the myth of american meritocracy-unz

8/13/2019 The Myth of American Meritocracy-Unz

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Just beore the Labor Day weekend, a ront pageNew York imesstory broke the news o the larg-est cheating scandal in Harvard University his-tory, in which nearly hal the students taking a

Government course on the role o Congress had pla-giarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on theirfinal exam.1 Each year, Harvard admits just 1600reshmen while almost 125 Harvard students nowace possible suspension over this single incident. AHarvard dean described the situation as unprec-edented.

But should we really be so surprised at this behavioramong the students at Americas most prestigious aca-demic institution? In the last generation or two, theunnel o opportunity in American society has drasti-cally narrowed, with a greater and greater proportiono our financial, media, business, and political elitesbeing drawn rom a relatively small number o ourleading universities, together with their proessionalschools. Te rise o a Henry Ford, rom arm boymechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtuallyimpossible today, as even Americas most successulcollege dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuck-

erberg ofen turn out to be extremely well-connectedormer Harvard students. Indeed, the early success oFacebook was largely due to the powerul imprimaturit enjoyed rom its exclusive availability first only atHarvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.

During this period, we have witnessed a huge na-tional decline in well-paid middle class jobs in themanuacturing sector and other sources o employ-ment or those lacking college degrees, with medianAmerican wages having been stagnant or decliningor the last orty years. Meanwhile, there has been anastonishing concentration o wealth at the top, with

Americas richest 1 percent now possessing nearlyas much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent.2 Tissituation, sometimes described as a winner take allsociety, leaves amilies desperate to maximize thechances that their children will reach the winners cir-cle, rather than risk ailure and poverty or even merelya spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. Andthe best single means o becoming such an economicwinner is to gain admission to a top university, whichprovides an easy ticket to the wealth o Wall Street orsimilar venues, whose leading firms increasingly re-

strict their hiring to graduates o the Ivy League or atiny handul o other top colleges.3On the other side,finance remains the avored employment choice orHarvard, Yale or Princeton students afer the diplo-mas are handed out.4

Te Battle for Elite College Admissions

As a direct consequence, the war over college admis-sions has become astonishingly fierce, with manymiddle- or upper-middle class amilies investing

quantities o time and money that would have seemedunimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to anall-against-all arms race that immiserates the studentand exhausts the parents. Te absurd parental effortso an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestsell-er Battle Hymn of the iger Mother, were simply amuch more extreme version o widespread behavioramong her peer-group, which is why her story reso-nated so deeply among our educated elites. Over thelast thirty years, Americas test-prep companies have

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Ron Unz is publisher ofTe American Conservative.

Te Myth ofAmerican MeritocracyHow corrupt are Ivy League admissions?

byRON UNZ


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grown rom almost nothing into a $5 billion annualindustry, allowing the affluent to provide an admis-sions edge to their less able children. Similarly, theenormous annual tuition o $35,000 charged by eliteprivate schools such as Dalton or Exeter is less or a

superior high school education than or the hope oa greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League.5Many New York City parents even go to enormousefforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program, seeking early placement onthe educational conveyer belt which eventually leadsto Harvard.6Others cut corners in a more direct ash-ion, as revealed in the huge SA cheating rings recent-ly uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in whichstudents were paid thousands o dollars to take SAexams or their wealthier but dimmer classmates.7

But given such massive social and economic value

now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, thetiny handul o elite admissions gatekeepers enjoyenormous, almost unprecedented power to shape theleadership o our society by allocating their supplyo thick envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons,and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actionsmore careully as their children approach college age.And i such power is used to select our uture elites ina corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is theselection o corrupt elites, with terrible consequencesor America. Tus, the huge Harvard cheating scan-dal, and perhaps also the endless series o financial,

business, and political scandals which have rockedour country over the last decade or more, even whileour national economy has stagnated.

