrect.

One problem in attempting to draw insight from the great literary works of a culture, as MacDonald does, is that these overwhelmingly focus on the lives of the topmost elites rather than the ordinary multitudes of the population.  For similar reasons, the tremendous importance of the traditional Chinese examination system in selecting China’s ruling meritocracy has led to widespread suggestions that this testing system played a major role in shaping the characteristics of the modern Chinese people and their high academic ability.  But both these possibilities seem very unlikely.

Although successful exam-takers received considerable social prestige in Old China, the major practical benefit they enjoyed was the possibility of an official appointment to the Mandarinate, which might provide them with huge opportunities to accrue wealth and power.  But the total number of such Chinese officials was utterly negligible, numbering just one in 20,000 Chinese during the nineteenth century, or a mere 0.005% of the total citizenry.  The overall characteristics of the population are unlikely to shift when even huge benefits are provided to such a negligible number of individuals.

Although the impact of polygamy would not be quite as insignificant, I think it would still be far too small to make a difference.  I’m not aware of any reliable quantitative estimates of the percentage of adult males who managed to obtain multiple wives or concubines in traditional China, but based on the detailed accounts I have read of particular villages and sociological overviews, the figure would seem very small, probably less than one percent of adult men.  Hence just a tiny fraction of women would have been absorbed by polygamy, with no significant impact upon the marriage prospects of the male population as a whole.

Instead, the overriding factor in preventing many men of each generation from obtaining wives was the widespread practice of female infanticide among the poorer classes, which experts estimate regularly produced a shortfall in the adult female population as high as 15% per generation.  Almost all the landlords of a village were just as monogamous as their poorer neighbors, with their wealth and land being far too insignificant to support an extra family on the side.  The missing wives of unhappy bachelors were not locked away in the harems of the rich, but had mostly been drowned at birth by the impoverished families of the previous generation.

Thus, I think the major demographic force upon Chinese society was the drain at the bottom rather than the overflow at the top.  The poorest portion of each male generation was unable to marry at all, and even those who did often suffered the ill effects of high infant mortality, both intentional and unintentional, as well as malnutrition and the ravages of periodic famines.  The bottom economic half of each generation probably produced just a small slice of the next one, and this economic winnowing was certainly a far more significant shaping force than the tiny handful of landlords who were so exceptionally wealthy that they could afford several wives and numerous children.

Admittedly, the major published works of traditional China would focus on the bitter intrigues of rival wives or the outstanding scholarly achievements of great scholars; but this had nothing to do with 99% of the Chinese people.  Similarly, the contemporaneous literature of Europe might focus on leading armies in battle, fighting knightly duels, or composing sonnets at Court, activities all totally alien to the lives of ordinary peasants, who constituted nearly the entire population.

Finally, I was quite astonished at the enormous response I received to my brief and casual discussion of the “Mickey Mouse” origins of America’s copyright law, with my column quickly reaching the top of the recent TAC readership charts and being Tweeted out to hundreds of thousands of individuals.  Sometimes I invest enormous time and research effort in a piece and relatively few people seem to find it interesting, and sometimes just the opposite.  Which just goes to show that our world remains highly unpredictable.

English and Meritocracy: The Gullibility of Our Political and Media Elites

The Unz Review • May 15, 2014 • 1,800 Words

Last week I noted in a column that the California Republicans in the Education Committee of the State Senate had joined an 8-to-0 vote to repeal Proposition 227 and restore Spanish-almost-only “bilingual education” in our schools.

The academic performance of over a million immigrant student had doubled in the four years following the implementation of intensive English immersion programs, so presumably the goal of the Republicans (and their Democratic co-conspirators) is now to un-double that performance and restore the system as it was in the past.

Just a few years ago, the educational successes of Prop. 227 were still so keenly recalled that even the erstwhile champions of bilingual programs heatedly denied any intent to restore the disastrous system. But politicians have exceptionally short memories, and with all the bilingual activists and bilingual researchers having spent some time lobbying them in Sacramento about the wondrous benefits of teaching young immigrant children everything in Spanish in order to help them learn English, their empty heads have been spun around and their votes have reversed.

Various other individuals share my amusement about this ridiculous situation. Harvard Professor Steven Pinker, one of America’s foremost psycho-linguists reminded his 126,000 twitter followers about the “Bizarre chapter in educ politics: So-called bilingual education (= keep Eng away fm kids when they can best learn it)” and Francis Fukuyama, another very prominent intellectual, tweeted out my column to his own 29,000 followers, as did Debra Saunders of the SF Chronicle and numerous others.

In general, the reaction all across the Internet to the Republican reversal on bilingual education was scathing, and others shared my view that it might constitute the last nail in the coffin for the dying California GOP that had once dominated the state during the eras of Reagan and Nixon.

Still, it would only be fair to note that the Republican position did receive strong support in certain ideological quarters. Richard Spencer, one of America’s leading White Nationalists, strongly endorsed the restoration of bilingual education and opposed requiring Hispanic children to learn English. Many of the commenters on Jared Taylor’s similarly-hued website took the same position, with one of them very clearly summarizing their perspective:

Good! Anything that disadvantages hispanics vs poor whites is in our racial interest.

Bilingual education often turns into defacto segregation, where whites get to be in normal classes with fewer hispanics. This could be the best thing for white kids trapped in California public schools. The hispanic kids won’t end up learning enough English to escape their educational barrio.

When the hispanics graduate with their worthless bilingual degrees, they won’t be able to speak English well enough to compete with the white kids for jobs. They’ll end up mopping floors and mowing lawns for the rest of their lives.

I’m done “doing the right thing” if it means helping non-whites at the expense of whites. If Jose and Guadalupe want their dumb kids to speak mexican dialect spanish as their only language, I hope the little bambinos enjoy their jobs scrubbing toilets for minimum wage.

Frankly, I regard the current effort to return a million California schoolchildren to Spanish language classrooms more as an amusing bit of idiocy than as any serious threat to the educational revolution of the late 1990s. We must remember that California schools have now been teaching immigrant children English for the better part of a full generation, and nearly all of them have become perfectly fluent and literate in that language, which they obviously want their children also to learn.

Most Latinos are working-class or working-poor and being busy with their own lives, don’t pay a great deal of regular attention to what the politicians in Sacramento are saying or doing. But if they discover that the local schools have suddenly stopped teaching their children English and shifted them into Spanish language classes instead, that bizarre educational change will produce a tidal wave of popular anger and outrage, threatening the gullible politicians responsible with annihilation.

As an approximate analogy, just a few months ago every Asian Democrat in the California Legislature voted to repeal Prop. 209 and reestablish racial preferences in state university admissions. But once ordinary Asians got wind of this development, which would almost certainly would have led to the reestablishment of Asian Quotas in California colleges, the popular outcry was so enormous that all the Asian Democrats immediately reversed their positions and their legislative leaders quickly killed the suddenly divisive measure, which had previously enjoyed near-unanimous Democratic backing.

As an even better parallel, consider the instructive political fate of Nativo Lopez of Santa Ana. His powerful political machine had rendered him a feared local figure to both Democrats and Republicans alike, whom he regularly insulted and attacked with total impunity, even running profanity-laced radio spots against California’s reigning Democratic governor without suffering any retaliation. But after he proclaimed himself a diehard supporter of bilingual education and refused to implement the English language programs required by Prop. 227, he provoked a grassroots uprising by angry Latino parents and was recalled from office, losing by a forty point margin in America’s most heavily Latino immigrant city.

Even over a dozen years ago, long before the educational facts were so fully established, “English in the Schools” enjoyed nearly 80% support among Democrats and Republicans,  and those numbers and intensity were identical for Latinos. Meanwhile, American popular discontent with the endless failures of our political elites, both Democratic and Republican, is at an all-time high. California Republicans are already on the verge of slipping into minor party status and the reestablishment of bilingual education in our schools might place the Democrats on the same trajectory. Perhaps a non-partisan “English Party” would arise to replace both of them in power.

But if the ignorance and gullibility of most American political leaders are universally acknowledged and the subject of endless ridicule by our media elites, perhaps the latter should occasionally look into a mirror.

Anyone can find a ridiculous article by a lowly and unknown junior reporter and tear it to shreds, so let me instead point to a particularly egregious recent example at the opposite end of the spectrum.

The New York Times stands as America’s newspaper of record and among Timesmen few can match the credentials of David Leonhardt, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and numerous other journalistic awards, spending years as Washington Bureau Chief and recently promoted to Managing Editor of a new high-profile venture applying analytical methods to public policy issues.

For his maiden analytical effort, Leonhardt filled the front page of the Sunday Week in Review with a 1,500 word piece discussing the reason that admission to the Ivies and other elite universities has become so much more difficult for American teenagers over the last couple of decades.

His surprising explanation was the enormous increase in the presence of foreign students since 1994, whose growing numbers have left American applicants to compete over a far smaller remaining pie. Thus, the globalization of top American universities is the true culprit behind so many of those thin envelopes received by disappointed students over the last few months.

Given my own prior research and writings on university admissions issues, Leonhardt’s claims seemed extremely doubtful to me, and their credibility was not enhanced by his total lack of specific numbers on international college admissions. In fact, it took me just a couple of minutes to confirm that his argument was entirely incorrect.

The website of the National Center for Educational Statistics provides thirty years worth of data on the enrollment of international students for America’s 5,000 individual colleges, but unfortunately only the most recent figures are presented in convenient form. Therefore, last year I added a research utility to my own website that immediately provides the 1980-2011 enrollment statistics for any university. A few moments using this tool revealed that between 1994 and 2011 the percentage of domestic undergraduates had merely declined from 93.5% to 89.3% at Harvard and from 95.6% to 89.8% at Yale, with roughly similar changes at most other elite universities. Obviously, a decline of only about 5% in the number of available slots for American students would have had little impact on their chance of admission.

Given that Leonhardt’s only quoted source was Harvard’s longtime dean of admissions, who emphasized the tremendous benefits international students provide to their American classmates, I strongly suspect that particular administrator and his counterparts had provided the original impetus for the article, and their motives may have been largely self-serving. Each Spring, many wealthy and influential families are disappointed at the rejection letters received by their children and deflecting their unhappiness is a crucial goal for top colleges. The sorts of families who apply to the Ivies are exactly those that most tend to favor globalization and meritocracy and if they could be persuaded that the competition of brilliant foreigners was the cause of their children’s distress, they would be much less likely to protest.

My own analysis of today’s admissions policies at the Ivies and other elite universities is very different and was presented in my 30,000 word Meritocracy article and the 30,000 words of columns that followed. Perhaps Leonhardt should read my analysis and examine the extensive data I provided.

As it happens, America’s Educational Writers Association is holding its annual convention next week at Vanderbilt University and I have been invited to speak on a panel dealing with Asian admissions issues, a major theme of my own research. Over the last year or two, I have published quite a number of pieces highlighting the strong statistical evidence for an Asian Quota among Ivy League universities, with my research even sparking a 2012 New York Times forum on the topic.

I have also repeatedly pointed out that the easiest means of addressing these very serious charges of racial discrimination would be for Ivies to release the historical statistics on the ethnic distribution of their applicants, information which they have no legitimate reason for keeping secret. My strong suspicion is that the admission rates for Asian-American applicants have plummeted relative to all other groups over the last twenty years, a drop certainly unmatched by any decline in Asian academic performance, and that this glaring discrepancy explains the unwillingness of our elite universities to provide that data.

The trends may have been so dramatic that if made public they would reach the front pages of the leading newspapers in America—and many in Asia as well—and generate a political firestorm, with the enterprising reporter who somehow obtained the data perhaps winning himself a Pulitzer Prize along the way. In fact, I can think of a particular American journalist ideally situated to achieve this result, with exactly the right mixture of stature, credibility, and university connections to quietly secure the restricted information and then break the story to an admiring public. His name? David Leonhardt of The New York Times.

Asian Quotas in the Ivy League? "We See Nothing! Nothing!"

The Unz Review • May 27, 2014 • 1,500 Words

Last week I was invited to speak at the annual conference of the Education Writers Association, with the topic of my panel being the perspective of Asian-Americans on Affirmative Action policies in college admissions.  Despite having the only white face among the four presenters, I believe my analysis made a useful contribution.

A couple of months ago, the issue had unexpectedly moved to the fore of the national debate. Democrats in the California State Legislature had unanimously backed SCA-5, a proposed 2014 ballot measure intended to repeal Prop. 209 and thereby restore Affirmative Action, banned in 1996. Since the 1990s, California had effectively become a one-party Democratic state, and many expected the voters would roll back that controversial legacy of the Pete Wilson Era. Every Asian in the Legislature is a Democrat and every Asian had supported the repeal without hesitation.

But once word of the proposal filtered out into the general Asian-American community, massive opposition spontaneously erupted, and within three weeks nearly 120,000 Asians had signed an electronic petition denouncing the proposal. Their intense hostility centered on the restoration of racially-conscious admissions policies for the prestigious state university system, reflecting their widespread belief that this would eventually result in the establishment of “Asian Quotas,” denying Asian students an equal chance for admission to public universities.

When over a hundred thousand individuals unexpectedly join a grassroots protest, politicians pay attention and within a few days every Asian legislator had reversed course and declared opposition to the measure. California Asians are a core Democratic constituency, usually backing that party’s candidates in the 75% range, and the stunned Democratic leadership quickly tabled the suddenly divisive proposal, which threatened to split their electoral base.

During the weeks that have followed, liberal advocates of Affirmative Action policies argued that Asian-American fears of a looming Asian Quota were totally mistaken, the product of dishonest conservative propaganda and misleading coverage in the ethnic media.  Indeed, these were exactly the arguments advanced by two of my fellow panelists, OiYan Poon of Loyola University and Robert Teranishi of UCLA. But although my presentation did not focus on the particulars of the recent California controversy, I think I demonstrated the underlying roots of the concern that had so galvanized the Asian community.

In late 2012 I had published The Myth of American Meritocracy, a lengthy critique of the admissions policies of America’s elite academic institutions. One of my central points was the overwhelming statistical evidence for the existence of “Asian Quotas” at Harvard, Yale, and the other elite Ivy League schools.

Over the last twenty years, America’s population of college-age Asians has roughly doubled and Asian academic achievement has reached new heights, but there has been no increase whatsoever in Asian enrollment in those elite universities and indeed substantial declines at Harvard and several other Ivies. Meanwhile, other top colleges such as Caltech that admit students based on a strictly meritocratic and objective standard have seen Asian numbers increase fully in line with the growth of the Asian population. These results were summarized in one of my graphs, soon afterward republished in a contentious New York Times symposium inspired by my findings.

(The public ethnic and gender enrollment history for Harvard and every other American university is now conveniently available on our website).

Ivy League schools admit their students by a totally opaque and subjective process, only somewhat related to academic performance or other objective factors, and leading American journalists such as Pulitzer-Prize winner Daniel Golden have documented the powerful evidence that this system is laced with favoritism and even outright corruption. In recent years, Asian enrollments at all the Ivies have converged to a very narrow range and remained relatively constant from year to year, a remarkably suspicious result that seems strongly suggestive of an implicit Asian Quota. Indeed, the statistical evidence for a present-day Asian Quota is arguably stronger than that for the notorious Jewish Quota of the Ivies during the 1920s and 1930s, the existence of which was widely denied at the time by university administrators but is now universally accepted.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, there had been widespread accusations of a similar policy of anti-Asian bias in admissions at the University of California system, but the passage of Prop. 209 outlawed the use of racial factors in admissions, and recent statistics indicate that Asian students are now admitted to leading UC campuses closely in line with their academic performance and without any numerical ceiling on their numbers. Asian parents in California can see with their own two eyes obvious evidence of an Asian Quota at most of America’s top national universities leading to their deep concern that a similar policy might eventually return to the University of California campuses.

Furthermore, Asian elected officials, Asian activists, and most Asian-American advocacy groups have kept silent on the likely existence of Asian Quotas at elite universities, thereby squandering any credibility they might have had during the contentious California debate. My own long article ran over eighteen months ago and despite its original publication in a magazine with a tiny circulation, quickly accumulated over 200,000 pageviews while the analysis was soon widely discussed in the New York Times and numerous other prominent publications.  Indeed, Times columnist David Brooks ranked the piece as perhaps the best American magazine article of the year.  But not a single Asian officeholder or traditional advocacy group took any notice or made any effort to hold the Ivies accountable on a matter of greatest concern to their own community.

In my writings, I have repeatedly noted that although the Ivies freely release their ethnic admissions and ethnic enrollment statistics, they refuse to release their ethnic application totals, data which is freely provided by the University of California and other universities. I strongly suspect that the reason for such reticence is that admission rates for Asians have plummeted relative to all other groups during the last twenty years, a necessary consequence of a determined effort to sharply restrict Asian numbers even while the Asian population has doubled. Asian elected officials or prominent activists could easily apply enormous pressure on the Ivies to release this simple data, but not a single one has chosen to do so.

Such timidity is far from surprising.  Most prominent Asian activists are either affiliated with universities or have close ties with individuals who are.  Regularly denouncing the perceived misdeeds of “white supremacists,” rightwingers, or even merely Republicans is an easy position to take given that those groups possess negligible influence within the academic community.  But Harvard University and its peers dominate higher education like a colossus, and leveling criticism against such targets is hardly conducive to academic career advancement.  Thus Asians found in ethnic studies departments readily seek out the most obscure and insignificant examples of anti-Asian discrimination in throughout the wider world but remain totally silent about the massively visible biases in the most prestigious portions of their own academy.

To date, the stonewalling of the Ivies on this issue has largely succeeded and the entire topic has disappeared from the mainstream media and public discussion, although ordinary Asians remain just as unhappy as ever about the obvious racial discrimination their children face in applying to most elite universities.  Unless either the media or prominent political figures begin putting pressure on Harvard and its fellow elite universities to reveal their ethnic admissions rates, I see no likelihood that this situation will change. And ordinary Asian families will become more and more doubtful that their interests are being represented either in government or in the media. Hence the backlash over SCA-5.

Meanwhile, most other elected officials seem to pay as little attention to the details of college admissions matters as do their Asian counterparts. For example, Sen. Ed Hernandez, the SCA-5 sponsor, had claimed that his effort to reestablish Affirmative Action in California university admissions was necessary to stem the ongoing erosion of Hispanic enrollment at those institutions. But just a few weeks later, all of California’s leading newspapers carried headlines declaring that Hispanic enrollment had reached an all-time high in the UC system, surpassing white numbers for the first time. Somehow I suspect that Sen. Hernandez would have a very difficult time gaining admission to an elite California university either with or without Affirmative Action.

[Clarification: In this column I pointed out that most Asian-American advocacy groups, including all the “traditional” ones, have kept entirely silent on the issue of Asian Quotas in higher education.  Although this is correct, I should have emphasized that some newer such groups have actually been very vigorous on this issue, including efforts to force the Ivies to release their applicant data and recently helping to organize the grassroots resistance to SCA-5 in California, with the most prominent of these being the 80-20 Initiative and one of its founding members, Dr. S.B. Woo, former Lt. Gov. of Delaware.  Indeed, Dr. Haibo Huang, another leading 80-20 activist, had persuaded EWA to invite me to the panel and gave his presentation just before mine.  Another relatively new Asian-American organization quite active on the issue of Affirmative Action is The Asian American Legal Foundation.  My criticism was entirely directed toward the older and more traditional Asian advocacy organizations]

Our Elite Colleges Should Abolish Tuition

Schools like Harvard have become tax-exempt hedge funds with huge returns. Ending tuition would be a form of payback.

The New York Times • March 30, 2015 • 500 Words

Although Harvard is widely known as one of America’s oldest and most prestigious colleges, that public image is outdated. Over the last couple of decades, the university has transformed itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds, with the huge profits of its aggressively managed $36 billion portfolio shielded from taxes because of the educational institution it continues to run as a charity off to one side.

The numbers tell the story. These days Harvard’s 6,600 undergraduates are charged annual tuition of $44,000 per year, with substantial reductions for students from less wealthy families. So student tuition probably contributes much less than $200 million to Harvard’s annual revenue. Meanwhile, the hedge-fund side of Harvard’s operations last year generated a $5 billion return, an amount at least 25 times larger. If all of Harvard’s college students disappeared tomorrow, or attended classes without paying a dime, the financial impact on Harvard, Inc. would be completely negligible.

But although those tuition dollars mean almost nothing to Harvard, they are surely a daunting barrier and burden to almost any American family. An admissions process is flawed when a four-year total price tag approaching $250,000 probably deters many students from even applying.

Harvard claims to provide generous assistance, heavily discounting its nominal list price for many students from middle class or impoverished backgrounds. But the intrusive financial disclosures required by Harvard’s financial aid bureaucracy may be a source of confusion or shame to many working-class households. I also wonder how many lower-income families unfamiliar with our elite college system see such huge costs and automatically assume that Harvard is only open to the very rich.

Meanwhile, even some upper-middle-class parents — who are charged closer to full freight — must wonder if they can afford paying close to a quarter million dollars for a Harvard diploma.

Harvard’s enormous hedge-fund operation has avoided billions of dollars in government taxes. In exchange for this continuing tax benefit, Harvard should abolish all tuition for its undergraduates.

The announcement of a free Harvard education would capture the world’s imagination and draw a vastly broader and more diverse applicant pool, including many high-ability students who had previously limited their aim to their local state college.

Furthermore, everything I’ve said about Harvard applies equally well to most of America’s other top universities including Yale, Princeton and Stanford, which have also become huge untaxed hedge-funds that charge exorbitant tuition. They could just as easily provide free college educations to their students at little financial cost and great social benefit.

In recent decades a greater and greater fraction of our financial, media and political elites have been drawn from among the graduates of a small handful of our top colleges, whose enrollments are enormously skewed toward the wealthy and the well-connected. Having these colleges eliminate their tuition would be an important step toward reversing this unhealthy American polarization.

Ron Unz is a software developer and publisher of The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection.

See also:

- Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund, The American Conservative, December 4, 2012

Meritocracy: Will Harvard Become Free and Fair?

The Unz Review • January 19, 2016 • 1,100 Words

As many of you already know, I recently launched the “Free Harvard/Fair Harvard” campaign, aimed at electing a slate of five candidates to the Harvard Board of Overseers on a platform of [1] increasing the transparency of today’s opaque and abuse-ridden admissions process and [2] immediately eliminating undergraduate tuition as being unnecessary given the huge size of the endowment.

Although scarcely a single individual in America was aware of our plans until five or six weeks ago, our momentum has been enormous, and the New York Times ran a (somewhat suspiciously-minded) front-page story about our reformist campaign on Friday, which quickly sparked additional stories in the London Telegraph, the Harvard Crimson, New York Magazine, Time Magazine, and several other publications, along with considerable international coverage in Spanish, Turkish, and Chinese media outlets.

Harvard is the world’s wealthiest and most prestigious university, and if it were suddenly to abolish tuition under the pressure of a referendum vote of its 320,000 alumni, the resulting earthquake in the global academic community would have aftershocks far and wide.  Indeed, some of Harvard’s most eminent scholars have already dropped me supportive notes, questioning the absurd rise of tuition at their own institution and at other universities over the past few decades, and very much hoping that our campaign might succeed in reversing this trend.

Certainly, Harvard hardly needs the money.  Embedded below is a striking chart, showing the relative size of Harvard’s sources of income in recent years, with the annual investment earnings from its mammoth endowment regularly averaging some twenty-five times larger than the net tuition revenue from its college students.  As I stated in my late 2012 article “Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund” Harvard has quietly become one of the world’s largest hedge-funds, with its aggressively managed $38 billion portfolio shielded from all taxation because of the small educational institution it continues to run as a charity off to one side.

Adding to the attention of our bold campaign has been the strange-bedfellows ideological alliance of our slate of five candidates for Harvard Overseer.  Both I and Lee Cheng, co-founder of the Asian-American Legal Foundation, are generally characterized as conservatives.  Stuart Taylor, Jr., who has spent decades as a prominent journalist and legal commentator, is usually considered a political moderate, although the Brookings Institution with which he has long been affiliated perhaps leans a bit more liberal.  Stephen Hsu, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State, is very much a moderate academic liberal, whose blogsite has for years proudly featured photos of his meetings with President Obama.  And Ralph Nader, headlining our slate, is surely one of the most renowned political progressives of the last half century.

It is also far from coincidental that two of the five members of our slate are Asian-Americans.  Several years ago I published strong statistical evidence for the existence of an “Asian Quota” at Harvard and the other Ivy League universities, prompting The New York Times to run a symposium on the topic, which attracted enormous attention and commentary.

Naturally, Harvard and its peers ignored these complaints, and just a few months ago The Economist ran a lengthy survey on the issue of Asian Quotas, updating my results and showing that nothing had changed.  Add to this the massive pattern of corrupt and abusive admissions practices at elite colleges—documented by Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Golden in his book The Price of Admission—and it is obvious that only the disinfecting sunlight of admissions transparency would restore our own alma mater and its peers to the academic integrity that is absolutely necessary for their continued existence.  And only the external pressure of a successful campaign for seats on the Harvard Board of Overseers could achieve this result.

Indeed, the notorious sluggishness of the Harvard Administration in responding to any external stimuli was the immediate spur for this campaign.  Last year the New York Times had solicited a piece from me on my suggestions for improving higher education, and I merely reiterated my argument that elite colleges should immediately abolish tuition. Response at the time was overwhelmingly positive from all ideological quarters, but mighty Harvard paid not the slightest notice to my words, leading me to consider what possible means might exist to impose necessary reforms upon such an enormously wealthy and rather solipsistic institution, now rapidly approaching its 400th anniversary.  This Overseer campaign was the ultimate result.

And if we succeed with this effort, the reverberations will echo far and wide, given that so many of Harvard’s near-peers possess balance sheets and institutional proclivities that are nearly indistinguishable.  Anyone who looks at a chart of the sources of income for Yale, Princeton, and Stanford would notice an uncanny resemblance to that of their Cambridge sibling.  So if Harvard falls to the “Free Tuition Movement,” many other academic dominoes will surely soon topple as well.

Will our campaign succeed?  Maybe, maybe not.  Based on all indications so far, I have little doubt that if our names do appear on the annual Overseer ballot and our position statements are mailed out to the 320,000 Harvard alumni, we will win a resounding victory throughout the Harvard community, and soon thereafter mighty Harvard will agree to forego 4% of its annual investment income and henceforth become tuition-free, while also starting to shift its admissions process from abusive total opacity to some degree of reasonable transparency.  But the more difficult question is whether we will even be able to reach that ballot.

