Yale and Complicit Bias in the SAT

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

There is strong evidence that the verbal section of the SAT, which Yale has valued above the math section and subject tests, was the most biased part of the SAT. Family background, race, and gender do translate into vocabulary differences. Skewed question selection certainly contributes to the test score disparities between black and whites. [Jay Rosner, “On White Preferences,” Nation, 14 Apr 2003]

Sometimes those biases were there by intentional design, as in the 1930s; other times those biases were there because of unexamined assumptions about vocabulary and logic. The elite private sector has been able to benefit from the disguise of social-class selection by the seemingly neutral device of standardization aptitude tests. At best, elite private colleges have been merely complicit in the misrecognition of social class as academic merit. Selective college admissions throughout the twentieth century appear to have been a case of inequality by design.

Yale Adopts Character Standards – 1970s

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

In 1967, Yale dropped personal evaluation categories and photos. The effort to classify and predict personal qualities and leadership potential had not been abandoned, but its technology was being re-tooled. Yale retired its predicted grade algorithm in 1972. This radical departure for Yale’s tradition of measuring academic ability could be seen as yet another move away from objective measure of brains toward subjective selection based on character. Yale proposed to conduct research on reliable measures of personality.

They immediately set about translating those factors into behavioral types and came up with seven types of successful students and five types of unsuccessful students. The seven were artists, athletes, careerists, grinds, leaders, scholars, and socializers. The five failures were alienated, directionless, disliked, extreme grinds, and unqualified. Yale could cherry-pick from among privileged and prepared youths while reserving room for legacy and racial targets.

A Life in Our Times by John Kenneth Galbraith, 1981, Excerpts

Primary responsibility is exercised, even monopolized, by a small group of well-connected, upper-income Americans selected for the task by family membership and attendance at Groton, Exeter, Andover or St. Paul’s and Princeton, Harvard or Yale. They are attracted to the State department because manner there is as important as knowledge and more easily acquired and because it is the one government department where a true-blue gentleman can work. Among Harvard men, it is not important that an individual be intelligent, but he does have to be superior.

Yale Admits Blacks - 1969

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

The other important change in the composition of the Yale College was the enrollment of Black undergraduates. In 1969, Yale enrolled a total of twenty-six Black undergraduates. Yale was as white as elephant ivory. Racist drawings adorned the inner walls of Payne Whitney Gym. The college named after the radical slave master John C. Calhoun had Confederate flags and bull whips outside its dining room.

By 1975, eighty-six undergraduate Blacks entered ale. The average between 1975 and 1997 was ninety-one per year or 7 percent of each undergraduate class. By 2000, Black faculty representation had inched up to being 3 percent at Yale. Blacks, however, continue to be overrepresented in maintenance positions. In 2002, Blacks were nearly 44 percent of Yale’s blue-collar workers.

Even though Yale is now, without doubt, more diverse in gender, race, and religion than ever before, the preponderance of wealthy, White families has not changed from 1952 to the present.

Yale Goes Coed - 1969

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

Yale College was an all-male institution from its founding to 1969 when the first undergraduate females breeched its defenses. Women had been allowed into Yale’s graduate art school for a bit of cultural polish since the late nineteenth century, but in the undergraduate domain, the only women in New Haven were visiting relatives, girl friends, prostitutes, or strippers. It was an adolescent boy’s world with more than its share of ugly episodes. One the worst was “the gang rape of a prostitute in 1940 that was a running public joke during the Brewster’s undergraduate years.” [Kabaservice, “Kingman Brewster and the Rise and Fall,” 436]. Going coeducational ended the most blatant manifestations of Yale’s masculine culture, both in college and at alumni events.

In the first academic year of coeducation, 1969-19780, there were 1,025 men, and 588 women. The “freshmen” class had 230 women, but 358 transferring women moved into the sophomore, junior, and senior classes to spread women around, helping to set a new tone on campus. The Seven Sisters colleges, close to Yale in social composition and geography, provided more than their share. Of the transferring families, fully 124 were from just three of them: Wellesley, Smith, and Vassar.

In 1994, George W. Bush told an interviewer that Yale “went downhill since they admitted women.”

Yale Corporation – Ivy Group

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

The Yale Corporation, which holds power of final say on anything it cares to rule on, always kept tight control over financial aid. The Corporation legally owns and controls Yale. Yale coordinated its aid program with the rest of the Ivy League, and from 1958, Yale also worked with MIT, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University. Financial officers from all those institutions would meet as the “Ivy Group,” to “compare and negotiate awards to joint scholarship candidates and ensure progress towards the standardization of awards.”

Yale and the Underprivileged Upwardly Mobile

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

As Yale admissions dean during the 1960s, Howe repeatedly explained to alumni that Yale was an upper-class liberal-arts college for the education of future leaders. Admission decisions at Yale had to take its social composition and special mission into account. Yale was looked to by families in the upper-class for social reproduction. In an alumni convocation speech Howe explained:

“To those who have enjoyed the privileges of cultural opportunities, wealth, and social standing, there is no stronger desire than to preserve the same for their children, and admission to Yale is one of the best ways to do it. To those less privileged, identification with a prestige-laden institution is probably the most effective vehicle for upward mobility. But those who are experiencing such mobility should, we are constantly reminded, have unusual reserves of intelligence and stamina to overcome the frequently painful, disturbing aspects of the process. Most of us have a natural, genuine sympathy for the underdog, and yet it is when sympathy rules reason that we make our worst admission errors. There is a very thin line indeed, between creating opportunity and causing injury.”

The upwardly mobile were suitable for vocational subjects at state universities, after which they could be technicians or accountants, but America’s future leaders should be culturally prepped in privileged families if they were to properly benefit from the stock of wisdom available in a liberal-arts residential college.

Howe feared that the upwardly mobile, at a place like Yale, would fall in with a fast, hard-drinking set, to the detriment of their studies and meager bank account.  Ivy colleges as a tool of upward mobility were like a sharp hook that harms as it hoists the underprivileged; youths from lower social classes would not be well matched to the college culture.

Artist: Eric Drooker

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.