Just a ew years ago Pulitzer Prize-winning ormerWall Street Journalreporter Daniel Golden publishedTe Price of Admission, a devastating account o thecorrupt admissions practices at so many o our lead-ing universities, in which every sort o non-academicor financial actor plays a role in privileging the privi-leged and thereby squeezing out those high-ability,hard-working students who lack any special hook. Inone particularly egregious case, a wealthy New Jer-

sey real estate developer, later sent to Federal prisonon political corruption charges, paid Harvard $2.5million to help ensure admission o his completelyunder-qualified son.8 When we consider that Har-

vards existing endowment was then at $15 billionand earning almost $7 million each day in investmentearnings, we see that a culture o financial corruptionhas developed an absurd illogic o its own, in whichsenior Harvard administrators sell their universityshonor or just a ew hours worth o its regular annualincome, the equivalent o a Harvard instructor raisinga grade or a hundred dollars in cash.

An admissions system based on non-academicactors ofen amounting to institutionalized venalitywould seem strange or even unthinkable among thetop universities o most other advanced nations inEurope or Asia, though such practices are widespreadin much o the corrupt Tird World. Te notion o awealthy amily buying their son his entrance into theGrandes Ecoles o France or the top Japanese univer-sities would be an absurdity, and the academic recti-

tude o Europes Nordic or Germanic nations is evenmore severe, with those ar more egalitarian societiesanyway tending to deemphasize university rankings.

Or consider the case o China. Tere, legions o an-gry microbloggers endlessly denounce the official cor-ruption and abuse which permeate so much o the eco-nomic system. But we almost never hear accusationso avoritism in university admissions, and this impres-sion o strict meritocracy determined by the resultso the national Gaokao college entrance examinationhas been confirmed to me by individuals amiliar withthat country. Since all the worlds written exams may

ultimately derive rom Chinas old imperial examina-tion system, which was kept remarkably clean or 1300years, such practices are hardly surprising.9Attending aprestigious college is regarded by ordinary Chinese astheir childrens greatest hope o rapid upward mobilityand is thereore ofen a ocus o enormous amily e-ort; Chinas ruling elites may rightly ear that a policyo admitting their own dim and lazy heirs to leadingschools ahead o the higher-scoring children o themasses might ignite a widespread popular uprising.Tis perhaps explains why so many sons and daugh-ters o top Chinese leaders attend college in the West:

American

Household

Net Wealth,

2010

Top 1%

35.4%

Next 4%

27.7%

Bottom

95%

36.9%



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enrolling them at a third-rate Chinese university wouldbe a tremendous humiliation, while our own corruptadmissions practices get them an easy spot at Harvardor Stanord, sitting side by side with the children o BillClinton, Al Gore, and George W. Bush.

Although the evidence o college admissions cor-ruption presented in Goldens book is quite telling,the ocus is almost entirely on current practices, andlargely anecdotal rather than statistical. For a broaderhistorical perspective, we should consider Te Chosenby Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel, an exhaustiveand award-winning 2005 narrative history o the last

century o admissions policy at Harvard, Yale, andPrinceton (I will henceorth sometimes abbreviatethese top three most elite schools as HYP).

Karabels massive documentationover 700 pagesand 3000 endnotesestablishes the remarkable actthat Americas uniquely complex and subjective sys-tem o academic admissions actually arose as a meanso covert ethnic tribal warare. During the 1920s, theestablished Northeastern Anglo-Saxon elites who

then dominated the Ivy League wished to sharply cur-tail the rapidly growing numbers o Jewish students,but their initial attempts to impose simple numericalquotas provoked enormous controversy and acultyopposition.10 Tereore, the approach subsequentlytaken by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell andhis peers was to transorm the admissions processrom a simple objective test o academic merit intoa complex and holistic consideration o all aspects oeach individual applicant; the resulting opacity per-mitted the admission or rejection o any given appli-cant, allowing the ethnicity o the student body to be

shaped as desired. As a consequence, university lead-ers could honestly deny the existence o any racial orreligious quotas, while still managing to reduce Jew-ish enrollment to a much lower level, and thereaferhold it almost constant during the decades which ol-lowed.11For example, the Jewish portion o Harvardsentering class dropped rom nearly 30 percent in 1925to 15 percent the ollowing year and remained rough-ly static until the period o the Second World War.12