We now have little more than ten remaining days to obtain the valid signatures of 201 Harvard alumni, holders of either undergraduate or graduate degrees, and although those numbers are small, our time is very short.  Furthermore, the traditions of such an august institution, set forth in the antique English of its mid-17th Century charter, require that all such signatures be provided in physical form and only written upon the elegant petitions printed by the University itself.

Thus, anyone holding a Harvard degree who is interested in signing our petitions and perhaps changing the world should email us at petitions@FreeHarvard.org, and include your mailing address to obtain a petition for signing.  If you can commit to quickly gathering an additional signature or two and also include your phone number, we will fedex you a petition.  The more Harvard alumni signatures all of you can quickly gather, the more likely Harvard will soon become both free and fair.

Meritocracy: How Harvard Currently Soaks the Rich...Such as NYC Public Schoolteachers

The Unz Review • February 4, 2016 • 2,200 Words

This last Saturday night I took a red-eye flight to Boston accompanied by an all-important carry-on bag, containing some thirty pounds of signed nomination petitions for our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign for the Harvard Board of Overseers.

With potentially major changes in the structure of American higher education hanging in the balance, I could not possibly trust Fedex or any other service for the safe Monday arrival of our petitions at the 17 Quincy Street Harvard offices, and hand-delivery seemed the only secure option.  I’d originally planned my trip when huge winter storms had led to thousands of flight cancellations along the East Coast, so I separately booked both Saturday night and Sunday morning flights, with an eye towards possibly buying a last-minute third ticket to some other city along the Eastern Seaboard just in case snow blocked all incoming flights to Boston’s Logan Airport.

Fortunately, by the time our signature-gathering was complete and I boarded my JetBlue flight out of SFO, the Great Winter Storm of 2016 was merely a fading memory and both I and my precious cargo arrived without delay or incident.

Under normal circumstances I would have been loath to risk turning in our Harvard petitions on the last day available, Monday, February 1st, but our Overseer ballot qualification drive had been far more difficult and challenging than outside observers might expect.  The number of signatures each of us required was hardly onerous—just 201 from among the 320,000 holders of Harvard degrees—but only physical signatures on special Harvard-printed nomination petitions were allowed, and for various reasons we had started our signature drive far later than I had originally planned.  Excluding the delivery time of the blank petitions from Harvard itself, we had just a couple of weeks to locate our potential supporters, fedex them our nomination petitions, and receive their signed petitions in the Priority Mail return envelopes we provided.  Naturally, most of the signatures arrived in the last couple of days, and late Saturday afternoon I was still nervously awaiting the day’s mail delivery just before leaving for the airport.

Despite all our concerns, we easily met our goals, and my heavy satchel on the flight to Boston Saturday night contained around 285 total signatures for most of our individual candidacies, providing a large safety margin over the required number.  Virtually all our signers appeared absolutely legitimate, and unless the Harvard administrators choose to disqualify huge numbers of those alumni signatures on unreasonably trivial grounds, our slate will appear on the next Harvard Overseer ballot, with potentially major consequences.  So we have now passed the first hurdle, though not without considerable nail-biting along the way.

Because I arrived in Cambridge very early Sunday morning and the Harvard offices did not open until Monday, I decided to spend the day trying to pad our numbers by doing some personal petitioning in Harvard Square and at various places around the university, having brought along some signs, large charts, and hand-outs to support such an effort.

During a full day of energetic petitioning, my success rate ran 100% among those who stopped in curiosity, asked questions, then declared themselves to be holders of Harvard degrees eligible to sign.  Unfortunately, that total came to merely two individuals, as a cold New England Sunday deterred the busy and the sensible from dawdling in conversation with some obvious political crackpot sermonizing on Harvard’s vast wealth and absurdly promising to abolition Harvard tuition as a consequence.

A couple of pleasant young Crimson reporters also spent an hour or so reporting on my petitioning efforts and interviewing me, with a picture taken by their staff photographer and displayed on the front-page of their Monday newspaper accurately capturing the somewhat amusing street scene.  Frankly, I doubt if even a single passer-by that day actually believed that my remarkably quixotic proposal had the slightest prospect of actual real-world success.

Petitioning near Harvard’s Science Center.  Credit: Harvard Crimson

Still, a much larger number of current Harvard students or casual visitors did stop, listen, and take away some of our materials, and of these individuals not one opposed our project, with the great majority being enthusiastic supporters.  So the secondary goal of my petitioning—to gauge the political temperature in the Harvard community—proved much more encouraging and successful.

On Monday morning, I waited in my local hotel for the fedex deliveries of those petitions signed too late to reach me on Saturday in California, then took a taxi and lugged my heavy bag of petitions to the Harvard offices for delivery to the friendly staff located there, receiving a signed receipt in return.

I then picked up a couple of copies of the Crimson issue featuring my local petitioning efforts, as well as President Drew Faust’s sharp rebuttal to our proposals, and went to have a cup of coffee with John S. Rosenberg, editor of Harvard Magazine.  Just a few days earlier, I had been stunned by the sudden appearance of his remarkably long (9,000 words), thorough, and even-handed article on our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign, and I was very glad to have an opportunity to meet the author himself and explain some of my forthcoming plans for the coming months.  Afterwards I took a taxi to WBUR, Boston’s local NPR station, which had invited me to do a long in-studio interview segment on our campaign, which I think went quite well.

The voter base for our Overseer campaign consists of active Harvard alumni, and these individuals receive Harvard Magazine, probably pay quite a bit of attention to stories that run in the Crimson, and are heavily concentrated in the Greater Boston area, often listening to the local NPR station.  Taken together, these sorts of media outlets are exactly the ones that help shape the perceptions of our potential voters, and so far I think their coverage of our efforts has been exemplary—probing, sometimes tough, but generally extremely fair.  I suspect there will be many, many more stories about our campaign and the issues we are raising before the Overseer election results are finally announced in June.

What, then, of the issues themselves?  For me, one considerable surprise has been just how much the Harvard Administration opposition to our campaign has focused on the “Free Harvard” issue, with the university spokesmen and its top officials repeatedly claiming that our proposal to abolish college tuition is completely unnecessary since Harvard already provides very generous financial aid, and also financially impossible or at least very burdensome and difficult.

In the original New York Times article, Harvard Spokesman Jeff Neal had claimed that legal restrictions on Harvard endowment funds made our proposal a non-starter.  Former Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation Robert Reischauer made a similar point in an NYT letter to the editor.  In fact, the Harvard Crimson article featuring President Drew Faust’s response was actually entitled “Faust Condemns Free Tuition Proposal from Outside Overseers Ticket” and my WBUR interviewer cited further statements from Neal along similar lines.

But despite the weighty credentials and elite credibility of these individuals, I believe the facts are very much on the other side.

Let us first consider whether our proposal is even legally and financially possible.  As I have repeatedly pointed out, the university’s overall investment income averages some twenty-five times the size of its net college tuition revenue, and none of these Harvard officials have ever disputed my claim.  The sheer magnitude of this disparity is effectively illustrated in a simple chart I have widely distributed:

Now it is perfectly true that a large portion of the Harvard endowment is bound by various donor restrictions, and according to the NPR interviewer, Neal claimed the figure was 70%, which does not seem unreasonable to me.  However, that still leaves 30% of the endowment income as completely unrestricted, and since an allocation of merely 4% would be sufficient to abolish tuition, I cannot see any resulting difficulty.  Furthermore, roughly half of all new Harvard donations each year are completely unrestricted, and this sum alone would easily be enough to swamp the costs now covered by tuition.  I simply cannot understand the argument that abolishing tuition is financially or legally difficult, let alone impossible.

Meanwhile, what of Harvard’s other argument, that the current system serves the cause of financial equity by only soaking the wealthy while protecting the less affluent?  It is endlessly claimed that today’s exceptionally complex system of financial aid means that only millionaires and such actually pay the stated costs of over $60,000 per year, while less affluent families are completely insulated from any resulting financial hardship.

To some extent this is certainly true.  Families with incomes of $65,000 and below may send their children to Harvard completely free of charge, though I personally wonder just how many such American families are actually aware of this, rather than casually hear about a Harvard list-price of $60,000 per year and never even consider applying.  But what about families with somewhat higher incomes?  Is Harvard’s very complex—and totally secret—financial aid formula really as well-designed and equitable as its top university officials endlessly proclaim?

As it happens, Harvard provides a convenient “Net Price Calculator” on its website, useful for determining the cost of attendance based on one’s financial situation (though an NYT columnist has harshly criticized Harvard for using various software tricks to block any “comparison shopping” against its competitors).

Therefore, let us consider a very simple case, namely that of married couple, both longtime New York City public schoolteachers, having one child who is smart and talented enough to have been accepted at Harvard College.

Now NYC is an extremely expensive place to live, with the local cost-of-living perhaps almost twice the national average.  The local teachers unions are strong and ensure a solid income for their members, with a base salary of at least nearly $93,000 for career teachers of 22 years service or longer; that may sound like a lot, but is more like $45,000 or $50,000 per year in a less expensive part of the country.  Therefore, a pair of such public school teachers has a combined salary income of roughly $185,000 per year.  Let us further suppose that over many years of diligent effort they have managed to accumulate (non-retirement) cash savings and investments of $200,000, which generates annual investment income of an extra $5,000 per year.  I would hardly regard such a middle-class couple as being part of America’s wealthy elite.

Harvard apparently disagrees.  Plugging these exact numbers into the Harvard Net Price Calculator indicates that those NYC public schoolteachers would be expected to provide a parental contribution of $44,000 per year, or $176,000 over the four years.  So they may indeed choose to send their son or daughter to Harvard just so long as they are willing to spend almost their entire life savings for that privilege.  Is this financially equitable?

What about a somewhat different case.  Suppose over the years that same couple of NYC school teachers had encountered serious financial problems or unexpected expenses, perhaps medical bills beyond their insurance coverage, and as a result had no significant personal savings when their son received his Golden Ticket of an acceptance letter to Harvard.  Surely, under such circumstances, Harvard would cover all the costs.

Apparently not.  If we plug zero savings and zero investment income into the handy Harvard Calculator, we find the university still requires such parents to contribute $135,000 over four years.  Presumably, it expects them to go massively into personal debt or sell their kidneys or (more realistically) take out a second mortgage on their home or apartment.  Obviously, the most likely scenario is that they decide that a Harvard education is totally unaffordable to the non-wealthy, and instead send their son or daughter to a local state college.  Meanwhile, Harvard remains totally mystified why such a large fraction of its current students come from wealthy families.

Now in the cases we examined, a total four-year parental contribution of $176,000 or even $135,000 surely seems like a huge amount of money to that family of NYC public school teachers.  But how much do such sums matter to Harvard itself?

Well, over the last few years, Harvard’s endowment investment income—excluding all new donations—has averaged about $3.2 billion per year.  That’s $9 million per day, or $365,000 per hour.  So the insurmountable obstacle of $135,000 it would demand from that family of NYC public school teachers in difficult financial circumstances represents roughly 22 minutes of Harvard’s average ordinary investment income.  22 minutes of investment income.  “Let them eat cake”…

It’s also important to remember that while those NYC public school teachers pay a huge variety of often heavy taxes—federal income taxes, social security taxes, state taxes, city taxes, sales taxes, property taxes—-Harvard University is totally tax-exempt, which is one reason its annual investment income is so extremely large.  Years ago, I wrote an article pointing out that Harvard had actually become one of the world’s largest hedge-funds, with some sort of small school or college or something attached off to one side for tax reasons.  Right now, it looks like Harvard and its peers will remain tax-exempt indefinitely.  But I really think it’s quite unseemly for a tax-exempt hedge-fund to continue gouging families of public school teachers of their life-savings, while simultaneously denigrating them as members of America’s wealthy elite.

I suspect that in a few months time, the vast majority of the Harvard alumni who vote in the Overseers election will agree with me.  And soon thereafter Harvard will indeed become free.

Meritocracy: Harvard PR vs. Factual Reality

The Unz Review • February 15, 2016 • 1,200 Words

As most readers have probably heard, a few days ago we were notified by Harvard University that the alumni signatures on the nomination petitions we had submitted were sufficient in number, and our “Free Harvard/Fair Harvard” slate of candidates would therefore appear on the forthcoming ballot for the Harvard Board of Overseers.

An important public discussion may soon begin, perhaps extending far beyond the narrow confines of a single prestigious college and its alumni: Issues of college tuition and admissions fairness are widely contentious in today’s America.  Furthermore, an extended campaign of months allows factual claims to be subjected to far greater scrutiny than the mere he-said-she-said ping-pong-match of a one-off media story, however prominent.

For example, take our original argument that the enormous annual income regularly generated by the Harvard endowment would allow the university to easily abolish undergraduate tuition, a suggestion that surely must have seemed shocking and implausible to many at first mention.  Indeed, the initial New York Times story quoted Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal as dismissing that claim as “a common misconception,” one which ignored the fact that endowment funds were “largely restricted” by the contributors.  And unsurprisingly, the vast majority of initial media stories deferred to Harvard’s position on such matters, accepting its credibility and treating our position as presumably mistaken; and without a campaign, that would have been the end of the matter.

However, the actual numbers seem decidedly on our side.  Over the last few years, the investment income from Harvard’s endowment has averaged some twenty-five times greater than net tuition revenue, meaning that reallocating a mere 4% of that vast ongoing flow of income from mortgage derivative securities and private equity tranches would be sufficient to eliminate tuition.  And in subsequent media interviews, Harvard officials specified that roughly 70% of their endowment is currently restricted, which implies that 30% is unrestricted, a figure vastly larger than the 4% in question, even excluding the huge annual total of unrestricted new donations.  Thus, it appears that our original claims were entirely correct, and the only lasting impact of Harvard’s initial denial is upon the credibility of the individuals involved.

A somewhat similar situation had developed in late 2012 when I first called attention to Harvard’s transformation into a giant hedge fund and originally suggested that the university should therefore abolish tuition.  Harvard quickly huddled with its external strategic communication firm and a top spokesman drafted a letter arguing that my article contained numerous inaccuracies which should be corrected.  I immediately responded and I leave it to individual readers to read both sides of the exchange and decide for themselves who seemed to get the better of it.

Most recently, I explored Harvard’s endless claims that its existing system of financial aid is so generous that only the rich are soaked.  Plugging a few hypothetical financials into Harvard’s own “Net Price Calculator,” I quickly discovered that a pair of public schoolteachers living in New York City would likely be forced to expend the bulk of their life savings in order to give their son or daughter a Harvard education.  So either Harvard considers all NYC public schoolteachers to be “rich” or their statements to the media have been somewhat less than entirely accurate.

These are the facts we should keep in mind as we now consider some of Harvard’s claims regarding its existing admissions policy.  Although “Fair Harvard” has always been an equal plank of our Overseer platform, and indeed the primary focus of several of our candidates, Harvard itself has appeared strangely reticent in addressing the issue, seeming to concentrate almost all their public statements on critiquing the “Free Harvard” proposal. Back in late 2012, I had published a piece in the NYT pointing to the strong statistical evidence for “Asian Quotas” at Harvard, and the rather brief and perfunctory Harvard denial contained absolutely no specifics whatsoever.

However, whenever I raised this issue in my conversations with journalists over the last few weeks, they immediately provided Harvard’s stock response that the large rise in Asian-American enrollments over the last twenty-five years clearly demonstrates the total absence of any anti-Asian bias.  And indeed, there are far more Asians at Harvard College today than there were in 1990.  The entire trajectory of Harvard’s undergraduate population since 1980 can be found in the public data made conveniently available on my own website, along with that of 5000-odd other colleges, drawn from the website of the quasi-governmental National Center for Educational Statistics.

But this glib argument on Harvard’s part completely ignores the dramatic rise of America’s Asian-American population, which has grown nearly 20-fold from a very low base since 1960.  Obviously, the relevant statistic to examine at Harvard College is not the total number of Asians, but their per capita enrollment, as measured relative to their college-age population.  Since the Current Population Survey of the U.S. Census provides a good estimate of the latter, the calculation is hardly a difficult one, either for Harvard or for any other elite college, and the changes over the last twenty years in the per capita ethnic enrollments of Asians, along with blacks, Hispanics, and non-Hispanic whites can be plotted in a simple chart:

Now obviously some degree of fluctuation in per capita enrollments at Harvard or any other college would be perfectly understandable, and indeed the figures for whites, Hispanics, and blacks all tend to go up and down a bit over time.  But the per capita enrollment for Asian-Americans of college-age has shown an almost continuous decline over the last twenty years, now being 60% lower than in 1995.  One would think that an apparent drop in enrollment of some 60% would have at least raised questions at Harvard’s admissions office. Has Asian academic performance collapsed during these two decades?  Are Asians no longer applying to Harvard in large numbers?  I’d hope we can disregard the possibility of any anti-Asian bias in Harvard’s vaunted “holistic admissions methods,” enshrined as exemplary by the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark Bakke decision.

Yet oddly enough, those dramatic changes at Harvard seem quite similar to what happened at most other elite colleges during that same period.  Producing similar charts is just as easy, and nearly all of them show exactly the same pattern, sometimes even exhibiting a drop in Asian enrollment significantly greater than that at Harvard (though with Princeton being one of the very few exceptions).  For example, here are the charts for Yale and Stanford:

These charts might help to explain the endless complaints and lawsuits from Asian-American activists and organizations over what they perceive as anti-Asian racial discrimination in elite admissions policy.  Whether or not that happens to be correct, I’d be very curious to hear Harvard’s own explanation.  Or might it even be possible that America’s most elite college never even noticed that per capita Asian-American enrollment had dropped by such a huge amount in just a couple of decades?

Inquiring minds wish to know.  Perhaps journalists will as well.

Postscript:

As I indicated above, Princeton is something of an outlier in this twenty-year trend of very large declines in the per capita enrollment of Asian-Americans at top elite colleges, as may be seen from the corresponding chart:

It may or may not be purely coincidental that a sharp turn-around in declining Asian-American enrollment there began around 2007, just after Daniel Golden of the Wall Street Journal reported the anti-Asian discrimination complaint filed by applicant Jian Li, which led to widespread coverage in the American media.

The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays

The Unz Review • March 4, 2016 • 1,800 Words

I first began collecting and organizing my old print articles early last summer, believing that having them all conveniently available in book form would be useful for my planned Harvard Overseer campaign. Now at very long last the regular hardcover edition of The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays has been delivered from the printers and is available for easy distribution and open sale at Amazon.com, with a Kindle edition to soon follow.

Unsurprisingly, the entire process took far more time and effort than I ever expected, and given the relative paucity of nonfiction collections by mainstream presses, required quite a bit of thought to issues of organization and design, as well as the aesthetics of layout and typeface. The magnitude of this initial effort meanwhile persuaded me to incorporate more and more of my material into the text, since I would hardly be likely to publish any second collection in the future.

As a result, the volume ultimately came to include virtually all my print articles of the last thirty years and a few of my more recent web columns, thus pushing the length past 700 pages, including a lengthy and comprehensive index. When I cautiously opened my first shipped box this afternoon, I was quite pleased with the physical quality of what I held in my hand, and the first book published by the newly established imprint Unz Review Press seems of fully professional quality.

Given the absence of costly overhead and my lack of mercenary motives, I have priced the thick, attractive hardcover edition at an inexpensive \$19.99. Free Amazon shipping is a nice option, though it may be another week or so until the Amazon.com’s own sales page is ready, displaying the book just like any produced by Harcourt or the Free Press, and also allowing international shipments and sales. Any journalist, writer, or academic wishing a complimentary copy for their personal use need only contact me to receive one.

Preface

The Table of Contents provides the organization and range, and my Preface provides a bit of explanation:

When considering a collection of previously published articles, unexpected patterns may appear. Such was the case as I reviewed the contents of this book, containing works originally written over a span of thirty years.

The earliest of my pieces are academic papers on the history of Classical Greece, attempting to reconstruct the true events of that era from sources that are often fragmentary, unreliable, and contradictory. Scholars in that field must seek to extract a measure of factual reality from a mountain of propaganda and distortion, knowing full well that embarrassing details are often completely omitted from the narratives of our informants.

While doing such research during the early 1980s I often told my friends how different ancient historical analysis was from that of modern times since “everyone knows” the basic facts about the wars and other major events of the twentieth century.

I was naive. There is a fitting symmetry that one of my earliest papers provided a careful analysis of the source material indicating that Alexander the Great had younger brothers whom he murdered when he came to the throne, while one of my most recent articles applied the same sort of critical analysis to present-day evidence, suggesting that the Vietnam military record of supposed war-hero Sen. John McCain may have actually been rather similar to that of the notorious “Tokyo Rose” of World War II fame. Over the last dozen years I have discovered that we live within the distorted matrix of “American Pravda,” and that determining the true events of our world requires much more effort than merely scanning the morning headlines of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

These writings also trace the evolution of my views in topics of race, ethnicity, and social policy, long my primary area of focus and the one that accounts for more than half the pages of this volume. In late 1999 I published a 9,000 word cover story on California’s racial transformation in Commentary, flagship organ of the neoconservative movement. That exposition took a strongly positive view of the immigration trends in our society, a stance I had also taken in numerous previous pieces. But a dozen years later America’s economic landscape had greatly changed, and when I published my 12,000 word sequel describing the racial transformation of our entire nation, it ran in The American Conservative—a leading anti-neoconservative outlet—where I argued that immigration levels were now far too high, also outlining a viable political strategy to curtail them.

That latter suggestion proposed a very large hike in the minimum wage, and this topic soon became the focus of much of my subsequent writing and political activity, which had previously had little connection to economic issues. I would like to think that my work has played a significant role in helping to move that important idea back to the center stage of American political life.

And then there is “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” the title piece of this collection, running well over 30,000 words with its many footnotes and appendices. Although our elite educational institutions have almost entirely ignored the massive, quantitative documentation that racial discrimination and endemic corruption lie at the heart of our allegedly meritocratic society, many of their victims have come to recognize the injustice of their situation, and I strongly doubt that our current system will long survive unchanged.

But why a book?

In an age when the Internet has so rapidly displaced traditional printed matter, does a bound collection of my writings make any sense, especially since nearly all of these are already available online?

I think so, and if you are holding this book in your hands, you might agree.

Different types of media are suitable for different forms of writing. The sort of short opinion pieces that once graced the op-ed pages of our vanishing newspapers are conveniently browsed on the web, just like the numerous informal blog posts that have largely replaced them. With attention spans dropping, much political debate is circumscribed by the 140 characters of a Tweet, but it is difficult to imagine such transitory sloganeering having much value in printed form. Meanwhile, popular fiction of any length is easily digested on a tablet or kindle, since a story is often read in short snatches of time, with the reader moving forward and rarely looking back.

But my own writings tend toward serious non-fiction of considerable length, with over half this book consisting of major articles running 4,000 words or more, many of them much longer than that. I find that material of such heft is best read in printed form, and a stack of twenty or thirty 8.5”x11” sheets obtained from a website is far less convenient for such purposes than the pages of a professionally typeset book.

Examine the table of contents, explore the pages herein, and judge for yourself whether this product is worth the paper on which it was printed.

Cover Quotes

I was enormously gratified by the remarkably kind and generous cover quotes my advance proofs received from several prominent academics and journalists, and with more than a little embarrassment, I make these available below:

With high intelligence, common sense, and advanced statistical skills, presented transparently and accessibly, Ron Unz has for decades been addressing key issues in a rapidly changing America, enlightening us on the implications and effects of bilingual programs in American schools, clarifying the issues around crime and immigration so often distorted in political and popular discussion, placing the question of an increased minimum wage effectively on the national agenda, and addressing most provocatively the issue of affirmative action and admission to selective colleges and universities, revealing some aspects of this ever disputed question that have never been noted or discussed publicly before. He is one of our most valuable discussants and analysts of public issues.—Nathan Glazer, Professor Emeritus of Education and Sociology, Harvard University, and author of Beyond the Melting Pot.

Few people on the planet are smarter than Ron Unz or have more intellectual curiosity. This fascinating and provocative collection of essays explores a remarkable range of topics, many of them high profile, some of them arcane. Unz’s analysis is always serious and invariably challenges prevailing wisdoms, which is to say there are a lot of controversial arguments in this book. No one is likely to agree with every one of his conclusions, but we would be better off if there were more people like Ron Unz among us. —John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and author of The Israel Lobby.

Ron Unz is a brilliant essayist. His interests run from ancient history and black holes to contemporary issues like racial quotas and the minimum wage. He moves swiftly to the heart of a subject with cogent analysis and limpid argument. This collection of essays sparkles with unexpected gems ranging from critiques of the mainstream press to appreciation of dissenters from common wisdom such as General Bill Odom and Alexander Cockburn. In every paragraph of these essays the reader enjoys a penetrating intelligence at work. —Nicholas Wade, former writer and editor for The New York Times, and author of Before the Dawn, The Faith Instinct, and A Troublesome Inheritance.

Over the past two decades as an original thinker and writer Ron Unz has tackled complex and significant subjects such as immigration, education, economics, race, and the press, pushing aside common assumptions. This book brings together in one volume these pieces from a variety of publications. Unlike other essayists on culture and politics, Unz shreds ideology and relies on statistical data to support his often groundbreaking ideas, such as his 2010 essay on “The Myth of Hispanic Crime.” And his 2014 efforts to put a \$12 an hour minimum wage bill before California voters is an example of how the action of an individual can draw public attention to an issue he believes is necessary for the economic health of the Republic. Anyone reading this book will learn a great deal about America from an incisive writer and scholar who has peeled back layers of conventional wisdom to expose the truth on issues of prime importance today. —Sydney Schanberg, Pulitzer-Prize winning former reporter and editor for The New York Times, whose story inspired the 1984 film The Killing Fields.

Provocative and fearless, sometimes infuriating, and quite often, persuasive. And when American’s low-wage workers get their coming big raise, the apostate conservative Ron Unz will deserve a decent share of the credit. —Prof. James K. Galbraith, author of The End of Normal and Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe .

A Harvard Debate on "Asian Quotas"...or Maybe Not!

