Yale and the Select Colleges

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

In 1968, research conducted by Harvard estimated there were approximately sixty-nine select colleges in the land. Yale’s Office of Institutional Research [OIR] circulated a confidential report on each of the sixty-nine colleges ranked by entering SAT scores. Institutions were rated “A” to “F” with fifty points separating each letter on the scale. Neither Harvard nor Yale was in the “A” group.

A: Cal Tech, Carnegie-Melon, MIT, Stanford, Swarthmore, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD. Most of the “A” list were in California, not New England.

B: Amherst, Harvard, and Yale. 

C: Brandeis, Bryan Maw, Harvey Mudd, New College, Pomona, Reed, and Wesleyan.

D: Barnard, Brown, Cornell, Haverford, Middlebury, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, St. John’s in Maryland, Trinity in Connecticut, and Williams.

E & F: The rest of the sixty-nine, including the two remaining Ivy League members, Colombia University and Dartmouth.

These four state universities - UC Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison – have the most “super students” in the entire United States because unlike the Ivies they do admissions at the top end of the ability pool based on academic, not personal, qualities.

Elite public institutions tend to draw from a broader social stratum than private ones do. Being dependent on the public purse, rather than on affluent families’ personal savings, public elite universities can truly admit students without any regard to ability to pay. They tend to be more middle class, and have a larger representation from the working class that America’s private elite colleges. Public elite universities also have a different sense of mission than private ones do. Being upper class, and more dependent on the taxpayer’s favor, public elite universities tend to focus less on old traditional humanities subjects, and more on modern natural science and technology.