As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the majorchanges in admissions policy which later ollowed wereusually determined by actors o raw political power

and the balance o contending orces rather than anyidealistic considerations. For example, in the afermatho World War II, Jewish organizations and their alliesmobilized their political and media resources to pres-sure the universities into increasing their ethnic en-

rollment by modiying the weight assigned to variousacademic and non-academic actors, raising the impor-tance o the ormer over the latter. Ten a decade or twolater, this exact process was repeated in the opposite di-rection, as the early 1960s saw black activists and theirliberal political allies pressure universities to bring theirracial minority enrollments into closer alignment with

Americas national population by partiallyshifing away rom their recently enshrinedocus on purely academic considerations.Indeed, Karabel notes that the most suddenand extreme increase in minority enrollment

took place at Yale in the years 196869, andwas largely due to ears o race riots in heav-ily black New Haven, which surrounded the

campus.13

Philosophical consistency appears notably absentin many o the prominent figures involved in these ad-missions battles, with both liberals and conservativessometimes avoring academic merit and sometimesnon-academic actors, whichever would produce theparticular ethnic student mix they desired or per-sonal or ideological reasons. Different political blocswaged long battles or control o particular universi-

ties, and sudden large shifs in admissions rates oc-curred as these groups gained or lost influence withinthe university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissionsstaff in 1965 and the ollowing year Jewish numbersnearly doubled.14

At times, external judicial or political orces wouldbe summoned to override university admissions policy,ofen succeeding in this aim. Karabels own ideologicalleanings are hardly invisible, as he hails efforts by statelegislatures to orce Ivy League schools to lif their de

factoJewish quotas, but seems to regard later legislativeattacks on affirmative action as unreasonable assaults

on academic reedom.15

Te massively ootnoted texto Te Chosenmight lead one to paraphrase Clausewitzand conclude that our elite college admissions policyofen consists o ethnic warare waged by other means,or even that it could be summarized as a simple Lenin-esque question o Who, Whom?

Although nearly all o Karabels study is ocused onthe earlier history o admissions policy at Harvard,Yale, and Princeton, with the developments o the lastthree decades being covered in just a ew dozen pages,he finds complete continuity down to the present day,with the notorious opacity o the admissions pro-

Americas uniquely complex and subjectivesystem of academic admissions actually arose

as a means of covert ethnic tribal warfare.



cess still allowing most private universities to admitwhomever they want or whatever reasons they want,even i the reasons and the admissions decisions mayeventually change over the years. Despite these plainacts, Harvard and the other top Ivy League schools

today publicly deny any hint o discrimination alongracial or ethnic lines, except insoar as they acknowl-edge providing an admissions boost to under-repre-sented racial minorities, such as blacks or Hispanics.But given the enormous control these institutions ex-ert on our larger society, we should test these claimsagainst the evidence o the actual enrollment statistics.

Asian-Americans as the New Jews

Te overwhelming ocus o Karabels book is on

changes in Jewish undergraduate percentages at eachuniversity, and this is probably less due to his ownethnic heritage than because the data provides an ex-tremely simple means o charting the ebb and flow oadmissions policy: Jews were a high-perorming group,whose numbers could only be restricted by major de-

viations rom an objective meritocratic standard.Obviously, anti-Jewish discrimination in admis-

sions no longer exists at any o these institutions, buta roughly analogous situation may be ound witha group whom Golden and others have sometimeslabeled Te New Jews, namely Asian-Americans.