The Unz Review • April 4, 2016 • 700 Words

Without doubt the current election for the Harvard Board of Overseers must rank as the most significant and substantive of the last twenty-five years, perhaps even the last century. The results of our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign could have tremendous national implications for tuition and admissions policy at our most elite colleges, with ripple effects upon all of American higher education.

Unfortunately, the ongoing national Trumpathon, with its endless series of Page One insults and crude slurs has captured an absolutely overwhelming share of American political attention, leaving relatively little for any other campaign, let alone a mere battle for the Harvard Board of Overseers. When The Dreadful Donald and Lyin’ Ted are trading staged photos of their wives in dress and undress on Twitter, why would anyone in America care whether elite college tuition might be abolished?

Therefore, I was extremely pleased a few days ago when Harvard’s Chinese Student Association invited me to a public debate they were sponsoring on April 10th, whose timing would be ideal for providing the media and the entire Harvard community an opportunity to weigh some of the conflicting claims made by ourselves and our organized opponents. The leaders of the latter had repeatedly said they were uninterested in publicly debating the issues with us, but with a Harvard event now scheduled, I felt confident they would now be forced to either send a representative or else be unmasked as totally ridiculous.

I was already scheduled to participate in a U.S. Senate Candidate Forum in California on the afternoon of the 9th, but immediately booked a red-eye flight to get to Cambridge for the 10th, shipped out a box of materials to my hotel in Harvard Square, and used my newly established Twitter account to send out a preliminary announcement:

Harvard's Chinese Student Association has just invited me to speak on "Asian Quotas" More details to follow: https://t.co/cIk6zDM05o

— Ron Unz (@RonUnz1) April 1, 2016

Unfortunately, two days later this additional Tweet followed:

Chinese Student Association pressured into dropping Harvard Debate on "Asian Quotas"—Will it still happen?

— Ron Unz (@RonUnz1) April 3, 2016

Although I am not privy to the exact details of what transpired, apparently the alumni leadership of the No campaign remained absolutely adamant in their refusal to participate in any public debate on the issues, which seems rather silly to me. Then in an even more childish manner, they made the Alice-in-Wonderland argument that since it would obviously be unfair for an audience to be exposed only to one side of the issue, the planned debate must therefore be cancelled, and heavily pressured the CSA to do so.

Such behavior brings to mind a seven-year-old who threatens to hold his breath if told to do his spelling homework, but when expressed by established alumni in their fifties such arguments may prove quite intimidating to undergraduates perhaps still be in their teens, and the board of Harvard’s Chinese Student Association quickly decided to drop their sponsorship of the debate, which now may or may not have to be cancelled.

A large Harvard lecture hall, Sever 113, has already been reserved, I’ve paid for my plane tickets and hotel room, and my materials are currently in transit to Cambridge. So a young Harvard Law School student, Matthew Young, is now urgently trying to round up one or more replacement student organizations as sponsors, allowing the debate forum to proceed. Anyone interested in assisting this or obtaining additional information should contact him.

The main architect of this possibly successful attempt to torpedo the scheduled Harvard debate appears to be one Jeannie Park, whose name frankly means nothing to me, and whose current professional activities are somewhat unclear. However, a couple of minutes of Googling brought some surprising facts to light. I am shocked, shocked that such seemingly juvenile political behavior would be coming from someone who had spent her distinguished publishing career working as an editor at one of America’s most intellectually elite periodicals, namely People Magazine. And for anyone so interested, here’s an example of her remarkably insightful and substantive Twitter Feed:

Fun show by The @Civilians at Joe's Pub; mini-@aajanewyork reunion with @Jeanheek and Ed Lin @robertchow, whose wife, #CindyCheung, killed!.

— Jeannie Park (@parkjeannie) December 9, 2015

Certainly, Harvard University’s traditions of “Free Speech” and “Open Debate” have taken an odd turn recently. The top stories at The Harvard Law Record currently center on agitated activists whose notion of academic freedom seemingly involves plastering the walls of the law school with their own crude posters and taking down any others that dispute their arguments.

Under such circumstances, perhaps the political rise of Donald Trump is far less mysterious than I had assumed.

My Stasi File Published in the Harvard Crimson

The Unz Review • April 17, 2016 • 1,400 Words

I was very unhappy with the unfair and inflammatory article that the Harvard Crimson ran regarding my political associations, and they suggested I submit an op-ed in response. I provided the piece below, which they requested be trimmed for length prior to publication, which I did.

They then notified me that after further consideration, they had decided that most of my points were irrelevant or unfair and should not be published: I could only make the arguments that they themselves approved. Perhaps they felt that the effectiveness of my response might risk “confusing” some of their readers.

Several individuals have emphasized to me that outrageous character assassination based on guilt-by-association must be answered quickly, so here’s the rebuttal that the Crimson refused to publish, and you can decide for yourself if their decision was appropriate.

I appreciate that the Crimson has afforded denied me an opportunity to reply to their highly misleading article of the 14th, featuring the particularly lurid headline “Overseers Candidate Donates to ‘Quasi-White Nationalist’ Group,” and supposedly documenting my links to various rightwing extremists. Coming at the peak of alumni voting, such unfair accusations have the potential to torpedo our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard slate of Overseer candidates.

Over the last dozen years I’ve certainly provided donations to a very wide range of political groups and individuals, including leftwingers, rightwingers, and libertarians. Many of these groups are on the political fringe and espouse controversial views on all sorts of different issues. I might agree with them on some things and disagree with them on others, but frequently find their ideas a useful counterpoint to the conventional wisdom presented in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which I spend hours closely reading every morning.

Much of the Crimson article focused on my financial support to VDare, a rightwing and very hard-core anti-immigrant webzine, with the dollars representing less than 1% of my total donations over the last decade. Since immigration issues have always been one of my main interests, I read VDare quite regularly and am on friendly terms with their staff. But as everyone knows from the hundreds of thousands of words I have published on immigration-related topics, I’ve always been one of America’s leading pro-immigrant voices, hence almost invariably on the exact opposite side from VDare. I find it odd that the Crimson article left out that significant detail, which surely would have made their account of my donation seem even more shocking and newsworthy.

Sometimes headlines may be factually correct but highly misleading. For example, back in 1994 I was a top featured speaker at the gigantic 70,000 person march in Los Angeles against Prop. 187, the largest pro-immigrant political protest in American history but boycotted by virtually every other prominent non-Latino political figure in California. As it happens, many small Communist groups participated in that rally, waving their Communist flags. So the Crimson could have run the lurid headline “Overseer Candidate Marched with the Communists in Los Angeles.” Accurate, but perhaps a bit skewed and misleading.

Similarly, the Crimson alludes to individuals supporting the assassination of police officers. The reference was to a piece I ran a couple of months ago by Bob Trivers, a brilliant evolutionary biologist but also a completely unrepentant radical militant, who had once served as the only white member of the Black Panther Party. It’s absolutely correct that he has advocated the assassination of “racist” white police officers, a view I personally do not share and one which is probably more extreme than anything VDare or any of my rightwing columnists has ever proposed. But the column was drawn from his recent book, which was widely praised by some of the world’s most prominent public intellectuals, including Richard Dawkins and Harvard’s own Steven Pinker. So perhaps the Crimson should run a headline “Richard Dawkins Praises Book Advocating the Assassination of White Police Officers.”

I reject “guilt by association” and just because I am personally friendly with various people, publish their writings, or even provide them some financial assistance, that does not necessarily mean that I endorse everything they say. For example, I very strongly disagree with Sen. Bernie Sanders on a whole host of important topics, but since on balance I like his positions much better than those of his competitors, he is my favored presidential candidate, and the only one to whom I have donated. Similarly, during the last couple of presidential elections I wrote in Ron Paul’s name at the top of the ticket, not because I agreed with him about everything, but because the other choices seemed so unsatisfactory.

I have a long record of closely associating with people of sharply different views. I am often identified as the former publisher (2006-2013) of The American Conservative (TAC), an opinion magazine that absorbed over 60% of my donations over the last decade. TAC was co-founded by Pat Buchanan and always had a strongly Buchananite stance on immigration, trade, and social issues, positions I did not share. However, I strongly supported their lonely opposition to the disastrous foreign wars of the Bush Administration, afterward continued by the Obama Administration.

Anyone who wishes to know my own views may easily examine my writings over the past twenty-five years, given that all 500,000 words are online and fully searchable. Furthermore, my most important articles are collected in a 700pp book together with a very comprehensive index. Just look in the index, read the text, and you’ll discover my opinions.

Over half my writing has dealt with matters of race, ethnicity, and social policy, including immigration, affirmative action, and bilingual education. Although often controversial, my articles have won praise from some eminent scholars and journalists, situated all across the ideological spectrum. If Crimson journalists wish to denounce me, they are free to do so, but they should focus on my own views rather than those of other people I happen to know.

Although the Crimson never revealed the source of their accusations, these almost exactly match the contents of a “dossier” someone forwarded to me around the same time, a file apparently prepared by some activist group and intended to cast me in an extremely unfavorable light, especially on racial issues.

I was stunned by the contents, since the Stasi-type researchers who compiled it were not only extremely malicious but also ignorant and incompetent, even getting wrong such simple factual details as the name of my webzine.

For example, they characterized my \$600,000 grant to Gregory Cochran as secret, even though his University of Utah announced it at the time in a public press release, boasting that it was larger than a MacArthur Fellowship. Dr. Cochran is an extreme rightwinger, who has stubbornly disputed my own immigration writings and even banned me from his website when I demonstrated the logical flaws in his “Gay Germ” theory. However, he is also a brilliant evolutionary biologist whose Accelerationist theory is hugely important, very possibly worth a future Nobel Prize. His press release emphasized that theory, but the ignorant Stasi investigators have apparently never heard of it.

The dossier sought to tar me as a nasty “racist,” opening with mention of my supposedly sinister phrase “the End of White America.” Indeed, two of my longest and most important articles on America’s ongoing racial transformation have been “California and the End of White America” in 1999 and “Immigration, Republicans, and the End of White America” in 2011, and I would urge everyone interested in the topic to read them. The former caught the attention of CBS News, which invited me to discuss my ideas on their morning show, available on YouTube for anyone for anyone who wants a taste of my views without reading 20,000 words of text.

In another particularly egregious case, the Stasi researchers claimed that I had endorsed a particular “white nationalist” political strategy although one of my aforementioned articles had actually totally debunked that theory. Since my article was 12,000 words long and the Stasi agents so lazy, I can understand why they never bothered reading what I actually wrote.

Finally, here’s a last, telling point. As I’ve said, the entire corpus of my writings of the last 25 years is conveniently available on the web in fully searchable form. Yet although the Stasi researchers exhaustively worked to portray my racial views in an extremely negative light, they did not include a single sentence of my own in their malicious dossier. So if they failed to find a single “incriminating” sentence anywhere among my 500,000 words of articles and columns, what does that indicate about the accuracy of their conclusions.

Make college cheaper by cutting administrative costs

Zocalo Public Square • May 2, 2016 • 300 Words

The greatest problem with most universities today is that tuition is much too high, forcing an entire generation of students into long-term debt-servitude. Total student loans now exceed \$1.2 trillion, and millions of students will probably never be able to pay them off.

During the mid-1970s, tuition at UCLA, Berkeley, and the other UC campuses was only \$630 per year. Now the annual cost averages around \$15,000, having increased many times faster than inflation.

An important factor has been the huge rise in educational expenses. Undergraduates now enjoy four years of access to nicer food, fancier dormitories, and Olympic-quality swimming pools, but must then spend 10 or 20 years paying back the crippling student loans that covered those temporary luxuries.

However, the biggest factor in rising expenses has probably been the huge growth in theadministrative staff. A couple of decades ago there was one administrator for every two faculty members, and now the numbers are roughly equal. Doubling the number of these non-teaching administrators, some of whom receive outrageous salaries, explains where much of the extra money has been going.

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One way of cutting tuition would be to persuade the state legislatures in California and around the country to allocate many billions of additional taxpayer dollars to increase public subsidies to their state colleges and universities. But most government budgets are very tight, so this seems unlikely to happen.

Therefore, the only apparent means of substantially lowering tuition is to drastically cut the expenses, especially those unnecessary administrative costs. Liberals and conservatives should unite behind this important political project, backed by the millions of students who desperately need cuts in their extremely high college tuition.

Ron Unz is chairman of Free Harvard/Fair Harvard, a slate of candidates running for the university’s Board of Overseers on a platform of immediately abolishing undergraduate tuition. He is also a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in California.

Win Some, Lose Some

The Unz Review • May 24, 2016 • 700 Words

As many of you have probably already heard, our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign for the Board of Overseers failed yesterday, with none of the five candidates on our slate being successful. The highly contentious nature of this year’s contest did boost the vote-by-mail turnout to 11%, considerably higher than the more usual 7%. But with nearly 90% of Harvard’s 320,000 throwing their ballots in the trash, lack of interest clearly won a gigantic landslide victory.

Given that no petition candidate had successfully won a seat on Harvard’s board in the 27 years since since Nobel Laureate Archbishop Tutu of South Africa made the cut in 1989, with a young Barack Obama being among the numerous failures, I suppose I should have expected this result from the beginning. But I’d like to believe that if not for a certain loudmouthed Republican presidential candidate having grabbed such an astonishing share of the national media oxygen over the last six months, our bold proposal to completely abolish tuition at the world’s most prestigious college would have attracted far more attention, considerably reducing the trash-can vote, and perhaps giving us a shot at victory.

In any event, I do believe we vastly increased the number of Americans now aware that Harvard’s annual investment income is so massively disproportionate to its net tuition revenue, perhaps laying the basis for future changes along the lines we proposed. Among other straws in the wind, just a few weeks after our campaign reached the front page of The New York Times, a group of influential U.S. Senators began pressing Harvard and its peers to allocate a much larger fraction of their annual earnings to financial aid or lose their tax exemption, with a figure as high as 25% being bandied about.

Although to a layperson, it might hardly seem unreasonable for wealthy colleges such as Harvard to spend just a quarter of their income subsidizing the education of their undergraduates, in practice such a demand would force Harvard to abolish all tuition, abolish all room-and-board costs, and also provide each student a brand new Rolls-Royce automobile each year, a policy which would surely increase the number of annual applicants to even higher levels.

It would not totally surprise me if at some point, Harvard’s shrewd financial managers may decide that the 4% allocation we were suggesting seems a lot cheaper than the 25% demanded by Congress, and immediately abolish tuition with a sudden wave of their hands.

In another strange irony, disgraced former Harvard President Larry Summers ferociously denounced our “free tuition” proposal as a disgusting giveaway to the wealthy elites, whose unfair financial privileges he so strongly opposes. Surely, Hillary Clinton should begin using a similar line of attack against her notoriously pro-Oligarchic opponent Bernie Sanders, who has proposed something very similar.

In the past, Summers has been somewhat less hesitant in assisting the rich, such as when he used \$26.5 million of Harvard funds to settle a government insider-trading case against one of his closest friends, who thereby perhaps avoided a long prison sentence as a result. This one of the major factors leading to a massive faculty revolt against Summers and his forced resignation as Harvard president, an event probably without precedent in Harvard history. Although personal friendship is surely priceless, Summers must have realized he was risking his presidency over that decision, and I’ve always half-suspected that he’d himself been a silent partner in that insider-trading ring, and was therefore blackmailed into using tens of millions in Harvard’s endowment money to save his friend from the slammer lest he end up wearing pinstripes himself.

Meanwhile, my longshot U.S. Senate race in California remains very longshot indeed, with yesterday’s front page story in the San Jose Mercury News providing a reasonably accurate summary of the situation. Still, regardless of what happens in that effort, I’m very pleased to have used my candidacy as an opportunity to propose an easy and obvious reform to the H-1B immigration problems that have so bedeviled Silicon Valley for many years. Furthermore, I believe I have now put together many of the necessary pieces for a sweeping “grand bargain” on immigration reform in general, a vital national issue that has always failed in Congress since the early 2000s.

And I’m really quite proud of the simple campaign video we managed to put together on a total shoestring:

“Group Urging Free Tuition at Harvard Fails to Win Seats on Board”

Stephanie Saul, The New York Times, May 23, 2016

Racial Discrimination at Harvard

The Unz Review • October 22, 2018 • 10,300 Words

This last week trial began in Boston federal court for the current lawsuit in which a collection of Asian-American organizations are charging Harvard University with racial discrimination in its college admissions policies.  The New York Times, our national newspaper of record, has been providing almost daily coverage to developments in the case, with the stories sometimes reaching the front page.

Last Sunday, just before the legal proceedings began, the Times ran a major article explaining the general background of the controversy, and I was very pleased to see that my own past research was cited as an important factor sparking the lawsuit, with the reporter even including a direct link to my 26,000 word 2012 cover-story “The Myth of American Meritocracy,”  which had provided strong quantitative evidence of anti-Asian racial quotas.  Economic historian Niall Ferguson, long one of Harvard’s most prominent professors but recently decamped to Stanford, similarly noted the role of my research in his column for the London Sunday Times.

Two decades ago, I had published a widely-discussed op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on somewhat similar issues of racial discrimination in elite admissions.  But my more recent article was far longer and more comprehensive, and certainly drew more attention than anything else I have ever published, before or since.  After it appeared in The American Conservative, its hundreds of thousands of pageviews broke all records for that publication and it attracted considerable notice in the media.  Times columnist David Brooks soon ranked it as perhaps the best American magazine article of the year, a verdict seconded by a top editor at The Economist, and the Times itself quickly organized a symposium on the topic of Asian Quotas, in which I eagerly participated.  Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, Business Insider, and other publications all discussed my striking results.

Conservative circles took considerable interest, with Charles Murray highlighting my findings, and National Review later published an article in which I explained the important implications of my findings for the legal validity of the 1978 Bakke decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

There was also a considerable reaction from the academic community itself.  I quickly received speaking invitations from the Yale Political Union, Yale Law, and the University of Chicago Law School, while Prof. Ferguson discussed my distressing analysis in a lengthy Newsweek/Daily Beast column entitled “The End of the American Dream.”

Moreover, I had also published an associated critique suggesting that over the years my beloved Harvard alma mater had transformed itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds with a vestigial school attached for tax-exempt purposes.  This also generated enormous discussion in media circles, with liberal journalist Chris Hayes Tweeting it out and generously saying he was “very jealous” he hadn’t written the piece himself. Many of his colleagues promoted the piece with similarly favorable remarks, while the university quickly provided a weak public response to these serious financial charges.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to myself or other outside observers, Harvard itself launched an internal investigation of the anti-Asian bias that I had alleged.  Apparently, the university’s own initial results generally confirmed my accusations, indicating that if students were admitted solely based upon objective academic merit, far more Asians would receive thick envelopes.  But Harvard’s top administrators buried the study and did nothing, with these important facts only coming out years later during the discovery process of the current Asian Quotas lawsuit.

Only the first part of my very long article dealt with the question of anti-Asian racial discrimination in elite college admissions, but it attracted vastly more attention than any other element.

For many years, there had been a widespread belief within the Asian-American community that such discriminatory practices existed, a sentiment backed by considerable anecdotal evidence.  But the university administrations had always flatly denied those claims, and the media had shown little interest in investigating them.  However, my powerful new quantitative evidence proved very difficult to ignore.

Among other things, I focused upon the publicly available statewide lists of National Merit Semifinalists (NMS), a group that constituted the highest-performing one-half percent of American high school seniors.  By a fortunate coincidence, this fraction of the American student body was reasonably close in size to the total enrollment of students at the Ivy League schools together with similarly elite schools such as Stanford, Caltech, and MIT.  The NMS dataset had previously been almost entirely ignored by researchers, but I found it provided a treasure-trove of useful empirical information.

Since Asian last names are extremely distinctive, I was able to estimate that Asians nationally constituted roughly 25-30% of this top academic group, a figure considerably larger than their enrollment at Harvard and other elite schools.  This conclusion was supported by the even greater Asian dominance in more highly selective academic competitions such as the Math Olympiad and the Intel Science Talent Search, though the far smaller numbers involved reduced the statistical validity of these analyses.

But my most dramatic finding relied upon an even simpler analysis of public data, which had previously remained unnoticed.  As I wrote in my New York Times column:

Just as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the existence of “Jewish quotas,” top officials at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of “Asian quotas.” But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary.

Each year, American universities provide their racial enrollment data to the National Center for Education Statistics, which makes this information available online. After the Justice Department closed an investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University discriminated against Asian-American applicants, Harvard’s reported enrollment of Asian-Americans began gradually declining, falling from 20.6 percent in 1993 to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade.

This decline might seem small. But these same years brought a huge increase in America’s college-age Asian population, which roughly doubled between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic white numbers remained almost unchanged. Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last two decades, while the percentage of whites changed little. This decline in relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of Harvard’s 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to 15 percent.

The percentages of college-age Asian-Americans enrolled at most of the other Ivy League schools also fell during this same period, and over the last few years Asian enrollments across these different universities have converged to a very similar level and remained static over time. This raises suspicions of a joint Ivy League policy to restrict Asian-American numbers to a particular percentage.

This statistical finding was illustrated in a simple graph, demonstrating that over the last two decades enrollment of Asian-Americans had gradually converged across the entire Ivy League, while sharply diverging from the rapidly increasing Asian-American population, with only strictly meritocratic Caltech continuing to track the latter.

It would be difficult to imagine more obvious visual evidence of an Asian Quota implemented across the Ivy League, and this chart was very widely circulated among Asian-American organizations and activists, who launched their lawsuit the following year.  If they do succeed in winning their current case in federal court, the history books may eventually record that the wealthiest and most powerful university in the world was brought low by a single striking graph.

For decades Affirmative Action based upon race has been an extremely contentious topic in American politics, sharply divisive across ideological lines, and it was hardly surprising that my new analysis of that issue produced a wave of coverage.  But buried deeper within that same lengthy article were even more explosive findings, apparently far too sensitive to even become a subject of significant media scrutiny.

Not without reason, most journalists regard matters touching upon Jewish sensitivities as the lethal “third rail” of their profession, and the bulk of my piece had presented some unexpected new insights in this area.  These attracted the widespread private fascination of numerous prominent scholars and members of the media, but almost none of these individuals was willing to publicly disclose the results that had drawn their rapt attention.

As a consequence, these findings have remained largely unnoticed except among those who have actually taken the time to read far into my extremely long piece, while never penetrating into the awareness of the broader public.  For example, Prof. Jordan Peterson, a leading celebrity-intellectual with a large YouTube following, recently demonstrated that he was totally ignorant of these important facts.  Therefore, I am now taking this opportunity to summarize and excerpt those elements of my Meritocracy analysis that attracted the greatest private interest but received the least public attention.

A few years earlier, Jerome Karabel, an eminent Berkeley sociologist, had published The Chosen, his magisterial history of Jewish enrollment in the Ivy League, which won numerous scholarly accolades.  His research conclusively demonstrated the existence of the once-denied Jewish Quotas of the past, employed by the reigning WASP elites to maintain control of those institutions against their upstart ethnic competitors.  As I wrote:

Karabel’s massive documentation—over 700 pages and 3000 endnotes—establishes the remarkable fact that America’s uniquely complex and subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert ethnic tribal warfare…

As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the major changes in admissions policy which later followed were usually determined by factors of raw political power and the balance of contending forces rather than any idealistic considerations. For example, in the aftermath of World War II, Jewish organizations and their allies mobilized their political and media resources to pressure the universities into increasing their ethnic enrollment by modifying the weight assigned to various academic and non-academic factors, raising the importance of the former over the latter. Then a decade or two later, this exact process was repeated in the opposite direction, as the early 1960s saw black activists and their liberal political allies pressure universities to bring their racial minority enrollments into closer alignment with America’s national population by partially shifting away from their recently enshrined focus on purely academic considerations. Indeed, Karabel notes that the most sudden and extreme increase in minority enrollment took place at Yale in the years 1968–69, and was largely due to fears of race riots in heavily black New Haven, which surrounded the campus.

Philosophical consistency appears notably absent in many of the prominent figures involved in these admissions battles, with both liberals and conservatives sometimes favoring academic merit and sometimes non-academic factors, whichever would produce the particular ethnic student mix they desired for personal or ideological reasons. Different political blocs waged long battles for control of particular universities, and sudden large shifts in admissions rates occurred as these groups gained or lost influence within the university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissions staff in 1965 and the following year Jewish numbers nearly doubled.

Branches of Hillel, the Jewish student organization, exist across most college campuses, and for decades they have provided estimates of the percentages of the local Jewish enrollment, with Karabel and other scholars relying upon these to chart the ebbs and flows of Jewish numbers.  I discussed how Karabel used this data to celebrate the final meritocratic victory of Jewish college applicants over their former WASP oppressors.

Indeed, Karabel opens the final chapter of his book by…noting the extreme irony that the WASP demographic group which had once so completely dominated America’s elite universities and “virtually all the major institutions of American life” had by 2000 become “a small and beleaguered minority at Harvard,” being actually fewer in number than the Jews whose presence they had once sought to restrict. Very similar results seem to apply all across the Ivy League, with the disproportion often being even greater than the particular example emphasized by Karabel.

Karabel showed that the collapse of WASP resistance to the admission of high-performing Jewish students soon drastically reshaped the ethnic composition of these institutions, with his triumphalist narrative suggesting that this transformation raised academic standards and lifted the quality of the student body to new heights.  And for decades, I had entirely accepted this simple morality tale, which was implicitly or explicitly presented in nearly all the accounts, liberal and conservative alike, that I had read regarding the history of our leading East Coast universities.

But as I began to quantitatively explore this issue, utilizing the same techniques and data sets I had applied to determining the existence of severe discrimination against Asian applicants, I uncovered evidence of an entirely contrary nature.  I soon came to realize that many of my beliefs were merely ideological fairy tales, sometimes little more accurate than the Soviet claims of Russian peasants eagerly joining their collective farms.

Although Jewish names are not nearly as distinctive as Asian ones, they may usually be determined with reasonable accuracy, and applying Weyl analysis to a subset of the most absolutely characteristic ones—such as Goldstein, Silverberg, Cohen, and Kaplan—allows us to statistically validate the results so obtained.

As I thus analyzed the many dozens of statewide NMS lists, I soon discovered that Jews were far less heavily represented among America’s highest-performing students than I had expected, probably constituting no more than 6% of the national NMS total.  The lists of the winners of the top scholastic competitions I had previously examined for Asians produced reasonably similar results.

