College admissions unmasked

I hope it's kosher to simply copy/paste another blog's intro to a relevant New Yorker article. This is from This Week in Education (way to my right in general):

In The New Yorker, the enviable Malcolm Gladwell dissects the American obsession whith attending elite colleges, reminds us that the link between attending an elite school and doing amazing things in life is not so clear, and chronicles how places like Harvard have over time evolved the selection criteria by usuing factors like athleticism and character to get the student body they want -- and maintain the "brand" they have created: Who gets into Harvard and why.

Gladwell notes, by the way, that the practice of including letters of reference and outside activities to demonstrate the applicant's well-rounded character was created by Harvard as a ploy to keep the percentage of Jews down.

I'm afraid that if I tell my 9th-grader that, he'll refuse to include any of that stuff in his college applications when the time comes. (His grandfather, my late father-in-law, attended Stanford under the Jewish quota.)

&mdash Caroline