Since their strong academic perormance is coupledwith relatively little political power, they would be ob-vious candidates or discrimination in the harsh re-alpolitik o university admissions as documented byKarabel, and indeed he briefly raises the possibility oan anti-Asian admissions bias, beore concluding thatthe elite universities are apparently correct in denyingthat it exists.16

Tere certainly does seem considerable anecdotalevidence that many Asians perceive their chances oelite admission as being drastically reduced by theirracial origins.17For example, our national newspapers

have revealed that students o part-Asian backgroundhave regularly attempted to conceal the non-whiteside o their ancestry when applying to Harvard andother elite universities out o concern it would greatlyreduce their chances o admission.18 Indeed, wide-spread perceptions o racial discrimination are almostcertainly the primary actor behind the huge growthin the number o students reusing to reveal their ra-cial background at top universities, with the percent-age o Harvard students classified as race unknownhaving risen rom almost nothing to a regular 515percent o all undergraduates over the last twenty

years, with similar levels reached at other elite schools.Such ears that checking the Asian box on an ad-

missions application may lead to rejection are hardlyunreasonable, given that studies have documenteda large gap between the average test scores o whites

and Asians successully admitted to elite universities.Princeton sociologist Tomas J. Espenshade and hiscolleagues have demonstrated that among under-graduates at highly selective schools such as the IvyLeague, white students have mean scores 310 pointshigher on the 1600 SA scale than their black class-mates, but Asian students average 140 points abovewhites.19Te ormer gap is an automatic consequenceo officially acknowledged affirmative action policies,while the latter appears somewhat mysterious.

hese broad statistical differences in the admis-

sion requirements or Asians are given a humanace in Goldens discussions o this subject, in whichhe recounts numerous examples o Asian-Americanstudents who overcame dire amily poverty, immi-grant adversity, and other enormous personal hard-ships to achieve stellar academic perormance andextracurricular triumphs, only to be rejected by alltheir top university choices. His chapter is actuallyentitled Te New Jews, and he notes the consider-able irony that a university such as Vanderbilt willannounce a public goal o greatly increasing its Jew-ish enrollment and nearly triple those numbers in

just our years, while showing very little interest inadmitting high-perorming Asian students.20

All these elite universities strongly deny the ex-istence o any sort o racial discrimination againstAsians in the admissions process, let alone an Asianquota, with senior administrators instead claim-ing that the potential o each student is individuallyevaluated via a holistic process ar superior to anymechanical reliance on grades or test scores; but suchpublic postures are identical to those taken by theiracademic predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s as doc-umented by Karabel. Fortunately, we can investigate

the plausibility o these claims by examining the de-cades o officially reported enrollment data availablerom the website o the National Center or Educa-tional Statistics (NCES).

Te ethnic composition o Harvard undergraduatescertainly ollows a highly intriguing pattern. Harvardhad always had a significant Asian-American enroll-ment, generally running around 5 percent when I hadattended in the early 1980s. But during the ollow-ing decade, the size o Americas Asian middle classgrew rapidly, leading to a sharp rise in applicationsand admissions, with Asians exceeding 10 percent o



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undergraduates by the late 1980s and crossing the 20percent threshold by 1993. However, rom that yearorward, the Asian numbers went into reverse, gen-erally stagnating or declining during the two decadeswhich ollowed, with the official 2011 figure being

17.2 percent.21

Even more surprising has been the sheer constan-cy o these percentages, with almost every year rom19952011 showing an Asian enrollment within asingle point o the 16.5 percent average, despite hugefluctuations in the number o applications and the in-evitable uncertainty surrounding which students willaccept admission. By contrast, prior to 1993 Asian en-rollment had ofen changed quite substantially romyear to year. It is interesting to note that this exactlyreplicates the historical pattern observed by Karabel,in which Jewish enrollment rose very rapidly, lead-

ing to imposition o an inormal quota system, aferwhich the number o Jews ell substantially, and there-afer remained roughly constant or decades. On theace o it, ethnic enrollment levels which widely di-

verge rom academic perormance data or applicationrates and which remain remarkably static over timeprovide obvious circumstantial evidence or at least ade factoethnic quota system.