Hispanic names are quite distinct and blacks are fewer in number and somewhat less successful academically, so the NMS totals for those two groups are also not difficult to determine. Once we subtract the totals of Asians, Jews, Hispanics, and blacks, what remains is the NMS total of non-Hispanic white Gentiles.  And the results were absolutely eye-opening:

The evidence of the recent NMS semifinalist lists seems the most conclusive of all, given the huge statistical sample sizes involved. As discussed earlier, these students constitute roughly the highest 0.5 percent in academic ability, the top 16,000 high school seniors who should be enrolling at the Ivy League and America’s other most elite academic universities. In California, white Gentile names outnumber Jewish ones by over 8-to-1; in Texas, over 20-to-1; in Florida and Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in New York, America’s most heavily Jewish state, there are more than two high-ability white Gentile students for every Jewish one. Based on the overall distribution of America’s population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America’s highest ability students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish total of under 6 percent.

Needless to say, these proportions are considerably different from what we actually find among the admitted students at Harvard and its elite peers, which today serve as a direct funnel to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, and finance. Based on reported statistics, Jews approximately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools, which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the official statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Harvard are America’s most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction of their national population than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher academic test scores.

When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America’s recent NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics, foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.

However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all relative to their number of high-ability college-age students.

Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70 percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews.

Several graphs from my article effectively illustrated these remarkable findings.

Based on these figures, Jewish students were roughly 1,000% more likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League than white Gentiles of similar ability.  This was an absolutely astonishing result given that under-representation in the range of 20% or 30% is often treated by courts as powerful prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.

Furthermore, I noted the possibility that this discrepancy might be related to the overwhelming Jewish dominance of the top administration of those institutions:

It would be unreasonable to ignore the salient fact that this massive apparent bias in favor of far less-qualified Jewish applicants coincides with an equally massive ethnic skew at the topmost administrative ranks of the universities in question, a situation which once again exactly parallels Karabel’s account from the 1920s. Indeed, Karabel points out that by 1993 Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all had presidents of Jewish ancestry, and the same is true for the current presidents of Yale, Penn, Cornell, and possibly Columbia, as well as Princeton’s president throughout during the 1990s and Yale’s new incoming president, while all three of Harvard’s most recent presidents have either had Jewish origins or a Jewish spouse.

At most universities, a provost is the second-ranking official, being responsible for day-to-day academic operations. Although Princeton’s current president is not Jewish, all seven of the most recent Princeton provosts stretching back to 1977 have had such ancestry, with several of the other Ivies not being far behind. A similar degree of massive overrepresentation is found throughout the other top administrative ranks of the rest of the Ivy League, and across American leading educational institutions in general, and these are the institutions which select our future national elites.

Since the publication of my 2012 article, Harvard and Princeton have both selected new presidents, each of them Jewish, while Yale’s Jewish president has remained in office.

The exact mechanism by which this seemingly enormous bias in favor of Jewish applicants to our most elite colleges manifests itself is not entirely clear, and I very much doubt that it takes the crude form of top administrators directing admissions officers to admit under-qualified Jewish applicants.  Instead, I strongly suggested that a leading factor was the “negative pressure” of America’s overwhelmingly Jewish media and Jewish activist groups, which might respond harshly to any significant decline in Jewish numbers:

Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s, and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education.  These articles included denunciations of Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system.

I suspect that the combined effect of these separate pressures, rather than any planned or intentional bias, is the primary cause of the striking enrollment statistics that we have examined above. In effect, somewhat dim and over-worked admissions officers, generally possessing weak quantitative skills, have been tasked by their academic superiors and media monitors with the twin ideological goals of enrolling Jews and enrolling non-whites, with any major failures risking harsh charges of either “anti-Semitism” or “racism.” But by inescapable logic maximizing the number of Jews and non-whites implies minimizing the number of non-Jewish whites.

I further noted that this 1999 firestorm of media controversy attacking Princeton for its alleged “anti-Semitism” took place at a time when university’s president and provost were both Jewish, and the campus had recently opened a $4.5 million Center for Jewish Life.

In 2002, Jacques Steinberg, a longtime National Educational Correspondent for the New York Times, published The Gatekeepers, a widely praised best-seller that provided an “inside look” at the college admissions process based on the year he had spent embedded with those officials at Wesleyan, and the 2012 edition of his book stated that few aspects of the process had changed during the previous decade.  I was deeply distressed by his description of the background of the admissions officers:

In fact, it seems likely that some of these obvious admissions biases we have noticed may be related to the poor human quality and weak academic credentials of many of the university employees making these momentous decisions. As mentioned above, 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.

Books by former members of the Harvard and Dartmouth admissions strongly supported the same conclusions.

As additional evidence, we can consider What It Really Takes to Get into the Ivy League, a 2003 advice book written by Chuck Hughes, who spent five years as a Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard, after having himself graduated from that university. Although he strongly emphasizes his own college participation in varsity sports, he never says a word about any personal academic interests, and near the end of his book on elite college admissions, he appears to describe Duke, Northwestern, and Rice as being members of the Ivy League.

A more explicit statement of this exact problem is found in A for Admission, a very candid 1997 description of the admissions process at elite private universities written by Michele A. Hernandez, who had spent four years as Dartmouth’s Assistant Director of Admissions. Near the beginning of her book, Hernandez explains that over half of Ivy League admissions officers are individuals who had not attended such academically challenging universities, nor probably had the intellectual capability to do so, and were sometimes confused about the relative ranking of SAT scores and other basic academic credentials. She also cautions students to avoid any subtlety in their essays, lest their words be misunderstood by their readers in the admissions office, whose degrees are more likely to have been in education than in any serious academic discipline.

Given this unfortunate situation, we should not be overly surprised by the egregious aspects of the particular admissions stories that Steinberg recounts.

Consider the case of Tiffany Wang, a Chinese immigrant student raised in the Silicon Valley area, where her father worked as an engineer. Although English was not her first language, her SAT scores were over 100 points above the Wesleyan average, and she ranked as a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, putting her in the top 0.5 percent of high school students (not the top 2 percent as Steinberg mistakenly claims). Nevertheless, the admissions officer rated her just so-so in academics, and seemed far more positively impressed by her ethnic activism in the local school’s Asian-American club. Ultimately, he stamped her with a “Reject,” but later admitted to Steinberg that she might have been admitted if he had been aware of the enormous time and effort she had spent campaigning against the death penalty, a political cause near and dear to his own heart. Somehow I suspect that a student who boasted of leadership in pro-death penalty activism among his extracurriculars might have fared rather worse in this process. And presumably for similar reasons, Tiffany was also rejected by all her other prestigious college choices, including Yale, Penn, Duke, and Wellesley, an outcome which greatly surprised and disappointed her immigrant father.

There was also the case of half-Brazilian Julianna Bentes, with slight black ancestry, who came from a middle-class family and attended on a partial scholarship one of America’s most elite prep schools, whose annual tuition now tops $30,000; her SAT scores were somewhat higher than Tiffany’s, and she was an excellent dancer. The combination of her academic ability, dancing talent, and “multiracial” background ranked her as one of America’s top college recruitment prospects, gaining her admission and generous financial packages from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and every other elite university to which she applied, including the University of Chicago’s most prestigious academic scholarship award and a personal opportunity to meet Chelsea Clinton while visiting Stanford, which she did, before ultimately selecting Yale.

Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam, her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion, he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.

In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she “didn’t see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After graduation, she eventually took a job at her father’s successful law firm, thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America’s ruling Ivy League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best.”

Jannol’s account also contains a particularly intriguing element. Personal essays have become a crucial component of application packages to elite colleges, and these are considered especially effective if they provide strong evidence of hardships and victimhood.  Given her extremely wealthy and privileged background, Jannol had originally considered focusing on her status as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, but ultimately decided against it because so many of her peers would be following exactly that same stratagem, explaining to Steinberg that “Everyone’s going to write about their Holocaust grandma.”

Over the last few decades, our news and entertainment industries have elevated Jewish suffering during World War II into the most horrific and monumental tragedy of the modern era, and it not impossible that a substantial fraction of the unfair Jewish advantage in elite admissions may derive from something as simple as the ability of the children of elite Jewish families to wrap themselves in the ultimate victimhood of Holocaust survivor status.

If so, this situation would be particularly ironic, given the considerable evidence that the Holocaust is substantially fraudulent, or even almost entirely so, merely a hoax promoted by heavily Jewish Hollywood, perhaps partially intended to conceal the inescapable reality that in per capita terms Jews worldwide were surely the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century.

I had been stunned by my evidence of the unreasonable over-representation of Jewish students at our most elite academic institutions, and most of the prominent scholars and journalists who read my analysis seemed to have a similar reaction. Further analysis suggested some of the crucial reasons for this widespread myopia, which I explicated in a section entitled “The Strange Collapse of Jewish Academic Achievement.”

From my own perspective, I found these statistical results surprising, even shocking.

I had always been well aware of the very heavy Jewish presence at elite academic institutions. But the underwhelming percentage of Jewish students who today achieve high scores on academic aptitude tests was totally unexpected, and very different from the impressions I had formed during my own high school and college years a generation or so ago. An examination of other available statistics seems to support my recollections and provides evidence for a dramatic recent decline in the academic performance of American Jews

The U.S. Math Olympiad began in 1974, and all the names of the top scoring students are easily available on the Internet. During the 1970s, well over 40 percent of the total were Jewish, and during the 1980s and 1990s, the fraction averaged about one-third. However, during the thirteen years since 2000, just two names out of 78 or 2.5 percent appear to be Jewish. The Putnam Exam is the most difficult and prestigious mathematics competition for American college students, with five or six Putnam winners having been selected each year since 1938. Over 40 percent of the Putnam winners prior to 1950 were Jewish, and during every decade from the 1950s through the 1990s, between 22 percent and 31 percent of the winners seem to have come from that same ethnic background. But since 2000, the percentage has dropped to under 10 percent, without a single likely Jewish name in the last seven years.

This consistent picture of stark ethnic decline recurs when we examine the statistics for the Science Talent Search, which has been selecting 40 students as national finalists for America’s most prestigious high school science award since 1942, thus providing a huge statistical dataset of over 2800 top science students. During every decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jewish students were consistently 22–23 percent of the recipients, with the percentage then declining to 17 percent in the 1990s, 15 percent in the 2000s, and just 7 percent since 2010. Indeed, of the thirty top ranked students over the last three years, only a single one seems likely to have been Jewish. Similarly, Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997, but have fallen to just 5 percent over the last decade, a result which must surely send Richard Feynman spinning in his grave.

• • •

Taken in combination, these trends all provide powerful evidence that over the last decade or more there has been a dramatic collapse in Jewish academic achievement, at least at the high end.

Several possible explanations for this empirical result seem reasonably plausible. Although the innate potential of a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly, achievement is a function of both ability and effort, and today’s overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students may be far less diligent in their work habits or driven in their studies than were their parents or grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing challenges of the immigrant experience. In support of this hypothesis, roughly half of the Jewish Math Olympiad winners from the last two decades have had the sort of highly distinctive names which would tend to mark them as recent immigrants from the Soviet Union or elsewhere, and such names were also very common among the top Jewish science students of the same period, even though this group represents only about 10 percent of current American Jews. Indeed, it seems quite possible that this large sudden influx of very high performing immigrant Jews from the late 1980s onward served to partially mask the rapid concurrent decline of high academic achievement among native American Jews, which otherwise would have become much more clearly evident a decade or so earlier.

This pattern of third or fourth generation American students lacking the academic drive or intensity of their forefathers is hardly surprising, nor unique to Jews. Consider the case of Japanese-Americans, who mostly arrived in America during roughly the same era. America’s Japanese have always been a high-performing group, with a strong academic tradition, and Japan’s international PISA academic scores are today among the highest in the world. But when we examine the list of California’s NMS semifinalists, less than 1 percent of the names are Japanese, roughly in line with their share of the California population. Meanwhile, Chinese, Koreans, and South Asians are 6 percent of California but contribute 50 percent of the top scoring students, an eight-fold better result, with a major likely difference being that they are overwhelmingly of recent immigrant origin. In fact, although ongoing Japanese immigration has been trivial in size, a significant fraction of the top Japanese students have the unassimilated Japanese first names that would tend to indicate they are probably drawn from that tiny group.

In his 1966 book The Creative Elite in America, Weyl used last name analysis to document a similarly remarkable collapse in achievement among America’s Puritan-descended population, which had once provided a hugely disproportionate fraction of our intellectual leadership, but for various reasons went into rapid decline from about 1900 onward. He also mentions the disappearance of the remarkable Scottish intellectual contribution to British life after about 1800. Although the evidence for both these historical parallels seems very strong, the causal factors are not entirely clear, though Weyl does provide some possible explanations.

In some respects, perhaps it was the enormously outsize Jewish academic performance of the past which was highly anomalous, and the more recent partial convergence toward white European norms which is somewhat less surprising. Over the years, claims have been widely circulated that the mean Jewish IQ is a full standard deviation—15 points—above the white average of 100, but this seems to have little basis in reality. Richard Lynn, one of the world’s foremost IQ experts, has performed an exhaustive literature review and located some 32 IQ samples of American Jews, taken from 1920 to 2008. For the first 14 studies conducted during the years 1920–1937, the Jewish IQ came out very close to the white American mean, and it was only in later decades that the average figure rose to the approximate range of 107–111.

In a previous article “Race, IQ & Wealth,” I had suggested that the IQs of ethnic groups appear to be far more malleable than many people would acknowledge, and may be particularly influenced by factors of urbanization, education, and affluence. Given that Jews have always been America’s most heavily urbanized population and became the most affluent during the decades in question, these factors may account for a substantial portion of their huge IQ rise during most of the twentieth century. But with modern electronic technology recently narrowing the gaps in social environment and educational opportunities between America’s rural and urban worlds, we might expect a portion of this difference to gradually dissipate. American Jews are certainly a high-ability population, but the innate advantage they have over other high-ability white populations is probably far smaller than is widely believed.

This conclusion is supported by the General Social Survey (GSS), an online dataset of tens of thousands of American survey responses from the last forty years which includes the Wordsum vocabulary test, a very useful IQ proxy correlating at 0.71. Converted into the corresponding IQ scores, the Wordsum-IQ of Jews is indeed quite high at 109. But Americans of English, Welsh, Scottish, Swedish, and Catholic Irish ancestry also have fairly high mean IQs of 104 or above, and their combined populations outnumber Jews by almost 15-to-1, implying that they would totally dominate the upper reaches of the white American ability distribution, even if we excluded the remaining two-thirds of all American whites, many of whose IQs are also fairly high. Furthermore, all these groups are far less highly urbanized or affluent than Jews, probably indicating that their scores are still artificially depressed to some extent. We should also remember that Jewish intellectual performance tends to be quite skewed, being exceptionally strong in the verbal subcomponent, much lower in math, and completely mediocre in visuospatial ability; thus, a completely verbal-oriented test such as Wordsum would actually tend to exaggerate Jewish IQ.

Stratifying the white American population along religious lines produces similar conclusions. An analysis of the data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that Americans raised in the Episcopal Church actually exceeded Jews in mean IQ, while several other religious categories came quite close, leading to the result that the overwhelming majority of America’s high-ability white population had a non-Jewish background.

Finally, in the case of Jews, these assimilation- or environment-related declines in relative academic performance may have been reinforced by powerful demographic trends. For the last generation or two, typical Jewish women from successful or even ordinary families have married very late and averaged little more than a single child, while the small fraction of Jewish women who are ultra-Orthodox often marry in their teens and then produce seven or eight children.  As a consequence, this extremely religious subpopulation has been doubling in size every twenty years, and now easily exceeds 10 percent of the total, including a far higher percentage of younger Jews. But ultra-Orthodox Jews have generally been academically mediocre, often with enormously high rates of poverty and government dependency.  Therefore, the combination of these two radically different trends of Jewish reproduction has acted to stabilize the total number of Jewish youngsters, while probably producing a sharp drop in their average academic achievement.

Although the relative importance of these individual factors behind Jewish academic decline is unclear, the decline itself seems an unmistakable empirical fact, and the widespread unawareness of this fact has had important social consequences.

My casual mental image of today’s top American students is based upon my memories of a generation or so ago, when Jewish students, sometimes including myself, regularly took home a quarter or more of the highest national honors on standardized tests or in prestigious academic competitions; thus, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools might be 25 percent Jewish, based on meritocracy. But the objective evidence indicates that in present day America, only about 6 percent of our top students are Jewish, which now renders such very high Jewish enrollments at elite universities totally absurd and ridiculous. I strongly suspect that a similar time lag effect is responsible for the apparent confusion in many others who have considered the topic.

For example, throughout his very detailed book, Karabel always seems to automatically identify increasing Jewish enrollments with academic meritocracy, and Jewish declines with bias or discrimination, retaining this assumption even when his discussion moves into the 1990s and 2000s. He was born in 1950, graduated Harvard in 1972, and returned there to earn his Ph.D. in 1977, so this may indeed have been the reality during his formative years. But he seems strikingly unaware that the world has changed since then, and that over the last decade or two, meritocracy and Jewish numbers have become opposing forces: the stricter the meritocratic standard, the fewer the Jews admitted.

Evidence of the remarkable collapse of Jewish academic achievement is easily seen in a series of charts:

Important results with major policy implications will only have significant impact if they are widely distributed, and in this regard I faced formidable obstacles.

My article was running in The American Conservative, a small circulation political opinion magazine of which I was the publisher, and so my findings needed to break through into far larger and more mainstream outlets in order to reach a sizable audience.  But in the past TAC had often been fiercely denounced by Jewish activists and organizations, mostly on foreign policy issues, and elements of my piece were far more inflammatory than any of that previous material.  While harsh attacks might help promote my information within particular ideological circles, they would surely dissuade mainstream publications from taking notice, and would also sufficiently stigmatize my research that no respectable individual would be willing to cite it in the future.

My first decision was to place my Asian Quota section near the front of my very long text.  Aside from the intrinsic importance, this would also provide interested readers with a relatively safe “hook” that they could use to describe and promote my analysis, while allowing them to avoid mentioning any of the “third rail” material that constituted the bulk of my text; and this was exactly what eventually occurred.  But such a strategy would obviously fail unless I could also somehow induce hair-trigger activist groups to maintain silence about my article rather than begin crudely demonizing it.  Therefore, I decided to launch what I considered a decapitating first strike against those central organs of Jewish activism but to do so in a rather oblique manner.

Jerome Karabel certainly ranked as the world’s foremost authority on Jewish admissions to the Ivy League, and his celebrated opus had been the central text I had used, although my ultimate conclusions were radically different than his own.  It seemed likely to me that once Jewish organizations became aware of the controversial elements of my article, he would be among the first individuals they contacted, both to seek his assessment of my analysis and perhaps also receive suggestions for an effective rebuttal.

Therefore, I obtained Karabel’s contact information and sent him an advance copy of my completed article weeks before it was generally released, explaining that I thought he would find it rather interesting although some of my conclusions were quite different than his own.  My expectation was that once he carefully read my detailed analysis, he would conclude that the case I made was far too strong to be effectively refuted, and he would pass along that verdict to the activist organizations when they eventually contacted him, thus leading them adopt a policy of “strategic silence” in order to avoid drawing attention to my claims.  For whatever reason, that was exactly how they reacted, and no prominent Jewish activist or group ever issued a public response to my extremely controversial findings despite the considerable attention these ultimately attracted.

Not only did this complete absence of organized attacks provide a green light for the very favorable mainstream coverage I soon began receiving, but it even opened the door to quite friendly treatment from numerous members of the organized Jewish community itself, as they discovered and read my article without any prior negative preconceptions.  Most of these discussions focused directly upon the evidence of the sharp recent decline in Jewish academic ability and the resulting Jewish over-representation at elite universities, with a professor of Talmud Studies at Yeshiva University publishing a thousand-word column entitled “Endangered Jewish Genius” and NYU’s Berman Jewish Policy Center featuring my article on its website.  Even the Israeli press took notice, with a columnist for Israel Hayom, Sheldon Adelson’s top-circulation newpaper, devoting a 1500 word column to my analysis, focusing especially upon my claims of Jewish over-representation.

But although prominent Jewish activists maintained their strict blockade against any discussion of my findings, the Jewish community has never lacked for extreme zealots, and some of these did eventually launch ferocious attacks on my work.  However, these were fringe figures, so they were very slow off the mark in their responses and lacked significant credibility or media support.  Therefore, their complaints had little impact, especially because they were largely self-refuting.

My fiercest academic critic was a certain cancer researcher named Janet Mertz, a fanatic feminist whose previous public efforts had been focused on vilifying and refuting former Harvard president Larry Summers for his mild but impolitic suggestion that perhaps men might be a bit better at math than women, a position she regarded as utter anathema.  To that end, she had published a 10,000 word peer-reviewed analysis of decades worth of International Math Olympiad participants, which convincingly demonstrated that across almost every time period and country, roughly 95% of the best mathematicians had been male and only 5% female.  But she rather bizarrely claimed that this conclusively proved that males and females had exactly equal mathematical aptitude, and then persuaded Science Daily and other gullible media outlets to publish headlined news stories touting her powerful debunking of male chauvinist mythology.

Mertz was equally zealous in her Jewish identitarianism, and she had invested enormous effort in exhaustively determining the exact fractional Jewish ancestry of all of America’s recent Math Olympians.  As a consequence, she fiercely denounced as mere “guesswork” my own estimates of Jewish numbers, based as they were upon a much more casual inspection of surnames, supplemented by Weyl analysis.  I think my response was quite effective.

As it happens, she and her co-authors had exhaustively researched the ethnicity of the 1988-2007 American Math Olympians in their aforementioned 2008 article, and through a combination of extensive biographical research and confidential personal interviews had determined the exact number of full-Jews and part-Jews among those 120 individuals, publishing the results in their Table 7 mentioned above, together with the broader racial categories.

Given that I had produced my own ethnic estimates for those same students based on perhaps five minutes of cursory surname analysis, while Mertz and her associates seemingly devoted five weeks of research to the same task, I readily acknowledge that her results are certain to be vastly more accurate than my own. Indeed, if we regard the Mertz figures as the “gold standard,” then comparing them with my own numbers provides a useful means of assessing the overall quality of my direct inspection technique, a technique that constituted a central pillar of my entire study. This allows us to decide whether my approach was indeed just the worthless “guesswork” that she alleges.

Her peer-reviewed journal article determined that the 120 American Math Olympians from 1988-2007 consisted of exactly 42 Asians, 26 Jews, and 52 non-Jewish whites. My crude surname estimate had been 44 Asians, 23 Jews, and 53 non-Jewish whites. Individual readers must decide for themselves whether these estimation errors seem so enormous as to totally invalidate my overall conclusions, but personally I would be quite satisfied if they remained in this range across the tens of thousands of surnames I had inspected throughout the rest of my paper.

Obviously, such estimation techniques may be completely incorrect for tiny handfuls of names, and should only be relied upon across substantial lists. For example, in one sentence of my 30,000 word article I stated that just 2 of the 78 names of Olympiad winners since 2000 seemed likely to be Jewish, and Mertz has repeatedly attacked me for this claim, now pointing out that I had missed the Hebrew name of winner “Oaz Nir.” She is correct, and since Nir was a double winner in 2000 and 2001, this single surname error on my part accounts for virtually the entire discrepancy between my own 1988-2007 Olympiad results and those produced by the exhaustive research undertaken by Mertz and her three academic co-authors.

The only reason that I or anyone else even became aware of Mertz’s harsh critique of my analysis was the heavy promotion she received by Andrew Gelman, a professor of Statistics at Columbia University and a prominent blogger, who thereby apparently hoped to undercut my findings without directly involving himself and thereby risking his own reputation.  But once I informed him of some of her previous scholarly claims regarding gender issues, he seemed to abandon the project.

A close Mertz ally was a much younger woman named Nurit Baytch, whom I actually encountered in person.  As I was giving my lecture at the University of Chicago Law School, I couldn’t help but notice a rather short young woman sitting in the front row, glaring at me with a glassy-eyed stare.  I am hardly a clothes-horse, but she was dressed very strangely, and when she afterward came up to “confront me,” her mannerisms and style of speaking were quite odd as well.  All in all, her appearance much reminded me of the photos of female Weather Underground terrorists of the late 1960s, most of whom had also come from a Jewish background.

Eventually, Ms. Baytch wrote a massive document purportedly refuting my Meritocracy analysis, and since it was never published anywhere, she posted it on the Internet as a GoogleDocs file, which countless Jewish activists have subsequently cited as a conclusive debunking of my claims.  But all her tens of thousands of words of complex verbiage cannot get around the simple fact that only about 6% of America’s high-performing NMS students are Jewish and the remaining 94% are Gentile.

Her other line of criticism was to denounce my use of the Hillel numbers for Jewish enrollment, which she claimed were completely fraudulent, though without any evidence buttressing her claim.  For decades, these Hillel figures had been accepted without reservation by all our leading media outlets and academic researchers, while I had actually treated them with some caution, perhaps being the first analyst to do so.

Similarly, nearly all our figures on Jewish enrollment were ultimately drawn from the estimates of Hillel, the national Jewish campus organization, and these are obviously approximate. However, the Hillel data is the best we possess for recent decades, and is regularly used by the New York Times and other prominent media outlets, while also serving as the basis for much of Karabel’s award-winning scholarship. Furthermore, so long as any latent bias in the data remained relatively constant, we could still correctly analyze changes over time.

Completely discarding as unreliable the tens of thousands of annual Jewish enrollment estimates compiled by Hillel over the last half-century would completely eliminate almost everything we know about the historical size and trajectory of the Jewish presence at thousands of American colleges, destroying the sociological studies of many scholars.  But fortunately, it seems quite unlikely that the figures are as completely nonsensical as Baytch casually claimed.

These Hillel estimates have been very widely circulated within the Jewish community for decades and republished in Jewish magazines, being primarily intended to help guide strongly-identified Jewish families in selecting a college campus with a Jewish enrollment in the range they considered necessary.  For most families, the cost of a college education is one of the largest investments they will ever make, and if for decades, tens or hundreds of thousands of committed Jewish families had picked their colleges based on the Hillel numbers only to discover that those figures had no connection to reality, surely there would have been a huge and angry backlash.  But there is no record of any such complaints.

