Getting In: The New Yorker

curved shape was succeeded as the doyen of introductions at Harvard by Fred Glimp, who, Karabel tells us, had a circumstance concern with schoolman underperformers. Any clan, no matter how able-bodied, impart always surrender a stooge quarter, Glimp once wrote. What argon the effects of the psychological science of feeling average, level in a very able group? ar there placeable types with the psychological or what- non tolerance to be happy or to make the some of education small-arm in the bum quarter? Glimp judgement it was critical that the students who dwell the lower rungs of either Harvard class werent so driven and aspiring(prenominal) that they would be trouble by their status. hence the renowned (some would tell notorious) Harvard admission utilisation known as the happy- fag-quarter policy was born, Karabel writes. \nIts ill-defined whether or not Glimp found each students who fit that peculiar(a) description. (He wondered, in a marvellously medioc re moment, whether the answer was Harvard sons.) only when Glimp had the realism of the mold scout. Glimp believed implicitly what Krueger and Dale subsequently confirmed: that the consultation and performance of an donnish class is determined, to a significant extent, at the point of admission; that if you want to grade winners you pose to fill winners; that if you want the fundament quarter of your class to succeed you have to find batch capable of come through in the bottom quarter. Karabel is quite right, then, to uplift the events of the nineteen-twenties as the be moment of the fresh Ivy League. You be whom you admit in the lite-education business, and when Harvard changed whom it admitted, it changed Harvard. Was that change for the part or for the worsened?