For many years, Harvard Hillel had regularly claimed that half or more of all the white undergraduates on the campus came from a Jewish background, and if this figure were wildly inaccurate, surely someone at Harvard Hillel would have eventually noticed that error and corrected it, with the same being true for Yale, Columbia, Penn, and numerous other colleges.  Obviously, the criteria used to classify a student as Jewish are somewhat elastic, and we can easily suppose that the estimate generally includes part-Jews who in any way identified with that community, and may have been been somewhat exaggerated due to ethnic boosterism.  But it seems highly unlikely that the figures would be utterly and demonstrably false.

These arguments based on general plausibility are strongly supported by quantitative evidence, and ironically enough, it is Baytch herself who provided it.   Around the time she produced her lengthy and unpublished document, Harvard Hillel was claiming a Jewish undergraduate enrollment of 25%, and near the beginning of her text, she claimed that figure was obviously false by citing a Harvard Crimson survey indicating that only 9.5% of the Class of 2017 were Jewish. However, she failed to notice that the survey referred to being religiously Jewish, which is entirely different than being Jewish in the broader ethnic or ancestral sense, especially since Jews are among the most secular populations in American society and a full 42% of the Harvard students described their religious beliefs as atheist, agnostic, or “other.”  Indeed, a worldwide survey finds that only 38% of (ethnic) Jews follow the Jewish religion.  So if the Crimson survey were correct and Harvard Jews were typical in their religiosity, this would imply that 9.5% / 0.38 = 25%(!!!) of Harvard freshman were ethnically Jewish, exactly the figure claimed by Harvard Hillel.  Fanatic ideologues such as Baytch sometimes have a tendency to score game-ending own-goals without even realizing what they have done.

In general, Jewish classification has a rather protean nature, with somewhat overlapping definitions based on religion, ethnicity, and full or partial ancestry, allowing it to be drastically expanded or contracted for various reasons.  I suspect that Baytch’s confusion on this matter was entirely sincere, related to the obsessive tendencies she exhibited in real life.  But others may employ these shifting definitions based upon more pragmatic considerations.

It is well known that for many decades the American Communist Party and especially its top leadership were overwhelmingly Jewish, even at a time when Jews were just 3% of the national population.  But Jewish community leaders were not pleased with this situation, and they sometimes flatly denied the reality, insisting that there were actually no Jewish Communists whatsoever—how could there be, when Communists were hostile to all religious belief?

Similarly, my findings that Jews were apparently enrolled at Harvard and other elite colleges at a rate some 1,000% greater than white Gentiles of similar academic performance must surely have set off alarm bells within the leadership of Jewish activist organizations, who wondered how best to manage or conceal this potentially dangerous information.  With a high-profile Asian discrimination lawsuit wending its way through the courts and my own unsuccessful 2016 attempt to run a slate of candidates for the Board of Harvard Overseers, the likelihood of growing public scrutiny surely loomed very large.

Baytch’s apparent confusion between having Jewish ancestry and practicing the Jewish religion would have been well-known in these circles, and offered an obvious solution.  If Jewish numbers were suddenly narrowed to only include those students who claimed to follow Jewish religious practices, the flagrant over-representation of Jews on elite campuses would be greatly reduced.  Meanwhile, large numbers of lesser-qualified applicants of Jewish ancestry but no religious belief could continue to gain unfair admission by writing essays about their “Holocaust grandmas” with America’s 98% Gentile population being none the wiser.

For whatever reason, Hillel seems to have recently adopted this practice, drastically reducing its published estimates of the Jewish enrollment at Harvard and other elite colleges, thus eliminating a glaring example of ethnic bias by a simple act of redefinition.  For example, the Hillel website now claims that merely 11% of Harvard undergraduates are Jewish, a huge reduction from the previous 25% figure, and a total suspiciously close to the Crimson survey of a few years ago which counted Jews only based upon their religious beliefs.  The Hillel figures for Yale, Princeton, and most other elite colleges have experienced equally sudden and huge declines.

One very strong clue regarding this new definition of Jewish enrollment comes from Caltech, an elite science and engineering school which is quite unlikely to attract Jews professing religious faith.  According to the Hillel website, the Jewish enrollment is 0%, claiming that there absolutely no Jews on campus.  Despite this, the website also describes the vibrant Jewish life at Caltech, with Caltech Jews involved in all sorts of local activities and projects.  This absurd paradox is obviously due to the distinction between individuals who are Jewish by religion and those who are Jewish by ancestry.

As the 1999 media firestorm engulfing Princeton demonstrated, in the past even slight and gentle declines of Jewish enrollment over a fifteen year period would provoke massive controversy and angry denunciations from Jewish organizations.  The absolute lack of any organized response to the recent sudden disappearance of nearly 60% of Harvard’s Jews certainly suggests that little more than a mere change in definition had occurred.

Many years ago as a young and naive undergraduate, I would usually spend my dinners discussing all sorts of political and policy issues with my fellow classmates in our Harvard dining hall.

Affirmative Action was a regular topic of our conversations, and I would occasionally note how odd America was in that regard. No other example came to mind in which an ethnic group had established a legalized system of racial discrimination against its own members, while similar sorts of systems aimed at excluding or disadvantaging rival ethnic groups were all too common in world history.

As the decades went by, I gradually noticed that the huge and continuing increase in the enrollment of non-white and foreign students at our most elite universities had caused a complete collapse in the enrollment of white American Gentiles, but oddly enough, no similar reduction in Jewish numbers. It was well-known that Jewish activists had been the primary force behind the establishment of Affirmative Action and related policies in college admissions, and I began to wonder about their true motivation, whether conscious or unconscious.

Had the goal been the stated one, of providing educational opportunities to previously excluded groups? Or had that merely been the excuse used to advance a policy that eliminated the majority of white Gentiles, their primary ethnic competitors?  With the Jewish population numbering merely 2%, there was an obvious limit as to how many elite college slots they themselves could possibly fill, but if enough other groups were also brought in, then Gentile numbers could easily be reduced to low levels, despite the fact that they constituted the bulk of the national population.

Asians represented an interesting test-case. As their numbers rapidly grew, white Gentiles were consequently pushed out, and this process was celebrated across the academic community. But by the late 1980s, Asian numbers had increased to such an extent that they inevitably began to impinge upon elite Jewish enrollment as well and future increases would surely worsen the situation. And at that point, the process suddenly halted, with Asian numbers being sharply reduced and thereafter permanently capped. The implications of this situation were already in the back of my mind when I published my 1998 Wall Street Journal column describing some of these striking racial facts.

The current high-profile trial in Boston is widely portrayed by the media as a conflict between Asian-American groups, whose educational interests suffer under the current subjective and opaque admissions system, and black and Hispanic groups, whose numbers might be sharply reduced under some proposed changes. Whites are largely portrayed as bystanders, with Harvard indicating that their numbers would scarcely shift even under drastic changes in admissions policy. But the term “white” encompasses both Jews and Gentiles, and thus may conceal more than it reveals.

The implications of my 2012 Meritocracy analysis are certainly well-known to all of the prominent participants and observers in the ongoing legal battle, but the fearsome power of the ADL and its media allies ensures that certain important aspects of the current situation are never subjected to widespread public discussion.  Asian advocates rightly denounce the unfairness of the current elite academic admissions system, but remain absolutely mute about which American group actually controls the institutions involved.

Throughout the enormous media controversy surrounding the Harvard trial in Boston, all sides are doing their utmost to avoid noticing the 2% elephant in the room. And that fact provides the best proof of the tremendous size and power of that elephant in today’s American society.

Affirmative Action and the Jewish Elephant in the Room

The Unz Review • July 3, 2023 • 6,800 Words

The top American news story at the end of last week was the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, striking down the use of race in college admissions and thereby overturning nearly a half-century of its own past rulings.

The print editions of our leading national newspapers carried virtually identical front-page banner headlines, with the New York Times announcing “Justices Gut College Affirmative Action” and the Wall Street Journal declaring “Court Guts College Affirmative Action.” The banner headline in my own local Palo Alto Daily Post, a small distribution newspaper that closely tracks the media consensus, was even more emphatic: “Court Ends Affirmative Action.”

Although the ultimate consequences of any major legal decision may take years to be fully understood, the potentially sweeping implications of this dramatic ruling were suggested by the lead story on the Saturday website edition of the Times: “Affirmative Action Ruling May Upend Hiring Policies, Too.”

The editors of our national newspaper of record had apparently prepared themselves for this verdict. The ruling was announced Thursday morning and by that evening the Times website had already published a lengthy opinion piece on the long political conflict over racial preferences by Jerome Karabel, an eminent Berkeley sociologist. Karabel’s essay was allocated a full page in the next day’s prestigious print edition, thereby establishing him as the primary voice selected by the Times to respond to the controversial court decision.

- The Decades-Long Fight to Dismantle Affirmative Action

Jerome Karabel • The New York Times • June 29, 2023 • 2,400 Words

Although the history presented by Karabel seemed reasonably even-handed and accurate, I noticed a striking omission. As a scholar, he is best known for his award-winning 2005 study The Chosen, a magisterial narrative history of the last hundred years of Jewish enrollment at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. His research had heavily focused on the secret use of discriminatory practices to sharply restrict Jewish admissions, yet despite its obvious relevance to the current court case no mention of that topic appeared anywhere in his lengthy essay.

Karabel’s seminal research on Jews in the Ivy League served as the foundation for my own 2012 Meritocracy analysis, and although he carefully avoided that subject in his Times piece, I had explained in my article why I regarded it as central to understanding the long struggle over elite admissions:

Karabel’s massive documentation—over 700 pages and 3000 endnotes—establishes the remarkable fact that America’s uniquely complex and subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert ethnic tribal warfare. During the 1920s, the established Northeastern Anglo-Saxon elites who then dominated the Ivy League wished to sharply curtail the rapidly growing numbers of Jewish students, but their initial attempts to impose simple numerical quotas provoked enormous controversy and faculty opposition.[10] Therefore, the approach subsequently taken by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and his peers was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration of all aspects of each individual applicant; the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired. As a consequence, university leaders could honestly deny the existence of any racial or religious quotas, while still managing to reduce Jewish enrollment to a much lower level, and thereafter hold it almost constant during the decades which followed.[11] For example, the Jewish portion of Harvard’s entering class dropped from nearly 30 percent in 1925 to 15 percent the following year and remained roughly static until the period of the Second World War.[12]

As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the major changes in admissions policy which later followed were usually determined by factors of raw political power and the balance of contending forces rather than any idealistic considerations. For example, in the aftermath of World War II, Jewish organizations and their allies mobilized their political and media resources to pressure the universities into increasing their ethnic enrollment by modifying the weight assigned to various academic and non-academic factors, raising the importance of the former over the latter. Then a decade or two later, this exact process was repeated in the opposite direction, as the early 1960s saw black activists and their liberal political allies pressure universities to bring their racial minority enrollments into closer alignment with America’s national population by partially shifting away from their recently enshrined focus on purely academic considerations. Indeed, Karabel notes that the most sudden and extreme increase in minority enrollment took place at Yale in the years 1968–69, and was largely due to fears of race riots in heavily black New Haven, which surrounded the campus.[13]

Philosophical consistency appears notably absent in many of the prominent figures involved in these admissions battles, with both liberals and conservatives sometimes favoring academic merit and sometimes non-academic factors, whichever would produce the particular ethnic student mix they desired for personal or ideological reasons. Different political blocs waged long battles for control of particular universities, and sudden large shifts in admissions rates occurred as these groups gained or lost influence within the university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissions staff in 1965 and the following year Jewish numbers nearly doubled.[14]

At times, external judicial or political forces would be summoned to override university admissions policy, often succeeding in this aim. Karabel’s own ideological leanings are hardly invisible, as he hails efforts by state legislatures to force Ivy League schools to lift their de facto Jewish quotas, but seems to regard later legislative attacks on “affirmative action” as unreasonable assaults on academic freedom.[15] The massively footnoted text of The Chosen might lead one to paraphrase Clausewitz and conclude that our elite college admissions policy often consists of ethnic warfare waged by other means, or even that it could be summarized as a simple Leninesque question of “Who, Whom?”

Although nearly all of Karabel’s study is focused on the earlier history of admissions policy at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with the developments of the last three decades being covered in just a few dozen pages, he finds complete continuity down to the present day, with the notorious opacity of the admissions process still allowing most private universities to admit whomever they want for whatever reasons they want, even if the reasons and the admissions decisions may eventually change over the years. Despite these plain facts, Harvard and the other top Ivy League schools today publicly deny any hint of discrimination along racial or ethnic lines, except insofar as they acknowledge providing an admissions boost to under-represented racial minorities, such as blacks or Hispanics. But given the enormous control these institutions exert on our larger society, we should test these claims against the evidence of the actual enrollment statistics.

For more than one hundred years and especially in recent decades, our elite colleges have served as a direct channel to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, finance, and media, so dominating those institutions and determining their enrollment provides a considerable measure of control over our entire society. And as Karabel demonstrated in his fascinating volume, throughout the twentieth century those colleges therefore became the battleground of a silent struggle for power between white Gentiles and Jews. The former initially held the upper hand, but the latter ultimately proved victorious, and towards the end of his book the author celebrated their supposedly meritocratic triumph:

Indeed, Karabel opens the final chapter of his book by …noting the extreme irony that the WASP demographic group which had once so completely dominated America’s elite universities and “virtually all the major institutions of American life” had by 2000 become “a small and beleaguered minority at Harvard,” being actually fewer in number than the Jews whose presence they had once sought to restrict. Very similar results seem to apply all across the Ivy League, with the disproportion often being even greater than the particular example emphasized by Karabel.

Indeed, I think our nation’s fifty year struggle over Affirmative Action can best be understood as an element of that hidden ethnic struggle. As I explained in the closing paragraphs of my 2018 article:

Many years ago as a young and naive undergraduate, I would usually spend my dinners discussing all sorts of political and policy issues with my fellow classmates in our Harvard dining hall.

Affirmative Action was a regular topic of our conversations, and I would occasionally note how odd America was in that regard. No other example came to mind in which an ethnic group had established a legalized system of racial discrimination against its own members, while similar sorts of systems aimed at excluding or disadvantaging rival ethnic groups were all too common in world history.

As the decades went by, I gradually noticed that the huge and continuing increase in the enrollment of non-white and foreign students at our most elite universities had caused a complete collapse in the enrollment of white American Gentiles, but oddly enough, no similar reduction in Jewish numbers. It was well-known that Jewish activists had been the primary force behind the establishment of Affirmative Action and related policies in college admissions, and I began to wonder about their true motivation, whether conscious or unconscious.

Had the goal been the stated one, of providing educational opportunities to previously excluded groups? Or had that merely been the excuse used to advance a policy that eliminated the majority of white Gentiles, their primary ethnic competitors? With the Jewish population numbering merely 2%, there was an obvious limit as to how many elite college slots they themselves could possibly fill, but if enough other groups were also brought in, then Gentile numbers could easily be reduced to low levels, despite the fact that they constituted the bulk of the national population.

Asians represented an interesting test-case. As their numbers rapidly grew, white Gentiles were consequently pushed out, and this process was celebrated across the academic community. But by the late 1980s, Asian numbers had increased to such an extent that they inevitably began to impinge upon elite Jewish enrollment as well and future increases would surely worsen the situation. And at that point, the process suddenly halted, with Asian numbers being sharply reduced and thereafter permanently capped. The implications of this situation were already in the back of my mind when I published my 1998 Wall Street Journal column describing some of these striking racial facts.

The current high-profile trial in Boston is widely portrayed by the media as a conflict between Asian-American groups, whose educational interests suffer under the current subjective and opaque admissions system, and black and Hispanic groups, whose numbers might be sharply reduced under some proposed changes. Whites are largely portrayed as bystanders, with Harvard indicating that their numbers would scarcely shift even under drastic changes in admissions policy. But the term “white” encompasses both Jews and Gentiles, and thus may conceal more than it reveals.

The implications of my 2012 Meritocracy analysis are certainly well-known to all of the prominent participants and observers in the ongoing legal battle, but the fearsome power of the ADL and its media allies ensures that certain important aspects of the current situation are never subjected to widespread public discussion. Asian advocates rightly denounce the unfairness of the current elite academic admissions system, but remain absolutely mute about which American group actually controls the institutions involved.

Throughout the enormous media controversy surrounding the Harvard trial in Boston, all sides are doing their utmost to avoid noticing the 2% elephant in the room. And that fact provides the best proof of the tremendous size and power of that elephant in today’s American society.

Most American journalists and academics quietly recognize that matters touching upon Jewish sensitivities constitute the deadly “third rail” of their professions and the quantitative analysis that I had presented in my 2012 Meritocracy analysis was probably one of the most explosive published anywhere in many decades. In that study I demonstrated that the distribution of students at our elite colleges sharply diverged from that of our society as a whole or its highest performing segment, but instead showed a strikingly different ethnic skew:

The evidence of the recent NMS semifinalist lists seems the most conclusive of all, given the huge statistical sample sizes involved. As discussed earlier, these students constitute roughly the highest 0.5 percent in academic ability, the top 16,000 high school seniors who should be enrolling at the Ivy League and America’s other most elite academic universities. In California, white Gentile names outnumber Jewish ones by over 8-to-1; in Texas, over 20-to-1; in Florida and Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in New York, America’s most heavily Jewish state, there are more than two high-ability white Gentile students for every Jewish one. Based on the overall distribution of America’s population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America’s highest ability students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish total of under 6 percent.

Needless to say, these proportions are considerably different from what we actually find among the admitted students at Harvard and its elite peers, which today serve as a direct funnel to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, and finance. Based on reported statistics, Jews approximately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools, which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the official statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Harvard are America’s most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction of their national population than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher academic test scores.

When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America’s recent NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics, foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.

However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all relative to their number of high-ability college-age students.

Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70 percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews.

Based on these figures, Jewish students were roughly 1,000% more likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League than white Gentiles of similar ability. This was an absolutely astonishing result given that under-representation in the range of 20% or 30% is often treated by courts as powerful prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.

- The Myth of American Meritocracy

Ron Unz • The American Conservative • November 28, 2012 • 26,200 Words

Several charts and graphs effectively presented these remarkable findings:

As I explained last year:

These charts demonstrated the hidden reality that white Gentiles were heavily under-represented at elite colleges not merely with regard to their fraction of highest-performing students but even relative to their share of the college-age population. Academic administrators might publicly fret that blacks or Hispanics were not enrolled proportional to their national numbers, but the under-enrollment of non-Jewish whites was actually far more severe. To a considerable extent, the student bodies of our top colleges constitute the next generation of our national elites in embryonic form, and during recent decades white Gentiles had been increasingly excluded from that important pool.

All these meritocracy statistics were originally compiled ten years ago, but when I’ve occasionally updated them, I noticed that little had changed except that they had sometimes grown even more extreme. As mentioned, legal discovery eventually revealed that an internal Harvard study had largely confirmed my analysis of Asian discrimination but had been suppressed. Meanwhile, my much more explosive analysis of massive Jewish over-representation had never been significantly challenged despite the angry fulminations of a few agitated Jewish activists, but the topic had unsurprisingly disappeared from any public debate.

Soon after I published my original article, the overwhelming evidence I provided of enormous Jewish over-representation relative to Jewish academic performance provoked a series of heated exchanges with a handful of outraged Jewish activists. As a consequence, I published a series of follow-up columns in which I explained and justified my methodology, confirming that my controversial conclusions had been entirely correct. Those so interested should read these pieces, weighing my own arguments against those of my critics and then decide for themselves:

- Meritocracy: The Yale Debate and Surname Analysis

The American Conservative • February 1, 2013 • 1,800 Words

- Meritocracy: Response to Prof. Gelman on Jewish Elite Overrepresentation

The American Conservative • February 13, 2013 • 2,800 Words

- Meritocracy: Admitting My Mistakes

The American Conservative • February 21, 2013 • 2,200 Words

- Meritocracy: Gelman’s Sixth Column

The American Conservative • March 1, 2013 • 1,500 Words

- Meritocracy: Almost as Wrong as Larry Summers

The American Conservative • March 9, 2013 • 2,000 Words

- Meritocracy: Dangerous Cancer Statistics

The American Conservative • March 16, 2013 • 1,100 Words

Karabel must certainly be well aware of my findings, so his complete silence on Jewish matters in his lengthy Times piece was only to be expected. Karabel himself was a student of my late friend Nathan Glazer, the longtime dean of American ethnic sociology, who had been very impressed by my Meritocracy analysis and promoted it in his circles. Moreover, I had fully recognized the exceptionally explosive nature of my conclusions and therefore provided an advance copy of my work to the highly-regarded Berkeley scholar:

My first decision was to place my Asian Quota section near the front of my very long text. Aside from the intrinsic importance, this would also provide interested readers with a relatively safe “hook” that they could use to describe and promote my analysis, while allowing them to avoid mentioning any of the “third rail” material that constituted the bulk of my text; and this was exactly what eventually occurred. But such a strategy would obviously fail unless I could also somehow induce hair-trigger activist groups to maintain silence about my article rather than begin crudely demonizing it. Therefore, I decided to launch what I considered a decapitating first strike against those central organs of Jewish activism but to do so in a rather oblique manner.

Jerome Karabel certainly ranked as the world’s foremost authority on Jewish admissions to the Ivy League, and his celebrated opus had been the central text I had used, although my ultimate conclusions were radically different than his own. It seemed likely to me that once Jewish organizations became aware of the controversial elements of my article, he would be among the first individuals they contacted, both to seek his assessment of my analysis and perhaps also receive suggestions for an effective rebuttal.

Therefore, I obtained Karabel’s contact information and sent him an advance copy of my completed article weeks before it was generally released, explaining that I thought he would find it rather interesting although some of my conclusions were quite different than his own. My expectation was that once he carefully read my detailed analysis, he would conclude that the case I made was far too strong to be effectively refuted, and he would pass along that verdict to the activist organizations when they eventually contacted him, thus leading them adopt a policy of “strategic silence” in order to avoid drawing attention to my claims. For whatever reason, that was exactly how they reacted, and no prominent Jewish activist or group ever issued a public response to my extremely controversial findings despite the considerable attention these ultimately attracted.

In 2016 I had launched a high-profile campaign to elect a slate of candidates to the Harvard Board of Overseers, with one of our central issues being greater transparency in admissions, and although our effort failed, it may have had some longer-term consequences.

Neither our own slate nor that of our bitter opponents ever raised the issue of Jewish numbers, but the front-page story in the New York Times announcing our effort must surely have reminded activist groups of the explosive contents of my original 2012 paper, and the risk that the surprising facts I had provided might eventually slip past their media blockade and reach the American public, perhaps with fateful consequences.

All my enrollment figures had been drawn from the public estimates annually provided by Hillel, the nationwide Jewish campus organization, whose numbers had been used for decades by academic researchers and media outlets. My article had noted that even slight declines in Jewish enrollment had sometimes provoked enormous public controversies and demands that they be immediately reversed. As I wrote in 2012:

Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s, and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. These articles included denunciations of Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system.

The year after our unsuccessful Harvard Overseer campaign, the Hillel website reported a sudden, massive collapse in Jewish enrollment at Harvard and many other top universities, a decline of more than 50% that was totally ignored by both the national media and normally alert Jewish activist organizations, and this striking disappearance of Jews at elite colleges has continued down to the present day. However, I quickly determined that this shift seemed merely to be one of redefinition, with students apparently now only counted in that category if they declared themselves to be practitioners of the Jewish religion, a change that had an enormous impact, as I explained in 2018:

These arguments based on general plausibility are strongly supported by quantitative evidence, and ironically enough, it is Baytch herself who provided it. Around the time she produced her lengthy and unpublished document, Harvard Hillel was claiming a Jewish undergraduate enrollment of 25%, and near the beginning of her text, she claimed that figure was obviously false by citing a Harvard Crimson survey indicating that only 9.5% of the Class of 2017 were Jewish. However, she failed to notice that the survey referred to being religiously Jewish, which is entirely different than being Jewish in the broader ethnic or ancestral sense, especially since Jews are among the most secular populations in American society and a full 42% of the Harvard students described their religious beliefs as atheist, agnostic, or “other.” Indeed, a worldwide survey finds that only 38% of (ethnic) Jews follow the Jewish religion. So if the Crimson survey were correct and Harvard Jews were typical in their religiosity, this would imply that 9.5% / 0.38 = 25%(!!!) of Harvard freshman were ethnically Jewish, exactly the figure claimed by Harvard Hillel. Fanatic ideologues such as Baytch sometimes have a tendency to score game-ending own-goals without even realizing what they have done.

In general, Jewish classification has a rather protean nature, with somewhat overlapping definitions based on religion, ethnicity, and full or partial ancestry, allowing it to be drastically expanded or contracted for various reasons. I suspect that Baytch’s confusion on this matter was entirely sincere, related to the obsessive tendencies she exhibited in real life. But others may employ these shifting definitions based upon more pragmatic considerations.

It is well known that for many decades the American Communist Party and especially its top leadership were overwhelmingly Jewish, even at a time when Jews were just 3% of the national population. But Jewish community leaders were not pleased with this situation, and they sometimes flatly denied the reality, insisting that there were actually no Jewish Communists whatsoever—how could there be, when Communists were hostile to all religious belief?

Similarly, my findings that Jews were apparently enrolled at Harvard and other elite colleges at a rate some 1,000% greater than white Gentiles of similar academic performance must surely have set off alarm bells within the leadership of Jewish activist organizations, who wondered how best to manage or conceal this potentially dangerous information. With a high-profile Asian discrimination lawsuit wending its way through the courts and my own unsuccessful 2016 attempt to run a slate of candidates for the Board of Harvard Overseers, the likelihood of growing public scrutiny surely loomed very large.

Baytch’s apparent confusion between having Jewish ancestry and practicing the Jewish religion would have been well-known in these circles, and offered an obvious solution. If Jewish numbers were suddenly narrowed to only include those students who claimed to follow Jewish religious practices, the flagrant over-representation of Jews on elite campuses would be greatly reduced. Meanwhile, large numbers of lesser-qualified applicants of Jewish ancestry but no religious belief could continue to gain unfair admission by writing essays about their “Holocaust grandmas” with America’s 98% Gentile population being none the wiser.

For whatever reason, Hillel seems to have recently adopted this practice, drastically reducing its published estimates of the Jewish enrollment at Harvard and other elite colleges, thus eliminating a glaring example of ethnic bias by a simple act of redefinition. For example, the Hillel website now claims that merely 11% of Harvard undergraduates are Jewish, a huge reduction from the previous 25% figure, and a total suspiciously close to the Crimson survey of a few years ago which counted Jews only based upon their religious beliefs. The Hillel figures for Yale, Princeton, and most other elite colleges have experienced equally sudden and huge declines.

One very strong clue regarding this new definition of Jewish enrollment comes from Caltech, an elite science and engineering school which is quite unlikely to attract Jews professing religious faith. According to the Hillel website, the Jewish enrollment is 0%, claiming that there absolutely no Jews on campus. Despite this, the website also describes the vibrant Jewish life at Caltech, with Caltech Jews involved in all sorts of local activities and projects. This absurd paradox is obviously due to the distinction between individuals who are Jewish by religion and those who are Jewish by ancestry.

As the 1999 media firestorm engulfing Princeton demonstrated, in the past even slight and gentle declines of Jewish enrollment over a fifteen year period would provoke massive controversy and angry denunciations from Jewish organizations. The absolute lack of any organized response to the recent sudden disappearance of nearly 60% of Harvard’s Jews certainly suggests that little more than a mere change in definition had occurred.

As I discussed last year, this apparent shift from a classification based upon Jewish ethnicity to one based upon Jewish religion seems to have successfully obscured the central issue:

My own Meritocracy analysis was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, but such numbers represent merely a tiny sliver within the vastness of the Internet, and after a few months my explosive Jewish findings had permanently vanished from any secondary coverage or other public discussion. So although well-informed individuals interested in Jewish matters or elite college admissions must be aware of my results, the complete silence of the broader media has ensured that everyone else remained entirely ignorant.

As an example of this, a few days ago a friend of mine pointed me to a Tablet podcast series on Jews in the Ivy League entitled “Gatecrashers” and hosted by Mark Oppenheimer, an Orthodox Jewish journalist who often focuses on religious matters. Although I listened to the episode “Harvard and the End of the Jewish Ivy League,” I found Oppenheimer’s obvious lack of quantitative skills or any true understanding of the issues involved rather disheartening.

However, the podcast page did provide a link to a very helpful article in the Harvard Crimson, presenting the results of four years of Freshman surveys on a variety of lifestyle issues, including religious faith. During 2013-2016, there had been a very sharp decline in most religious affiliations, with the percentage of Catholics and Protestants together dropping from over 42% to less than 35% in just four years, and a corresponding, even stronger decline in followers of Judaism, while the combined category of Atheists, Agnostics, and “Other” grew from under 42% to nearly 53%. We can safely assume that a very substantial portion of the adherents in those latter categories are Jewish by ethnicity.

Freshmen who were religiously Jewish had dropped to just 6.3% in 2016, but during the other three years the percentage had closely clustered around 10%, which is also the figure currently reported for Harvard on the Hillel website. So if we assume that Harvard College attracts Jews who are average in their religious faith, this indicates that the ethnically Jewish fraction of the undergraduate population would be roughly 25% or perhaps a bit higher.

If this estimate of Jewish numbers is even remotely correct, the implications are quite astonishing, and we can easily understand why switching from ethnicity to religion was employed as a subterfuge to conceal that reality. Since 1980 every college and university in America has been required to report the demographic characteristics of its student body to the National Center for Education Statistics. Our own website provides this public data in a highly-convenient form, allowing easy examination of the historical trajectory of all our thousands of undergraduate academic institutions, and we can examine a table showing the changing enrollment at Harvard College since 2012:

One of the most striking facts is that during the five years 2015-2020, the percentage of black students grew from 6.3% to 11.0%, a remarkable rise of 75%, certainly the most rapid in Harvard’s history, and despite the decline in 2021, the numbers are still up by nearly 50% since 2015. This dramatic rise was driven by extremely high acceptance rates, with blacks being 14.8% of the students admitted in 2020 and a whopping 18% of the 2021 admissions. The number of Hispanic, Asian, and foreign students also rose substantially during those same years.

The Iron Law of Arithmetic demands that percentages must sum to 100, so during this same period, Harvard’s white enrollment dropped by nearly 10 percentage points, steadily falling from 45.1% in 2012 to just 35.4% in 2021. And if, as seems likely, ethnically Jewish students are in the approximate range of 25%, the unavoidable conclusion is that although white Gentiles are nearly 60% of the American population and probably at least 60% of our highest-performing students, they are now approaching a single digit presence at our most elite college. As I noted in my original 2012 article, Harvard has long enrolled American blacks at a considerably higher rate than non-Jewish whites, but the former are now probably comparable in absolute numbers even though the latter are more than four times more numerous in our society.

These shocking conclusions must be carefully hedged with a couple of caveats. It is possible that for some reason Jews at Harvard are far more religious than the Jewish population as a whole, which would impact our ethnic estimates. There also seems to be some anecdotal evidence that the lure of Affirmative Action admissions has increasingly persuaded some white students to falsely claim non-white status, and perhaps those numbers have now become large enough to significantly distort Harvard’s official statistics. But aside from these two possible factors, both quite difficult to evaluate, the shocking conclusions I have drawn seem inescapable.

The increasing elimination of non-Jewish whites from Harvard and other top colleges is real, but the underlying factors responsible are far from certain. However, I should quote a relevant paragraph from my 2012 article, which noted the close historical parallel described in Jerome Karabel’s volume:

It would be unreasonable to ignore the salient fact that this massive apparent bias in favor of far less-qualified Jewish applicants coincides with an equally massive ethnic skew at the topmost administrative ranks of the universities in question, a situation which once again exactly parallels Karabel’s account from the 1920s. Indeed, Karabel points out that by 1993 Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all had presidents of Jewish ancestry,[80] and the same is true for the current presidents of Yale, Penn, Cornell, and possibly Columbia, as well as Princeton’s president throughout during the 1990s and Yale’s new incoming president, while all three of Harvard’s most recent presidents have either had Jewish origins or a Jewish spouse.[81]

When I published that article a decade ago, probably half of the eight Ivy League colleges had Jewish presidents, and that figure still remains true today; the ratio had been much higher last year before Amy Gutmann left the presidency of Penn to become our ambassador to Germany, while on July 1st Harvard’s Jewish President Lawrence Bacow was replaced by Claudine Gay, the first black to hold that position.

Relatively few Americans ever consider applying to Harvard or the other elite Ivy League schools. Indeed, I suspect that much of our citizenry probably regards the composition of those student bodies as totally irrelevant, of far less significance than the identities of our top professional athletes or pop music stars. Yet as I have repeatedly emphasized, those educational institutions tend to provide the next generation of America’s ruling elites, and this applies to the world of politics as well as many other sectors.

Consider, for example, the leading figures in our current Biden Administration, who are playing a crucial role in determining the future of our own country and the rest of the world. The list of Cabinet departments has wildly proliferated since Washington’s day, but suppose we confine our attention to the half-dozen most important, led by the individuals who control national security and the economy, and then also add the names of the President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and National Security Advisor. Although “Diversity” may have become the sacred motto of the Democratic Party, the background of the handful of individuals running our country appears strikingly non-diverse, especially if we exclude the two political figureheads at the very top.

- President Joe Biden (Jewish in-laws)

- Vice-President Kamala Harris (Jewish spouse)

- Chief of Staff Jeff Zients (Jewish), replacing Ron Klain (Jewish, Harvard)

- Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Jewish, Harvard)

- Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (Jewish, Yale)

- Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III (Black)

- Attorney General Merrick Garland (Jewish, Harvard)

- National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (White Gentile, Yale)

- Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines (Jewish)

- Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas (Jewish)

As I wrote last year:

In 2013 Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Moscow’s Jewish Center and noted in his remarks that 80-85% of the first Bolshevik government was Jewish. Although that statement was probably somewhat exaggerated, it does seem a very reasonable characterization of today’s American government, despite Jews constituting less than 2% of our population.

When a nation’s top leadership is drawn from such a narrowly insular, almost incestuous circle, in which standards of strict meritocracy have long since been replaced by shared ideological beliefs and perhaps even widespread implicit ethnic nepotism, enormous problems may develop. Our current inflation rate is now the highest in forty years, and a few days ago, prestigious Foreign Affairs, mouthpiece of the American political establishment, carried a major article discussing the looming possibility of a simultaneous war against both Russia and China and how we could successfully triumph in such a difficult conflict. Since my infancy, no American president has seriously contemplated a war with either Russia or China, but our current national leadership seems quite eager to embroil us in a global war with both of them at the same time.

My original 2012 article had closed with a strongly cautionary note:

Following the 1991 collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union, some observers noted with unease that the United States was left as about the only remaining large and fully-functional multi-ethnic society, and the subsequent collapse and disintegration of ethnically diverse Yugoslavia merely strengthened these concerns. China is sometimes portrayed by the ignorant American media as having large and restive minority populations, but it is 92 percent Han Chinese, and if we exclude a few outlying or thinly populated provinces—the equivalents of Alaska, Hawaii, and New Mexico—closer to 95 percent Han, with all its top leadership drawn from that same background and therefore possessing a natural alignment of interests. Without doubt, America’s great success despite its multiplicity of ethnic nationalities is almost unique in modern human history. But such success should not be taken for granted.

Many of the Jewish writers who focus on the history of elite university admissions, including Karabel, Steinberg, and Lemann, have critiqued and rebuked the America of the first half of the Twentieth Century for having been governed by a narrow WASP ascendency, which overwhelmingly dominated and controlled the commanding heights of business, finance, education, and politics; and some of their criticisms are not unreasonable. But we should bear in mind that this dominant group of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—largely descended from among the earliest American settlers and which had gradually absorbed and assimilated substantial elements of Celtic, Dutch, German, and French background—was generally aligned in culture, religion, ideology, and ancestry with perhaps 60 percent of America’s total population at the time, and therefore hardly represented an alien presence.[119] By contrast, a similarly overwhelming domination by a tiny segment of America’s current population, one which is completely misaligned in all these respects, seems far less inherently stable, especially when the institutional roots of such domination have continually increased despite the collapse of the supposedly meritocratic justification. This does not seem like a recipe for a healthy and successful society, nor one which will even long survive in anything like its current form.

Power corrupts and an extreme concentration of power even more so, especially when that concentration of power is endlessly praised and glorified by the major media and the prominent intellectuals which together constitute such an important element of that power. But as time goes by and more and more Americans notice that they are poorer and more indebted than they have ever been before, the blandishments of such propaganda machinery will eventually lose effectiveness, much as did the similar propaganda organs of the decaying Soviet state. Kahlenberg quotes Pat Moynihan as noting that the stagnant American earnings between 1970 and 1985 represented “the longest stretch of ‘flat’ income in the history of the European settlement of North America.”[120] The only difference today is that this period of economic stagnation has now extended nearly three times as long, and has also been combined with numerous social, moral, and foreign policy disasters.

Over the last few decades America’s ruling elites have been produced largely as a consequence of the particular selection methods adopted by our top national universities in the late 1960s. Leaving aside the question of whether these methods have been fair or have instead been based on corruption and ethnic favoritism, the elites they have produced have clearly done a very poor job of leading our country, and we must change the methods used to select them.

The Myth of American Meritocracy: Quantitative Sources and Methods

The American Conservative • November 21, 2012 • 6,400 Words

Main article: The Myth of American Meritocracy

Appendix A: Current and Historical Estimates of American Jewish Population

Appendix B: Estimated Age and State Distribution of American Racial and Ethnic Groups

Appendix C: Racial and Ethnic Enrollments at Elite Universities

Appendix D: Recent and Historical Jewish Enrollments at Elite Universities

Appendix E: Estimating the National Distribution of High-Ability Students from the NMS Semifinalists

Appendix F: Winners of Leading Academic Competitions

Appendix G:  Roster of Harvard College Phi Beta Kappa Inductees, 1966-2012

Appendix H: Relative Enrollment Figures at Ivy League and Other Universities

Appendix A: Current and Historical Estimates of American Jewish Population

Much of the our analysis is based on the per capita performance or representation of different groups, now and in the past, and such calculations obviously depend upon the population sizes of the groups in question.  For some racial or ethnic groups such as Asians, Hispanics, or non-Hispanic whites, these population figures are relatively easy to obtain from the official Census data, which also provides good numbers for various ethnic subpopulations such as Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese.

However, such official data does not exist in the case of America’s Jewish population, forcing us to rely upon the estimates produced by independent researchers, mostly employed at Jewish universities or thinktanks, and these inevitably contain a significant degree of uncertainty.

Three of the research reports which I have used as my main sources have been:

“Jewish Population in the United States, 2011,”  Ira Sheshkin and Arnold Dashefsky, Current Jewish Population Reports, Number 4 – 2011, published by the North American Jewish Data Bank of the Berman Institute of the University of Connecticut.

“Estimating the Jewish Population of the United States: 2000-2010,”  Elizabeth Tighe et al., December 2011, published by the Steinhardt Social Research Institute of Brandeis University.

“The National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01”, United Jewish Communities Report, September 2003.

These figures tend to be somewhat larger than the “Core Jewish Population” sometimes cited in other sources, which refers to individuals of Jewish ancestry who self-identify as Jewish. For example, the total figure of 6.59 million is a million or more higher than various other estimates.

For historical values, I am relying on the numbers for each decade provided by the Jewish Virtual Library, and based on the research provided by the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Jewish Committee, and various other Jewish organizations. For those decades in which a range is provided, I am using the midpoint of that range, and also applying linear interpolations between the specified years. As the research reports I have consulted indicate and the stated ranges imply, the size of the American Jewish population is usually uncertain to within five or ten percent.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/usjewpop1.html

Estimated Historical Jewish Population of the United States

Year

Jewish Estimate (1000s)

US Total (1000s)

Midpoint Jewish Percentages

1900

938-1,058

76,094

1.3%

1910

1,508-2,350

92,407

2.1%

1920

3,300-3,605

106,461

3.2%

1927

4,228

119,035

3.6%

1937

4,641-4,831

128,825

3.7%

1940

4,770-4,975

132,122

3.7%

1950

4,500-5,000

152,271

3.1%

1960

5,367-5,532

180,671

3.0%

1970

5,370-6,000

205,052

2.8%

1980

5,500-5,921

227,225

2.5%

1992

5,828

255,030

2.3%

2009

6,544

306,772

2.1%

2011

6,588

311,592

2.1%

Given the small and uncertain size of America’s Jewish population during most of the last half-century, more precise demographic details are unlikely to exist, including estimates of the 18-21 college-age cohort. However, according to these midpoint national range estimates, the Jewish population between 1970 and 2011 ranged between about 3.05% and 3.35% of the total non-Hispanic white population. Therefore, since the median age of the Jewish population has been reasonably close to that of non-Hispanic whites in general, for the purposes of Appendix B I have approximated the Jewish college-age cohorts during these decades as a fixed 3.20% of their non-Hispanic white counterparts nationally. Prior to 1970, such relationships seem less certain, so I assumed the college-age fractions of Jews and whites in general were proportional to the sizes of their total populations.

Similarly, since Jews are today roughly 8% of the total non-Hispanic white population in California, I have assumed that they represented that fixed share of that same total population over the last few decades, though it appears that the Jewish fraction of whites in California has actually risen substantially during this period.

A crucial demographic factor among American Jews has been rapid growth of the ultra-Orthodox segment, driven by their very high fertility, and the contrasting trends within the general Jewish population. For example, demographic estimates by Prof. Joshua Comenetz of the University of Florida indicate that the population of ultra-orthodox Jews is doubling every twenty years, and would have easily exceeded 10% of the American total by 2010.

This is driven by both early marriages and an extremely high total fertility rate, running at 6.6 children for Haredi ultra-Orthodox families to 7.9 children for Hassidic ultra-Orthodox. Meanwhile, the overall Jewish fertility rate is well below replacement, being around 1.86. Given the relative size of the ultra-Orthodox community, this implies that the non-ultra-Orthodox fertility rate (including modern Orthodox) is not much above one child. In fact, the New York City population figures for 2011 indicate that the average Orthodox Jewish family (including both modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox) has almost five times as many children as the average non-Orthodox Jewish family.

The demographic and socio-economic contrast between ordinary and ultra-Orthodox Jews and the associated projections are discussed in the following sources:

Jack Wertheimer, “Jews and the Jewish Birthrate,” Commentary, October 2005

Joseph Berger, “Aided by Orthodox, City’s Jewish Population Is Growing Again,” The New York Times, June 11, 2012

Josh Nathan-Kazis, “N.Y. Jewish Population Grows to 1.5M: Study,” Jewish Daily Forward, June 12, 2012

“Majority of Jews will be Ultra-Orthodox by 2050,” University of Manchester, July 23, 2007

Appendix B: Estimated Age and State Distribution of American Racial and Ethnic Groups

When considering the per capita performance or representation of various racial or ethnic groups, we must be careful to calculate these values with respect to the appropriate underlying population. In particular, different groups frequently have substantially dissimilar age-distributions, so the relative sizes of their college-age cohorts may be quite different from the sizes of their overall populations, impacting both college enrollments and late high school achievements. Such differences are indicated by non-Hispanic whites having a median age of 42, while the figure for Hispanics is 27.

For that reason, I have used the totals of the 18-21 age-cohorts from the Community Population Survey (CPS) of the U.S. Census to provide these racial percentages for the last forty years, both nationwide and for the state of California. Since the CPS results are based on sampling, the yearly figures may display considerable random statistical fluctuations, especially for small groups such as Asians, but over longer periods they are probably accurate. In addition, prior to 1987, the figures for Asians were not separately provided, but were included in the “Other” category, and based on the 1986 and 1987 figures, I have assumed that 80% of the pre-1987 “Other” totals were actually Asians. “Whites” represent non-Hispanic whites. The national Jewish figures are estimated as described in Appendix A, while the California figures assume a constant ratio to non-Hispanic whites, hence are probably an overestimate for prior decades.

For the late high school cohort of ages 16-17, the racial distributions are very close to those of the 18-21 cohort for all racial groups, but have much higher yearly statistical fluctuations because the total samples are half as large; therefore, I have elected to use the distributions derived from the 18-21 cohort for high school populations as well.

Historical National and California College-Age Population Percentages

National Percentages, Age 18-21

California Percentages, Age 18-21

Year

W

H

B

A

J

NJW

W

H

B

A

J

NJW

1972

82.0

4.5

12.4

0.9

2.6

79.3

74.2

14.2

9.1

2.1

5.9

68.3

1973

81.1

5.1

12.4

1.1

2.6

78.5

71.2

14.3

9.8

3.8

5.7

65.5

1974

80.7

5.5

12.4

1.1

2.6

78.1

68.8

16.6

9.8

3.8

5.5

63.3

1975

80.3

5.7

12.4

1.2

2.6

77.8

67.6

18.9

8.4

4.1

5.4

62.2

1976

80.3

5.4

12.7

1.3

2.6

77.7

69.4

16.5

8.9

4.2

5.6

63.9

1977

79.7

5.8

12.8

1.4

2.6

77.2

68.2

18.7

8.8

3.4

5.5

62.8

1978

79.4

5.9

12.8

1.5

2.5

76.9

65.9

18.2

10.3

4.4

5.3

60.6

1979

79.1

6.2

12.8

1.5

2.5

76.5

65.3

19.1

9.6

4.8

5.2

60.1

1980

78.3

6.9

12.9

1.6

2.5

75.8

63.4

21.2

9.1

5.0

5.1

58.4

1981

76.6

7.3

13.4

2.2

2.5

74.2

60.8

22.3

8.0

7.1

4.9

56.0

1982

76.8

7.1

13.6

2.0

2.5

74.3

62.8

20.5

9.1

6.1

5.0

57.8

1983

76.5

7.0

13.8

2.2

2.4

74.0

59.1

22.7

11.2

5.6

4.7

54.3

1984

75.7

7.2

14.2

2.3

2.4

73.2

59.1

21.6

10.0

7.4

4.7

54.4

1985

74.3

8.5

14.2

2.4

2.4

71.9

56.3

25.2

8.2

8.3

4.5

51.8

1986

73.3

9.5

14.3

2.3

2.3

71.0

54.2

28.7

8.9

6.6

4.3

49.9

1987

72.3

10.0

14.4

2.7

2.3

70.0

51.5

30.0

7.5

8.8

4.1

47.4

1988

72.6

9.7

14.2

2.9

2.3

70.2

51.8

30.4

7.2

9.9

4.1

47.6

1989

72.8

9.7

13.9

2.8

2.3

70.5

50.3

31.6

5.7

11.4

4.0

46.3

1990

70.8

10.9

14.3

3.0

2.3

68.5

49.1

33.4

5.1

10.1

3.9

45.2

1991

70.5

10.8

14.7

3.2

2.3

68.3

47.7

33.9

6.5

10.9

3.8

43.9

1992

69.6

11.4

14.9

3.1

2.2

67.4

41.5

38.0

9.3

9.6

3.3

38.2

1993

68.4

12.2

15.0

3.0

2.2

66.2

39.4

41.9

6.5

10.4

3.2

36.3

1994

66.5

13.5

15.1

3.0

2.1

64.4

39.0

40.6

6.2

10.5

3.1

35.8

1995

66.0

14.0

15.3

2.5

2.1

63.9

35.3

45.1

5.1

8.9

2.8

32.4

1996

65.2

14.1

15.4

4.2

2.1

63.2

37.5

40.3

7.6

13.4

3.0

34.5

1997

65.1

14.1

15.7

3.9

2.1

63.0

35.5

41.3

7.3

14.7

2.8

32.7

1998

65.6

14.8

15.0

3.7

2.1

63.5

45.4

36.7

5.4

11.1

3.6

41.8

1999

65.3

14.7

15.2

3.9

2.1

63.2

42.5

38.4

6.6

11.4

3.4

39.1

2000

64.8

14.4

15.2

4.4

2.1

62.8

42.9

36.5

6.3

13.5

3.4

39.5

2001

61.8

17.8

14.7

4.5

2.0

59.8

36.5

43.9

6.6

12.4

2.9

33.6

2002

61.6

17.6

14.6

4.8

2.0

59.7

36.2

42.7

5.6

14.3

2.9

33.3

2003

61.2

17.2

14.0

4.7

2.0

59.2

39.1

38.0

5.7

13.1

3.1

35.9

2004

62.3

17.1

13.3

4.4

2.0

60.3

38.9

38.7

6.0

13.6

3.1

35.8

2005

60.5

17.3

14.8

4.5

1.9

58.6

36.9

41.7

6.6

11.0

3.0

34.0

2006

60.6

17.0

15.4

4.4

1.9

58.7

37.2

40.5

6.7

13.3

3.0

34.2

2007

59.3

17.9

15.3

4.7

1.9

57.4

34.8

40.8

7.8

13.4

2.8

32.0

2008

59.4

17.9

15.0

4.6

1.9

57.5

36.5

41.6

7.8

11.0

2.9

33.6

2009

60.2

17.3

15.1

4.6

1.9

58.2

38.2

41.6

7.3

11.3

3.1

35.1

2010

58.5

18.9

15.1

4.6

1.9

56.6

33.3

46.1

6.8

10.8

2.7

30.7

2011

56.9

19.6

15.4

5.1

1.8

55.1

30.1

48.8

6.1

11.1

2.4

27.7

Estimated 2010/2011 State Percentages of non-Jewish whites, Asians, and Jews

State

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

State

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

Alabama

66.8

1.1

0.2

Montana

87.7

0.6

0.1

Alaska

63.2

5.4

0.9

Nebraska

81.8

1.8

0.3

Arizona

56.1

2.8

1.7

Nevada

51.3

7.2

2.8

Arkansas

74.4

1.2

0.1

New Hampshire

91.5

2.2

0.8

California

36.8

13.0

3.3

New Jersey

53.6

8.3

5.7

Colorado

68.2

2.8

1.8

New Mexico

39.9

1.4

0.6

Connecticut

68.0

3.8

3.2

New York

49.9

7.3

8.4

Delaware

63.6

3.2

1.7

North Carolina

65.0

2.2

0.3

District of Columbia

30.1

3.5

4.7

North Dakota

88.8

1.0

0.1

Florida

54.5

2.4

3.4

Ohio

79.8

1.7

1.3

Georgia

54.6

3.2

1.3

Oklahoma

68.6

1.7

0.1

Hawaii

22.2

38.6

0.5

Oregon

77.4

3.7

1.1

Idaho

83.9

1.2

0.1

Pennsylvania

77.2

2.7

2.3

Illinois

61.4

4.6

2.3

Rhode Island

74.6

2.9

1.8

Indiana

81.2

1.6

0.3

South Carolina

63.8

1.3

0.3

Iowa

88.5

1.7

0.2

South Dakota

84.7

0.9

0.0

Kansas

77.6

2.4

0.6

Tennessee

75.3

1.4

0.3

Kentucky

86.0

1.1

0.3

Texas

44.7

3.8

0.6

Louisiana

60.1

1.5

0.2

Utah

80.2

2.0

0.2

Maine

93.4

1.0

1.0

Vermont

93.4

1.3

0.9

Maryland

50.6

5.5

4.1

Virginia

63.6

5.5

1.2

Massachusetts

71.9

5.3

4.2

Washington

71.8

7.2

0.7

Michigan

75.8

2.4

0.8

West Virginia

93.1

0.7

0.1

Minnesota

82.2

4.0

0.9

Wisconsin

82.8

2.3

0.5

Mississippi

57.9

0.9

0.1

Wyoming

85.7

0.8

0.2

Missouri

80.0

1.6

1.0

Puerto Rico

1.0

0.2

0.1

Northeast

63.5

5.5

5.2

South

58.8

2.8

1.2

Midwest

76.8

2.6

1.1

West

50.6

9.3

2.2

National Total

61.6

4.8

2.1

Source: The Asian and Non-Jewish white figures are derived from the 2010 Census, while the Jewish estimates appear in Sheskin [2011] and should be almost unchanged from the 2010 figures.

Appendix C: Racial and Ethnic Enrollments at Elite Universities

The following tables summarize the 1980-2011 officially reported racial enrollment percentages for full-time undergraduates at the Ivy League and several comparably elite universities, and were derived from the total enrollment figures obtained from the website of National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES). The listed categories are White (W), Black (B), Hispanic (H), Asian (A), Unknown Race (U), and International (I). Prior to 2009, the “Unknown Race” category also included mixed race individuals.

Harvard

Yale

Princeton

Year

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

1980

81.3

5.2

3.5

4.1

0.0

5.7

80.2

5.9

3.7

5.6

0.0

4.3

79.8

7.5

4.6

3.2

0.0

4.5

1984

77.4

4.3

3.8

6.9

0.0

7.5

80.8

6.5

2.9

6.8

0.0

2.8

76.4

6.6

3.9

4.8

0.0

8.0

1986

74.2

5.9

4.2

9.0

0.0

6.3

79.7

6.5

3.4

7.8

0.0

2.5

78.2

6.2

4.1

7.1

0.0

4.2

1988

70.9

6.9

4.6

10.8

0.0

6.3

76.2

6.9

4.3

9.7

0.0

2.9

75.8

6.0

3.9

7.6

0.0

6.4

1990

69.9

7.1

5.8

10.9

1.4

5.8

67.8

8.4

5.7

14.1

12.3

3.6

73.2

6.7

4.9

9.6

0.0

5.2

1991

64.2

7.4

5.9

16.1

3.1

5.9

67.0

7.7

5.2

15.6

10.1

4.3

72.0

6.6

5.4

10.1

0.0

5.6

1992

58.0

7.5

8.5

19.1

4.8

6.3

65.7

7.8

6.0

16.1

8.3

4.0

72.2

6.4

5.9

9.4

0.0

5.9

1993

56.5

8.4

7.5

20.6

10.9

6.4

63.2

9.2

6.1

16.8

8.2

4.3

71.7

6.2

6.0

9.9

0.0

5.8

1994

46.1

7.4

7.1

18.3

14.0

6.5

56.6

8.4

6.4

15.6

7.9

4.4

71.1

6.3

6.0

10.5

0.0

5.6

1995

45.1

7.3

7.3

18.4

15.1

6.2

55.4

8.7

6.5

16.1

7.7

5.0

69.7

6.8

6.2

11.3

0.0

5.4

1996

44.6

8.0

7.2

17.5

15.8

6.1

54.9

8.2

6.0

16.8

7.5

5.9

68.2

7.0

6.4

12.1

0.0

5.6

1997

43.4

8.2

7.4

17.4

16.4

6.4

55.5

7.5

5.9

16.5

7.8

6.1

67.9

7.1

6.4

12.8

0.0

5.1

1998

44.1

8.1

7.7

17.0

15.8

6.7

53.8

7.2

5.8

16.1

10.0

6.4

67.8

7.2

6.3

12.9

0.0

5.2

1999

43.5

7.9

7.5

17.2

16.7

6.5

52.7

7.0

6.0

14.6

12.1

6.7

68.4

7.2

6.3

12.3

0.0

5.1

2000

44.3

7.9

7.6

17.1

15.9

6.5

53.9

7.6

5.8

14.5

12.3

5.1

68.0

7.2

6.0

12.3

0.0

6.0

2001

45.6

7.5

7.6

16.4

15.1

6.9

52.4

7.6

6.0

13.8

12.1

7.4

66.2

7.9

6.4

12.1

0.0

6.9

2002

47.4

7.2

7.7

16.3

13.5

7.2

52.0

8.0

6.0

13.5

11.8

7.9

65.2

8.2

6.2

12.2

0.0

7.5

2003

48.6

7.3

7.4

16.2

12.2

7.5

51.6

7.6

6.0

13.4

11.9

8.8

63.6

8.2

6.3

12.9

0.0

8.3

2004

48.9

7.6

7.7

17.1

9.3

8.5

51.3

7.8

7.1

13.6

10.8

8.6

62.9

8.2

6.8

13.0

0.0

8.4

2005

49.0

8.3

7.5

17.6

8.5

8.4

51.0

8.1

7.2

13.6

11.1

8.2

62.0

8.5

6.8

13.1

0.0

8.9

2006

47.6

7.9

6.5

14.3

14.3

8.9

50.1

8.2

7.6

13.5

11.4

8.3

57.5

8.7

7.2

13.6

2.9

9.2

2007

45.9

7.8

7.0

15.4

14.0

9.1

48.7

8.8

8.1

13.7

11.2

8.4

52.3

8.6

7.5

14.1

7.2

9.6

2008

44.6

7.8

6.7

16.7

14.0

9.5

45.1

8.7

8.6

13.8

14.4

8.6

51.2

8.5

7.6

15.0

7.1

10.0

2009

42.4

7.9

7.5

17.0

13.9

10.3

41.7

8.5

8.5

14.3

16.8

8.9

48.3

7.8

7.5

15.7

4.6

10.4

2010

44.1

6.9

8.1

15.6

11.9

9.8

46.6

6.0

9.1

14.2

8.6

9.8

48.8

7.5

7.7

16.9

3.3

10.5

2011

45.0

6.6

9.2

17.2

6.2

10.7

47.2

6.0

10.0

15.2

5.2

10.0

49.0

7.0

8.0

17.6

2.7

11.0

Columbia

Brown

Cornell

Year

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

1980

73.4

5.8

6.3

9.7

4.9

4.9

86.1

6.2

1.4

3.8

0.0

2.3

81.4

5.0

3.3

6.4

0.0

3.7

1984

74.2

6.2

5.1

12.5

1.9

1.9

82.9

6.9

2.6

5.9

0.0

1.6

75.7

5.4

4.6

10.1

0.0

3.9

1986

73.3

6.1

5.0

12.8

2.6

2.6

81.1

7.4

2.4

7.2

0.0

1.8

75.0

4.6

4.1

11.5

0.0

4.0

1988

70.5

6.7

5.3

14.1

3.2

3.2

78.9

7.3

2.9

8.6

0.0

2.2

73.8

4.3

4.2

13.6

0.0

3.8

1990

63.4

7.4

7.5

16.2

5.2

5.2

71.5

6.9

4.2

10.9

0.0

6.4

70.9

4.6

4.8

15.0

0.0

4.4

1991

60.7

7.8

7.7

18.4

5.2

5.2

69.0

6.7

4.8

12.7

0.0

6.7

67.5

4.6

5.6

16.6

0.0

5.4

1992

58.6

7.6

7.6

19.9

6.1

6.1

66.6

6.8

5.4

14.0

0.0

7.0

65.1

4.6

6.1

17.7

0.0

6.2

1993

55.8

8.5

6.4

22.7

6.3

6.3

66.6

6.4

5.0

14.8

0.0

7.0

63.4

4.0

5.8

19.2

0.0

7.3

1994

46.3

7.4

5.4

19.5

6.2

6.2

66.4

6.3

5.0

15.2

0.0

6.8

61.9

4.0

6.1

20.1

0.0

7.6

1995

45.8

7.3

5.0

18.4

6.7

6.7

66.2

6.6

4.9

15.3

0.0

6.7

60.7

3.7

6.2

20.9

0.0

8.0

1996

46.3

7.3

4.6

16.3

6.9

6.9

66.2

6.3

5.1

15.6

0.0

6.5

55.3

4.1

6.3

20.4

5.4

8.0

1997

46.2

7.7

4.6

14.7

7.1

7.1

65.8

6.4

5.6

15.3

0.0

6.7

56.0

4.3

6.1

20.6

3.0

9.4

1998

45.6

7.5

4.2

13.9

7.3

7.3

65.2

6.4

5.8

15.2

0.0

7.1

55.9

4.3

6.1

19.7

3.7

9.8

1999

46.1

7.9

3.9

12.6

7.0

7.0

61.8

6.2

6.0

14.7

4.1

6.9

55.6

4.2

6.0

19.9

3.6

10.1

2000

45.6

7.3

6.6

13.5

14.5

14.5

55.7

6.3

6.3

14.9

9.5

6.9

55.8

4.2

5.9

19.8

3.6

10.1

2001

46.3

7.2

6.8

13.6

13.5

13.5

51.9

6.1

6.6

14.5

14.1

6.3

55.9

4.5

5.6

19.7

3.9

10.1

2002

47.6

7.1

6.8

14.2

11.4

11.4

49.9

6.1

6.4

13.7

17.4

5.9

55.8

4.7

5.3

19.8

4.3

9.7

2003

47.5

6.9

7.3

16.3

8.3

8.3

49.6

6.5

6.7

13.6

16.8

6.3

59.4

4.6

5.2

16.4

6.6

7.2

2004

47.1

7.2

7.3

16.4

7.4

7.4

51.2

6.5

7.0

13.5

14.9

6.3

57.9

4.6

5.2

16.3

8.5

7.1

2005

46.0

7.4

7.9

16.7

7.9

7.9

51.4

6.8

7.3

13.7

14.1

6.2

56.0

4.8

5.4

15.9

10.0

7.4

2006

43.2

7.7

9.3

17.2

8.4

8.4

50.1

6.9

8.1

13.9

14.1

6.4

53.2

5.0

5.5

16.1

11.8

7.9

2007

42.0

8.4

9.5

17.2

9.5

9.5

48.4

6.8

8.4

15.3

13.4

7.2

49.7

5.3

5.5

16.2

14.8

8.0

2008

39.6

9.0

10.6

16.9

10.4

10.4

45.2

6.8

8.7

15.9

14.5

8.3

48.8

5.1

5.6

16.5

14.9

8.7

2009

37.3

9.9

11.9

16.3

11.2

11.2

46.9

5.5

9.2

15.4

11.2

8.9

45.6

5.4

5.9

16.6

17.4

8.7

2010

40.2

8.5

13.6

15.7

12.2

12.2

45.8

5.9

9.2

14.6

11.0

9.7

46.1

5.3

8.4

16.1

12.0

9.0

2011

40.2

8.0

13.0

15.6

11.0

11.0

44.7

6.0

9.0

13.5

11.2

11.0

45.5

6.0

9.0

16.4

9.9

9.0

Dartmouth

Penn

Caltech

Year

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

1980

86.3

7.7

0.4

1.6

0.0

2.7

85.3

5.4

1.9

3.8

0.0

3.5

74.4

1.9

3.6

12.0

0.0

8.0

1984

86.5

6.1

1.0

1.9

0.0

3.2

82.3

5.2

2.4

5.7

0.0

4.3

67.8

1.5

3.4

18.7

0.0

8.1

1986

84.2

5.6

1.4

3.6

0.0

3.4

79.9

5.4

2.9

7.3

0.0

4.4

64.6

1.6

2.9

21.4

0.0

9.4

1988

77.5

6.7

2.3

5.6

0.0

5.8

74.9

6.1

3.1

9.3

0.0

6.5

63.8

0.9

2.8

22.4

0.0

9.8

1990

74.9

6.0

3.4

6.3

5.7

6.8

70.7

6.2

3.3

12.6

0.0

7.1

62.1

1.7

3.3

22.1

0.5

10.2

1991

73.2

6.6

3.9

6.4

7.3

7.1

68.3

5.8

3.5

14.5

0.0

7.7

59.6

2.2

4.6

22.7

0.3

10.3

1992

71.7

6.5

4.6

7.1

9.1

7.2

65.6

5.6

3.8

15.9

0.0

8.9

56.3

1.9

5.9

25.2

0.1

10.3

1993

70.7

6.0

4.5

8.3

9.7

7.5

64.1

5.4

3.8

17.1

0.0

9.4

56.3

1.8

5.7

26.9

0.6

8.7

1994

63.6

5.6

4.7

8.5

7.2

7.8

64.1

5.3

3.8

17.8

0.0

8.8

54.0

1.6

5.7

29.8

0.2

8.3

1995

59.3

5.8

4.1

8.7

11.4

8.5

64.1

5.5

4.0

18.1

0.0

8.0

55.6

0.5

5.0

29.1

0.1

9.5

1996

58.4

5.4

4.2

8.7

12.9

8.4

64.9

5.3

4.2

17.9

0.0

7.7

57.5

0.6

4.9

27.6

0.1

9.3

1997

58.0

5.5

4.0

9.1

13.1

8.3

64.1

5.6

4.3

17.9

0.0

7.9

58.0

0.6

4.2

27.4

0.3

9.3

1998

59.1

5.6

4.4

10.2

14.7

4.1

63.6

5.4

4.0

18.5

0.0

8.4

59.5

1.4

4.9

24.1

0.3

9.4

1999

60.4

5.3

5.0

9.8

13.3

4.0

62.2

5.3

4.3

19.2

0.0

8.8

60.0

1.1

5.3

24.3

0.3

8.8

2000

59.8

5.5

5.7

10.2

12.1

4.4

53.1

5.6

4.8

19.0

8.8

8.6

58.1

1.4

5.9

24.9

0.3

9.1

2001

60.9

5.6

5.8

10.5

9.9

4.6

51.2

5.4

5.2

19.5

10.1

8.4

55.9

1.9

6.9

24.5

0.6

9.8

2002

59.4

6.2

6.5

11.6

8.5

4.8

50.6

5.7

5.7

18.4

10.5

8.8

56.0

1.3

6.5

27.2

0.9

7.7

2003

58.2

6.3

6.4

12.2

8.6

5.3

50.1

5.9

5.4

16.8

11.0

10.5

51.4

1.3

7.3

31.1

0.8

7.5

2004

57.2

6.8

6.4

13.4

7.3

5.4

48.7

6.1

5.3

17.6

12.0

10.0

51.8

1.1

6.9

31.1

1.5

6.9

2005

57.6

6.9

6.1

13.5

7.2

5.4

48.2

6.5

5.3

17.2

12.3

10.1

49.5

0.8

6.7

33.0

2.6

7.0

2006

58.0

7.2

5.9

13.4

6.0

5.6

46.4

6.9

5.6

17.6

12.5

10.6

45.7

0.6

5.6

37.4

2.7

8.0

2007

57.2

7.3

6.3

13.6

5.3

6.7

44.7

7.1

5.7

16.8

14.0

11.4

43.5

0.8

5.4

38.1

2.7

9.4

2008

55.8

8.0

6.8

13.6

5.1

7.0

42.2

7.6

5.9

17.3

15.4

11.1

40.4

0.8

5.5

39.8

2.2

11.3

2009

53.2

8.4

7.0

14.5

5.5

7.6

39.3

7.5

6.2

17.8

17.1

11.6

38.7

1.2

6.8

39.9

1.8

11.7

2010

50.1

7.9

8.3

14.5

6.1

7.8

45.4

7.1

6.6

17.9

9.3

12.1

37.3

1.1

6.4

39.4

1.9

11.7

2011

47.4

7.0

9.0

14.0

8.4

7.0

45.5

7.0

7.0

18.3

6.8

11.0

35.1

1.0

8.0

38.8

0.5

12.0

MIT

Stanford

Berkeley

Year

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

1980

76.3

5.5

2.4

5.3

0.0

10.1

78.3

6.1

6.5

6.3

0.0

2.2

68.4

3.2

3.8

21.7

0.0

2.4

1984

64.3

5.4

3.8

13.5

0.0

12.7

70.9

7.6

8.7

7.4

0.0

4.8

62.1

4.3

5.9

24.6

0.0

2.6

1986

67.1

4.6

4.8

15.8

0.0

7.3

68.0

7.8

9.5

9.8

0.0

4.3

53.5

5.1

7.3

25.5

0.0

2.6

1988

60.5

5.8

6.6

17.9

0.0

8.6

64.3

8.4

9.5

13.7

0.0

3.2

49.5

7.0

11.0

27.8

0.0

3.6

1990

55.0

6.4

8.3

21.2

0.0

8.7

59.3

8.3

9.8

18.4

0.2

3.2

42.8

7.3

14.9

30.4

6.1

3.4

1991

53.1

6.2

8.2

23.0

0.0

8.7

57.0

8.0

10.0

20.2

0.2

3.5

41.0

7.3

15.2

31.7

6.0

3.5

1992

51.3

5.6

8.3

25.5

0.0

8.5

54.2

7.8

10.6

22.2

0.1

4.0

37.5

6.2

15.4

35.9

7.6

3.8

1993

49.3

5.6

8.7

27.3

0.0

8.3

51.8

7.8

11.1

23.6

0.2

4.3

35.6

5.6

14.7

39.1

7.4

3.8

1994

48.3

5.8

8.9

28.0

0.0

8.1

50.2

7.9

11.0

24.6

0.2

4.8

30.5

5.2

13.3

38.9

7.3

3.8

1995

47.6

5.6

8.7

29.1

0.7

7.6

50.0

8.0

11.7

23.8

0.2

4.8

29.7

5.6

13.6

39.4

6.7

3.7

1996

43.6

6.5

9.6

28.5

3.3

7.8

50.5

7.9

11.3

23.9

0.1

4.8

29.8

5.5

13.3

39.9

6.7

3.7

1997

40.8

6.2

9.9

28.3

5.9

7.7

50.7

8.1

10.9

24.1

0.1

4.8

30.0

5.8

12.8

39.7

6.9

3.7

1998

37.7

6.1

10.1

28.4

8.3

7.9

51.3

8.2

11.0

23.5

0.1

4.8

29.7

5.1

11.3

39.8

9.4

3.7

1999

34.1

6.3

10.6

27.7

11.0

8.3

50.7

8.5

10.7

24.0

0.1

4.8

29.8

4.6

10.4

39.9

10.6

3.8

2000

34.0

6.2

11.2

27.5

10.8

8.5

49.7

8.8

10.4

24.5

0.1

5.0

30.0

4.2

9.5

40.9

11.0

3.8

2001

34.5

6.1

11.3

27.8

10.1

8.2

48.0

8.6

10.6

24.7

1.2

5.2

30.3

3.6

9.2

41.3

11.6

3.4

2002

34.5

6.1

11.8

27.4

10.0

8.3

45.6

9.6

11.1

24.5

2.1

5.3

29.8

3.5

9.8

42.3

11.0

3.0

2003

34.7

6.1

11.8

28.2

9.5

8.1

41.4

10.4

12.0

25.2

3.3

5.8

29.7

3.8

10.5

41.7

10.6

3.1

2004

35.4

5.9

11.5

27.8

10.4

7.5

40.9

10.7

11.7

24.3

4.4

5.9

30.2

3.6

10.5

41.5

10.4

3.3

2005

35.9

5.8

11.3

26.6

11.3

7.6

40.6

10.5

11.3

24.2

5.1

6.2

30.9

3.4

10.5

41.9

9.5

3.3

2006

36.7

6.3

11.5

26.5

9.9

7.9

40.3

10.3

11.3

24.2

5.3

6.1

31.4

3.4

10.9

41.8

8.7

3.3

2007

37.2

7.1

11.8

25.9

8.4

8.4

41.1

9.5

11.5

24.2

5.0

6.3

31.4

3.2

11.4

42.2

8.1

3.2

2008

36.5

8.0

12.4

25.4

7.2

9.4

38.2

9.9

12.2

23.0

7.0

6.9

30.7

3.4

11.5

42.0

7.6

4.3

2009

36.3

8.1

13.2

25.0

5.8

9.3

35.9

10.0

13.4

23.1

7.7

7.2

30.2

3.5

11.9

40.8

7.5

5.6

2010

36.9

7.7

13.4

23.9

5.2

9.6

38.9

7.0

15.7

17.9

1.3

7.2

30.2

3.0

11.9

38.7

7.1

7.3

2011

36.0

7.0

15.0

24.0

4.0

10.0

36.4

7.0

16.0

18.2

0.9

8.0

30.3

3.0

12.0

37.1

5.2

9.0

The figures do not sum to 100 because the small racial categories of American Indian and post-2009 mixed race are excluded, while prior to 1994 the “Unknown Race” category was parallel to the actual racial reporting.

Appendix D: Recent and Historical Jewish Enrollments at Elite Universities

Recent Jewish Enrollments

Estimates of current Jewish enrollments at most major American universities may be found at the website of the Jewish Hillel student organization.

For most universities with large Jewish enrollments, the most recent seven years of these Jewish enrollment estimates by Hillel were published as lists in issues of Reform Judaism Magazine, and are available on their website at:

Date/PDF

URL

Fall 2006

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=1192

Fall 2007

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=1278

Fall 2008

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=1380

Fall 2009

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=1518

Fall 2010

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=1647

Fall 2011

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=2888

Fall 2012

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=3074

A summary of these recent Jewish enrollment figures for available Ivy League and other elite universities are as follows:

Year

Harvard

Yale

Princeton

Brown

Columbia

Cornell

Penn

Dartmouth

All Ivies

2006

25

23

20

22

22

25

21

2007

30

22.6

14*

25

25

21.7

30.8

11*

24

2008

25.5

30

25

25

25

28

24

2009

25

23

25

25

22

25

22

2010

25

27

25

25

23

25

23

2011

25

27

22

25

23

25

22

2012

25

27

13

22

30

23

25

11

23

Year

MIT

Caltech

Stanford

Berkeley

UCLA

Irvine

San Diego

Davis

Chicago

2006

11

10

2007

9*

6*

10*

10*

12.1

5*

7*

10

14*

2008

10.3

2009

12

2010

12

2011

9

16

2012

9.5

5.5

9.5

10

8.7

4

8

10

16

The average enrollment across the Ivies is weighted by the 2011 total enrollments.

The Hillel estimates for universities with relatively small Jewish enrollments are not provided in the past Reform Judaism listings. However, a commenter to the College Confidential discussion forum claims to have provided the Hillel listings in 2007, and since his figures exactly match those of the listings, they are probably accurate, and are the source for the 2007 figures marked with an asterisk: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/3739728-post7.html .

Historical Jewish Enrollments:

Historical levels of Jewish enrollment may be found in Synnott (1979/2010), Oren [1985], and Karabel [2005], as well as a few other sources.

Jewish Portion of Freshmen at Princeton, 1925-1940: Synnott (1979/2010) p. 195, 224

Class

Jewish Percentage

1925

3.9%

1926

3.9%

1927

3.3%

1928

2.1%

1929

1.7%

1930

2.8%

1931

3.0%

1932

2.8%

1933

2.8%

1934

1.7%

1935

0.8%

1936

1.6%

1937

1.8%

1938

3.1%

1939

1.0%

1940

2.7%

1970

13.5%

Jewish Portion of Freshmen at Harvard, 1900-1922: Synnott (1979/2010) p. 96; the figures are significantly higher if we also include transfer students.

Year

Jewish Percentage

1900

7%

1903

7.1%

1906

7.5%

1909

9.8%

1912

12.6%

1913

14.6%

1914

15.1%

1915

14.0%

1916

14.8%

1917

13.1%

1918

19.8%

1919

17.9%

1920

17.8%

1921

19.7%

1922

21.5%

Also, according to Synnott (1979/2010) p. xxvi, In the mid-1990s, undergraduate Jewish enrollments was about 10-12% at Princeton and ranged between 25% and 36% at Harvard, Yale, and all of the other Ivy League schools.

Jewish Enrollment at Yale College, 1902-1969: Oren [1985] pp. 320-321

Period

Average Jewish Enrollment

1902-04

2.1%

1905-10

3.4%

1911-19

6.0%

1920-26

9.7%

1927-33

11.6%

1934-45

9.8%

1945W-51

9.2%

1952-61

11.3%

1962-65

11.8%

1966-69

16.1%

And according to Oren [1985] p. 196, Ivy Enrollment in 1961 was as follows: Columbia=45%, Cornell=26%, Penn=25%, Harvard=21%, Brown=18%, Princeton=15%, Dartmouth=15%, Yale=12%.

Historical Jewish Enrollments figures for Ivy League Universities, 1900-2000 drawn from Karabel [2005], in some cases drawn from Synnott (1979/2010) or Oren [1985]

Year

Source

Enrollment

1900

p. 96

Harvard=7%

1908

p. 23

Harvard=9%F

1909

p. 51

Harvard=9.8%

1914

p. 51

Harvard=15.1%

1915

p. 96

Harvard=15%

1917

p. 75

Yale=9F%

1918

p. 75

Harvard=20%F,Princeton=4%F,Cornell=9.1%,Penn=15.7%

1919

pp. 86-7

Brown=20%,Penn=25%,Columbia=40%

1921

pp. 86-7

Columbia=22%

1922

p. 89

Harvard=21.5%

1923

p. 105

Yale=13.3%, Princeton=3.6%

1924

p. 105

Harvard=25%,Princeton=2%

1925

p. 105,207

Harvard=27.6%F+3.6?%, Yale=13.3%

1926

p. 126

Harvard=15%F

1927

p. 207

Yale=13.3%

1933

p. 172

Harvard=15%F

1937

p. 225

Yale=11.2%F

1936-41

p. 230

Princeton=2.3%F

1930s

p. 245

Harvard=10-15%,Yale=10.7%, Princeton=2%

1942

p. 243

Princeton=2.6%F

1943

p. 243

Princeton=4.8%F

1944

p. 243

Princeton=8.1%F

1946

p. 243

Princeton=4.7%F

1947

p. 597n160

Yale=9.4%F

1948

p. 243

Princeton=6.8%F

1949

p. 597n160

Yale=12.3%F,Princeton=5.6%F

1946-50

p. 211

Yale=10.2%

1950

p. 212

Yale=7.2%F

1952

p. 196

Harvard=25%, Cornell=23%F

1953

p. 363, 607n120

Yale=11%, Princeton=12-13%

1958

p. 246

Princeton=14%

1959

p. 323

Yale=12%,Princeton=14%

1960

p. 319

Princeton=15%

1962-65

p. 331

Yale=16%

1966

p. 364

Yale=30%F,Princeton=12%

1967

p. 365

Penn=40%,Columbia=40%

1960s-70s

p. 626n66

Harvard=25-30%

1972

p. 459

Yale=30%

1973

p. 365

Yale=33%

1976

p. 478-9

Yale=33%,Princeton=19%

1979

p. 529

Princeton=20%

1985

Princeton=16%

1986-88

p. 529

Princeton=13-14%

1990

p. 529-530

Harvard=21%,Yale=29%,Princeton=10%

1999

p. 669n2

Harvard=21%

2000

p. 536

Harvard=21%

F=Entering freshman class figures

In addition, the Harvard Crimson in 1992 claimed that “one in four” (or 25%) of the students at the college was then Jewish: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1992/11/16/harvard-is-a-home-for-jewish/

I have applied linear interpolation methods to estimate the Jewish enrollment percentages for years between these specified figures.

Bibliographical Sources:

The Chosen [2005] Jerome Karabel

Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale [1985] Dan A. Oren

The Half-Opened Door (1979/2010) Marcia Graham Synnott

Appendix E: Estimating the National Distribution of High-Ability Students from the NMS Semifinalists

Each year since 1956 the quasi-official National Merit Scholarship (NMS) Corporation has distributed millions of dollars in financial awards to American high school students based on academic aptitude and performance. In recent years, the competition has attracted roughly one-half of all high school juniors, probably including nearly all the higher-performing ones hoping to attend selective universities.

The first stage of the process involves the identification of some 16,000 NMS semifinalists based on their Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) scores, with state totals apportioned according to the numbers of high school seniors. Since the PSAT is almost identical in nature to the much better-known SAT, these rosters effectively provide the names of the 16,000 or so American high school juniors who perform best on SAT-type academic aptitude tests, placing them in the top one-half percent of their age group in academic ability.

Although some statistics exist on the racial or ethnic distribution of SAT scores, the annual rosters of PSAT semifinalists seem a far superior dataset for estimating the distribution of highest-performing students.

First, there is a wide divergence in the rates at which different groups take the SAT, which obviously would impact mean scores, along with the problem that many students in certain parts of the country tend to substitute the somewhat similar ACT. By contrast, the PSAT is universal and national.

Also, wealthier or more determined students frequently take the SAT multiple times, often following test-prep courses, and afterward report only their best scores, while the PSAT is only administered once.

Since the only use of the PSAT is as an initial filter for the few thousand National Merit Scholarships, it constitutes a relatively “low stakes” test compared with the SAT or ACT, which are usually taken by high school seniors the following year and heavily determine college admissions; thus, the PSAT results are less likely to be distorted by cramming, prepping, or even outright cheating.

Finally, estimating the distribution of high performing students from the means or other statistics of the individual subpopulations requires us to assume that the results are normally distributed, which may not be correct, while the lists of NMS semifinalists represent the explicit set of high-ability students we are seeking, allowing us to stratify the data in whatever way we choose.

Each June, the individual state lists of NMS semifinalists are released to thousands of media outlets for publicity purposes. Sometimes these releases are then posted on the Internet in PDF form or otherwise made permanently available, and I have managed to locate a total of forty-three such lists from the years 2008-2013, containing the names and schools of over 23,000 individual students. These lists are drawn from twenty-five different states, including all eight of the most populous, together representing almost 75 percent of America’s total population.

In analyzing this large dataset, I first grouped the NMS lists by state, and after performing the analyses discussed below on an individual list basis, then averaged all the percentages for each state, thereby producing individual state figures. The results for each state are thus based on tens or even hundreds of thousands of tested students and hundreds or thousands of resulting NMS semifinalists; therefore, in most cases the results for different years are usually reasonably similar, with aggregation across multiple years obviously tending to further reduce the random error.

Since East Asian and Hispanic names are extremely distinctive, and the same is true to a somewhat lesser extend for South Asians and Jews, these state lists were individually inspected, and estimated totals for each of these different groups determined, with somewhat ambiguous names assigned a partial weight. Because East Asians were discovered to be an enormously over-represented group, a few particularly ambiguous names such as “Lee” were generally assumed to be of that background. Although this process was necessarily somewhat subjective, I consider it unlikely that any other careful examiner would produce totals greatly different from my own, and I am providing links to all the lists, allowing other interested parties to examine those lists and verify my own estimates.

The findings of this direct-inspection approach may be extended and confirmed by using a name-frequency analysis similar to that pioneered by Nathaniel Weyl, in which the prevalence of names of uniquely distinctive ethnicity is compared with their prevalence in the general population.

For example, the surname “Nguyen” is uniquely Vietnamese and “Kim” uniquely Korean. The relative prevalence of these particular names among those groups in America can be found by considering the number of such names in the public Census data with the sizes of the two ethnic groups in question. The 2000 Census lists 310,125 Nguyens, or about 1 in 3.6 of the total Vietnamese population of 1,122,528. Meanwhile, there were 194,067 Kims, representing 1 in 5.5 of the 1,076,872 Koreans. Therefore, determining the number of Nguyens and Kims in a state’s NMS semifinalist lists allows us to roughly estimate the total number of Vietnamese and Koreans, though obviously the size of the random error would be much larger than for most of our other calculations.

Similarly, we can perform the same population estimate using distinctly Jewish last names, such as the small set of Cohen, Kaplan, Levy, and “Gold—“ (J1) which were suggested by blogger Steve Sailer and his Jewish correspondent, or else extended to include the full set of such names (J2) utilized by Weyl by adding Berman, Bernstein, Epstein, Friedman, Greenberg, Katz, Levine, Rosenberg, and Stern. Based on the 2000 Census estimates, the first group includes approximately 1 in 20 American Jews, while the larger set raises the fraction to 1 in 12. The prevalence of these names allows us to semi-independently confirm the estimated Jewish name-by-name counts obtained by direct inspection, though once again we might expect a significant random error since the numbers are extremely small for most individual states, so use of the results produced by this method should probably be restricted to the aggregate total across all the available states.

Estimated NMS Semifinalists for Available States, 2008-2013

State

2011 Total

N/J White

Asian

Korean

Viet.

Jewish

J1

J2

Alabama/2008,2010

208

83%

14%

2%

1%

2%

Arizona/2013

342

68%

26%

4%

4%

5%

California/2010,2012

1,999

37%

58%

10%

2%

4%

Colorado/2012-2013

256

78%

14%

6%

—

7%

Florida/2008-2013

867

74%

13%

1%

1%

8%

Illinois/2011-2013

693

71%

21%

3%

0.5%

8%

Indiana/2010,2012-13

327

75%

18%

2%

—

5%

Iowa/2011

191

80%

15%

—

—

4%

Kansas/2011

159

87%

9%

—

—

4%

Louisiana/2013

190

76%

19%

3%

—

5%

Maryland/2010

327

57%

32%

3%

—

11%

Michigan/2012,2013

570

68%

30%

2%

—

2%

Minnesota/2010,2011

318

81%

13%

2%

—

6%

Missouri/2011

344

87%

11%

—

—

2%

Nevada/2010,2011

85

67%

20%

3%

—

9%

New Mexico/2011

99

76%

11%

5%

—

6%

New York/2011,2012

957

45%

34%

8%

—

21%

Ohio/2012-2013

642

76%

20%

—

0.5%

4%

Oklahoma/2008

187

83%

14%

—

4%

3%

Pennsylvania/2012

700

72%

20%

2%

—

9%

Tennessee/2010

279

80%

17%

—

—

2%

Texas/2010

1,344

68%

28%

0.5%

2%

3%

Virginia/2008-2009

411

74%

19%

6%

2%

6%

Washington/2013

344

64%

31%

8%

—

5%

Wisconsin/2012

324

87%

11%

2%

—

3%

Eight Largest States

7,772

59%

33%

4%

1%

7%

8%

8%

25 State Aggregate

12,163

65%

28%

4%

1%

6%

6%

7%

National Estimate

16,317

67%

26%

4%

1%

6%

6%

6%

The individual figures for the National Estimate are derived by extrapolating the racial or ethnic totals for the twenty-five available states. All values above 1% are rounded to the nearest 1%, while those below are rounded to the nearest 0.5%.

Consider the total sum of the estimated number of Jewish names across the 25 state lists produced by direct inspection. If we compare this figure with the estimates produced by the J1 and J2 processes, the results are within 1% and 3% respectively, remarkably consistent given the significant expected random error, which therefore tends to confirm the validity of the separate methodologies employed.

In the American context, non-Hispanic “whites” are defined as those individuals who are not black, Asian, Hispanic, or American Indian. As mentioned, Hispanic names are quite distinctive, and their numbers can easily be determined by direct inspection. These vary considerably by state, and an extrapolated national total may be estimated. Neither black nor American Indians names are highly distinctive, but the combined total size of these groups is considerably smaller than the Hispanic total, and their weighted-average academic performance also considerably lower; therefore, we would expect their aggregate numbers to be much smaller than the Hispanic total, allowing us to easily assign an upper bound to the combined total of these three groups, and provide a good estimate of the net white numbers. Finally, the Jewish totals can be subtracted from this figure to yield the estimates for non-Jewish whites.

Major Sources of Likely Error

Our primary interest is estimating the overall national percentages of the high performing students in each of these various racial and ethnic groups, and we must extrapolate these results from the limited available subset of NMS semifinalist lists for twenty-five states. Fortunately, these states include the eight largest in population, and also the overwhelming majority of the national totals for the Jewish, Asian, and Hispanic populations. These percentages, based on the 2010 Census figures, are shown in the table below:

Percentage of Particular Groups Included in Our Available States

Aggregate Group

Overall

Jewish

Asian

Hispanic

Chinese

Korean

Viet.

Eight Largest States

47%

68%

61%

69%

66%

56%

63%

Total of 25 States

75%

81%

80%

87%

81%

79%

85%

Using these population ratios, we can easily extrapolate the total number of national NMS semifinalists for each of these groups, and thereby obtain national percentage estimates.

However, in performing this analysis, we should bear in mind the possible sources of substantial error, above and beyond the sort of statistical errors due to sample size.

First, we are lacking the NMS semifinalist lists for several sizable East Coast states, including New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, which together with California and Maryland regularly represent the five highest performing PSAT states, based on NMS qualification threshold. These three states also contain over one-eighth of all American Jews, as well as large numbers of American Chinese, Koreans, and Asians in general. If the relative performance of ethnic groups in these states differed substantially from the pattern in the states whose lists we possess, our national extrapolations might be somewhat distorted. Such regional variations are quite possible, since Asians tend to outperform Jews by a factor of three in California, but by less than a factor of two in New York or Florida, while Jews actually do much better in Virginia. However, since the states whose data we do have already account for roughly 80% of both the Jewish and Asian populations, such adjustments would probably not be large.

A much more significant issue is the widely different semifinalist selection criteria across the states, with huge differences in qualification thresholds between states such as California and Massachusetts, with very high cut-off scores of 220, and states such as Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, whose qualification scores of around 200 are near the bottom. The crucial point is that we are merely using these NMS semifinalist lists as a proxy to estimate the distribution of America’s highest-performing students on academic ability tests, and if only a small fraction of the semifinalists from the bottom half of the states would have qualified in California, our national estimates may be significantly distorted.

In particular, California is America’s most heavily Asian mainland state, containing one-third of our entire Asian population, and partly as a consequence has an extremely high qualification threshold. Thus, although California provides nearly 1,200 Asian semifinalists, that figure would surely be much higher if there were a uniform national qualification threshold, so our national estimates of the Asian percentage of high-ability students probably represent a significant underestimate of the true figure.

This impact of these varied thresholds may be seen when we consider the relative performance of other groups. For example, New York and California are the two states with the largest number of Jews, but New York Jews are almost twice as likely to achieve semifinalist status as their California cousins. Similarly, California and Texas contain the two largest populations of Hispanics, both overwhelmingly Mexican-American, but Texas Hispanics are almost three times as likely to be NMS semifinalists. These large discrepancies are probably less due California Jews or Hispanics being much dimmer or lazier, than that California’s required qualification scores are so much higher.

As a partial counter-weight to this, Hawaii is half or more Asian, and its unimpressive semifinalist threshold of 211 would tend to imply that the academic performance of its Asian population is far below the norms of other states; but since less than 5% of Asians live on those islands, the national impact would not be large.

Finally, there is the much broader question of the possible intrinsic bias of the NMS semifinalist qualification criteria as a true measure of academic aptitude. After 1997 the NMS Corporation began double-weighting the Verbal component of the PSAT exam in selecting NMS semifinalists, a decision which obviously much advantaged those groups which are particularly strong in Verbal and disadvantaged those with weaker Verbal performance. And like the SAT itself but unlike a regular IQ test, the PSAT has never included a Visuospatial component, with such absence obviously benefiting those groups whose Visuospatial skills are weak and hindering those with strong ability in that area. Indeed, an intriguing thought-experiment is to consider the likely distribution of NMS semifinalists if these seemingly arbitrary decisions had been reversed, and semifinalist qualification were based on a double-weighted Visuospatial score but excluding any Verbal one.

PRIMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY:

The Creative Elite in America [1966] Nathaniel Weyl

The Geography of American Achievement [1989] Nathaniel Weyl

Links to 43 State NMS Semifinalist Rosters, 2008-2013:

State

Year

Link

Alabama

2008

http://tinyurl.com/bz7lnwt

2010

http://tinyurl.com/a8spy5w

Arizona

2013

http://tinyurl.com/b7e3kou

California

2010

http://tinyurl.com/2foy2b7

2012

http://tinyurl.com/ajtpanp

Colorado

2012

http://tinyurl.com/bzxal3e

2013

http://tinyurl.com/batzrht

Florida

2008

http://tinyurl.com/acaplhe

2009

http://tinyurl.com/apak264

2010

http://tinyurl.com/azg9lbo

2011

http://tinyurl.com/a7wwcfy

2012

http://tinyurl.com/bhy8unj

2013

http://tinyurl.com/agbb38z

Illinois

2011

http://tinyurl.com/afwd6cl

2012

http://tinyurl.com/b7z6j2e

2013

http://tinyurl.com/au3c2wk

Indiana

2010

http://tinyurl.com/cmjd2ho

2012

http://tinyurl.com/bh6m6a5

2013

http://tinyurl.com/bgjb32f

Iowa

2011

http://tinyurl.com/bctaykq

Kansas

2011

http://tinyurl.com/b8mnr99

Ohio

2012

http://tinyurl.com/akjsjve

2013

http://tinyurl.com/akoo2q3

Oklahoma

2008

http://tinyurl.com/a9a6x55

Louisiana

2013

http://tinyurl.com/awvc34h

Maryland

2010

http://tinyurl.com/ah4stmv

Michigan

2012

http://tinyurl.com/3eso9ve

2013

http://tinyurl.com/beucyy8

Minnesota

2010

http://tinyurl.com/a8xmf3j

2011

http://tinyurl.com/azc3gnr

Missouri

2011

http://tinyurl.com/azmdk9h

Nevada

2010

http://tinyurl.com/at82rt4

2011

http://tinyurl.com/am7jkvx

New Mexico

2011

http://tinyurl.com/bbz4yo8

New York

2011

http://tinyurl.com/au99m9k

2012

http://tinyurl.com/93xd6qx

Pennsylvania

2012

http://tinyurl.com/b5gg5z6

Tennessee

2010

http://tinyurl.com/ay9cjo2

Texas

2010

http://tinyurl.com/a7kur78

Virginia

2008

http://tinyurl.com/a74z3s7

2009

http://tinyurl.com/2b5za88

Wisconsin

2012

http://tinyurl.com/ajenrnp

Washington

2013

http://tinyurl.com/ayvyf9a

Addendum: After publication of this article, the hundreds of energetic Internet commenters who analyzed and critiqued my findings managed to locate one additional state NMS semifinalist list, supplementing the 43 that I had used.  The list contains the 2009 semifinalists from Massachusetts, and may be found at  http://tinyurl.com/cbtp4ph .

My estimate of the ethnic distribution of that list is approximately 24% Asian, 19% Jewish, and 57% non-Jewish white, while the 2011 NMS semifinalist total for Massachusetts was 355.  Incorporating this additional list produces no significant change in my overall results.

Appendix F: Winners of Leading Academic Competitions

Complete or partial rosters of the American winners of various academic competitions are available on various Internet websites and may be examined to estimate the distribution of ethnicities. The tables estimating the ethnic distribution are provided immediately afterward. These include:

The U.S. Mathematics Olympiad, 1974-2012:

http://www.imo-official.org/country_individual_r.aspx?code=USA

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1970s

56%

0%

44%

1980s

54%

9%

37%

1990s

45%

27%

28%

2000s

43%

53%

3%

2010s

28%

72%

0%

The Putnam College Math Competition, 1938-2011:

http://www.maa.org/awards/putnam.html

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1938-49

59%

0%

41%

1950s

66%

3%

31%

1960s

76%

2%

22%

1970s

69%

0%

31%

1980s

75%

2%

24%

1990s

44%

24%

31%

2000s

52%

37%

12%

2010s

50%

50%

0%

The U.S. Physics Olympiad winners, 1986-2012:

http://www.aapt.org/

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1980s

49%

23%

28%

1990s

55%

25%

20%

2000s

46%

46%

9%

2010s

14%

81%

5%

The U.S. Computing Olympiad, 1992-2012:

http://www.usaco.org/index.php?page=history

The U.S. Biology Olympiad, 2003-2012:

http://www.ibo-info.org/ibo-results-and-awards

The U.S. Chemistry Olympiad, 2011-2012:

http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content

Competition

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

Computing, 1992-2012

62%

27%

11%

Biology, 2003-2012

25%

68%

8%

Chemistry, 2011-2012

10%

90%

0%

The Intel/Westinghouse Science Talent Search, 1942-2012:

http://www.societyforscience.org/sts/history

STS Finalists

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1940s

83%

0%

17%

1950s

78%

1%

22%

1960s

76%

1%

23%

1970s

70%

8%

22%

1980s

55%

22%

23%

1990s

54%

29%

17%

2000s

49%

36%

15%

2010s

29%

64%

7%

Top STS Winners

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1940s

71%

0%

29%

1950s

85%

0%

15%

1960s

82%

3%

15%

1970s

62%

11%

27%

1980s

45%

26%

30%

1990s

55%

25%

20%

2000s

58%

21%

21%

2010s

47%

50%

3%

The Siemens AP Awards, 2002-2011:

http://www.siemens-foundation.org/en/advanced_placement.htm

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

2002-2011

31%

61%

8%

Appendix G:  Roster of Harvard College Phi Beta Kappa Inductees, 1966-2012

Approximately 10% of each graduating class at Harvard College receives the academic distinction of being inducted into the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the national honor society, and the Harvard rosters of the last fifty-odd years, containing the names of over 7200 top performing Harvard undergraduates, are all available on the Internet:

http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k19082&pageid=icb.page189954

The selection process is not entirely objective and the requirement that the distribution of inductees match the distribution of student concentrations may somewhat distort the results. Nonetheless, these lists probably constitute one of the few publicly available datasets of top performing Harvard undergraduates for the last half-century. In addition, roughly the top 1.5% of each class receives the special distinction of being elected to PBK in their junior year, and the rosters indicate these highest-performing PBK members for the years 1966-1982 and 2000-2012.

The same sort of surname analysis used for other high-performance datasets may be applied to these rosters, and compared to Harvard’s contemporaneous underlying ethnic percentages to gain insight into the relative performance of different groups, and the results are presented below. However, utilizing this type of analysis at the college level, especially in the last two decades presents greater difficulties and challenges than in the various high school cases we have also considered.

First, the percentage of foreign students enrolled at Harvard College rose from approximately 5-6% of each class during 1980-2001 to an average of about 8-10% since then. An unknown but very substantial fraction of these foreign students have been of East or South Asian ancestry, hence their names would often be indistinguishable from those of Asian-American students on the rosters, and would tend to augment the apparent contribution of the latter, while another substantial fraction would be of non-Jewish European ancestry, having a similar impact.

Furthermore, any of the sort of Eastern European or Germanic surnames which in America often imply Jewish origins are quite common among Gentiles in many parts of Europe, and might easily be misidentified as being Jewish.

For these reasons, the estimates I have made are probably much less reliable than when a similar process was employed in analyzing the rosters of Appendices E and F, and others who examine the raw data would surely produce somewhat different findings. However, the results and the broad trends which they indicate are still worth considering.

Total PBK Selections

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1960s

68%

1%

31%

1970s

55%

3%

41%

1980s

63%

10%

26%

1990s

57%

23%

19%

2000s

60%

23%

16%

2010s

54%

34%

11%

[* = Based on years 1980-1982]

Junior Year PBK Selections

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1960s

41%

0%

59%

1970s

41%

3%

56%

1980s

59%*

6%*

35%*

1990s

—

—

—

2000s

54%

25%

21%

2010s

39%

49%

13%

As already mentioned, these results may be somewhat contaminated, especially in the last decade, by the presence of foreign students. To some extent, first names might be used as a filter to attempt to exclude these, but in many cases those of first generation immigrants would be indistinguishable, rendering such a process ineffective. Therefore, let us simply analyze these results, recognizing a significant level of likely inaccuracy.

First, during most of the 1960s and early 1970s Harvard was roughly 25-30% Jewish, declining to about 20% Jewish by 1979. Meanwhile, the Jewish PBK numbers were far above this level, generally running at 40% during the 1970s, and close to 60% of the most academically elite Junior Year PBKs throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as much as three times their share of Harvard undergraduates. Clearly, Harvard Jews were extremely successful academically, far superior to the much larger number of their non-Jewish white classmates.

Although Jewish enrollment seemed to decline to about 20% of Harvard students during the 1980s, their relative academic performance remained quite strong, accounting for much more than their share of the PBK selections and for the years 1980-1982 nearly twice the expected number of Junior Year PBKs. However, during this decade, the relative performance of both Asians and non-Jewish whites had become roughly comparable, at least with regard to regular PBK selections, and in fact the Jewish numbers began noticeably falling off toward the end of the decade, even though Jewish enrollment did not.

During the 1990s, this Jewish academic decline continued, with Jews remaining as 20-25% of the students, but a lower fraction of the PBKs, with the results for the second half of the decade being far below that of the first half. Asians (including foreign students) were perhaps about 20% of enrollment during these years, but they gained a larger share of PBKs, while non-Jewish whites (including foreigners) showed by far the best performance, being only about 30-35% of the undergraduates, but gaining nearly twice as many PBK selections.

During the 2000s, these trends continued, with Jewish enrollment rising from 21% to 25%, while Jewish PBKs fell to just 16%, once again higher at the beginning of the decade than at the end; thus, Jewish PBKs dropped even as Jewish numbers increased. Asians continued to gain more than their share of PBKs, while non-Jews greatly strengthened their lead in PBKs and Junior Year PBKs, even as their numbers continued to fall, becoming nearly three times as likely to gain the PBK distinction as their Jewish classmates, a total reversal of the superiority which Jewish students had once enjoyed.

By the late 2000s and early 2010s, Jewish students had become one of the academically weakest groups at Harvard, constituting 25% or more of all students, but just 11-13% of PBKs selections. Meanwhile, during the 2010s the average Asian student was nearly 300% more likely to make PBK, with their proportion of Junior Year PBKs running even higher. And white Gentiles seemed to perform best of all, being about 400% more likely to gain PBK honors than their Jewish classmates. Put another way, the reported number of Jewish and non-Jewish white undergraduates at Harvard is approximately equal, but five times as many of the latter appear to be ranked in the top 10% of their class academically.

Once again, these estimates of academic performance at Harvard strongly support the consistent hypothesis that over the last couple of decades, Jewish students have been admitted to Harvard out of all reasonable proportions to their academic performance or intellectual potential.

This historical pattern also helps to explain the confusion exhibited by a researcher such as Karabel. When he was named to Phi Beta Kappa as a member of the Harvard Class of 1972, probably 40% or more of his fellow PBK inductees were also Jewish, while the same was true for half of the students who had received that distinction in their Junior year; both these figures were twice or more the relative performance of his non-Jewish white classmates. He earned his Harvard Ph.D. in sociology during the mid-1970s, a period which probably represented the absolute peak of Jewish academic performance on campus. And Individuals have a natural tendency to assume that the world of their formative years remains forever unchanged.

Appendix H: Relative Enrollment Figures at Ivy League and Other Universities

The estimated size of America’s college-age populations for racial and ethnic groups are provided in Appendix B, the racial and ethnic enrollment figures for various universities are provided in Appendices C and D, and the high-ability (top 0.5%) percentages of the college-age population are estimated in Appendix E based on the NMS semifinalist lists.

By combining these figures, we may produce estimates of the relative enrollment ratios for different racial and ethnic groups, both with respect to the size of the total college-age populations and the high ability college-age populations.

Enrollment Ratios 2007-11, Relative to Age 18-21 National Population

University

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

Hispanic

Black

Harvard

32%

348%

1,386%

42%

49%

Yale

35%

301%

1,376%

48%

50%

Princeton

64%

336%

701%

42%

52%

Brown

38%

317%

1,295%

49%

41%

Columbia

26%

346%

1,327%

64%

58%

Cornell

42%

347%

1,218%

38%

36%

Dartmouth

73%

298%

584%

41%

51%

Penn

29%

373%

1,421%

34%

48%

All Ivies

40%

340%

1,214%

43%

46%

MIT

48%

527%

499%

72%

50%

Stanford

49%

451%

531%

75%

57%

Caltech

59%

831%

297%

35%

6%

Berkeley

36%

851%

531%

64%

21%

UCLA

42%

784%

478%

85%

23%

Enrollment Ratios 2007-11, Relative to High Ability Age 18-21 National Population

University

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

NJW+Asian

Harvard

28%

63%

435%

51%

Yale

30%

55%

432%

49%

Princeton

55%

61%

220%

62%

Brown

33%

57%

407%

53%

Columbia

22%

63%

417%

44%

Cornell

36%

63%

382%

59%

Dartmouth

63%

54%

183%

67%

Penn

25%

68%

446%

51%

All Ivies

35%

62%

381%

54%

MIT

41%

96%

157%

63%

Stanford

42%

82%

167%

58%

Caltech

50%

151%

93%

80%

Berkeley

31%

154%

167%

73%

UCLA

36%

142%

150%

70%

California University Enrollment Ratios 2007-11, Relative to High Ability Age 18-21 California Population

University

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

NJW+Asian

California Students

Stanford

76%

37%

222%

57%

38%

Caltech

90%

68%

124%

78%

31%

Berkeley

56%

69%

222%

71%

73%

UCLA

65%

64%

200%

69%

87%

Note that the four elite California universities of Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, and UCLA draw very substantial fractions of their students from within the state. Therefore, the underlying population of high ability students against which their enrollment parity ratios should be calculated would be intermediate between the national and the California totals, and this is exactly what we find. For example, at Caltech, Berkeley, and UCLA, Asians are enrolled at roughly 142-154% of parity with respect to their national population of high ability college-age students, but just 64-69% of parity with respect to the California totals. Similarly, the non-Jewish white enrollments are very low relative to the national totals, but roughly similar to the Asian ratios with regard to the California figures.