In another strong historical parallel, all the otherIvy League universities seem to have gone throughsimilar shifs in Asian enrollment at similar times and

reached a similar plateau over the last couple o de-cades. As mentioned, the share o Asians at Harvard

peaked at over 20 percent in 1993, then immediatelydeclined and thereafer remained roughly constant at alevel 35 points lower. Asians at Yale reached a 16.8 per-cent maximum in that same year, and soon droppedby about 3 points to a roughly constant level. Te Co-

lumbia peak also came in 1993 and the Cornell peakin 1995, in both cases ollowed by the same substantialdrop, and the same is true or most o their East Coastpeers. During the mid- to late-1980s, there had beensome public controversy in the media regarding alle-gations o anti-Asian discrimination in the Ivy League,and the Federal Government eventually even openedan investigation into the matter.22But once that investi-gation was closed in 1991, Asian enrollments across allthose universities rapidly converged to the same level oapproximately 16 percent, and remained roughly staticthereafer (See chart below). In act, the yearly fluctua-

tions in Asian enrollments are ofen smaller than werethe changes in Jewish numbers during the quota erao the past,23and are roughly the same relative size asthe fluctuations in black enrollments, even though thelatter are heavily influenced by the publicly declaredethnic diversity goals o those same institutions.

Te largely constant Asian numbers at these elitecolleges are particularly strange when we considerthat the underlying population o Asians in Americahas been anything but static, instead growing at theastest pace o any American racial group, having in-creased by almost 50 percent during the last decade,

and more than doubling since 1993. Obviously, therelevant ratio would be to the 1821 age cohort, but

0

10

20

30

40%

0

200

400

600

800

Asia ns,

Age18-21

1990 1995 2000 2005 2011

AsiansAge 18-21 andEliteCollegeEnrollmentTrends,1990-2011

Trends of Asian enrollment at Caltech and the Ivy League universities, compared with growth of Asian college-age population; Asian age cohort population figures arebased on Census CPS, and given the small sample size, are subject to considerable yearly statistical fluctuations. Source: Appendices B and C.

AsianEnrollmentPercentage

AsiansAge18-21(InThousands)

Caltech Harvard Yale Princeton Brown Columbia Cornell Dartmouth Penn



adjusting or this actor changes little: based on Cen-sus data, the college-age ratio o Asians to whites in-creased by 94 percent between 1994 and 2011, evenwhile the ratio o Asians to whites at Harvard and Co-lumbia ell over these same years. 24

Put another way, the percentage o college-ageAsian-Americans attending Harvard peaked around1993, and has since dropped by over 50 percent, a de-cline somewhat larger than the all in Jewish enroll-ment which ollowed the imposition o secret quotasin 1925.25And we have noted the parallel trends in theother Ivy League schools, which also replicates thehistorical pattern.

Furthermore, during this exact same period a largeportion o the Asian-American population movedrom first-generation immigrant poverty into theranks o the middle class, greatly raising their edu-

cational aspirations or their children. Although eliteuniversities generally reuse to release their applicanttotals or different racial groups, some data occasion-ally becomes available. Princetons records show thatbetween 1980 and 1989, Asian-American applicationsincreased by over 400 percent compared to just 8 per-cent or other groups, with an even more rapid in-crease or Brown during 1980-1987, while HarvardsAsian applicants increased over 250 percent between1976 and 1985.26 It seems likely that the statisticsor other Ivy League schools would have ollowed asimilar pattern and these trends would have at least

partially continued over the decades which ollowed,just as the Asian presence has skyrocketed at selectivepublic eeder schools such as Stuyvesant and BronxScience in New York City and also at the top EastCoast prep schools. Yet none o these huge changesin the underlying pool o Asian applicants seemed tohave had noticeable impact on the number admittedto Harvard or most o the Ivy League.

Estimating Asian Merit

One obvious possible explanation or these trendsmight be a decline in average Asian scholastic per-ormance, which would certainly be possible i moreand more Asian students rom the lower levels o theability pool were pursuing an elite education.27 Temean SA scores or Asian students show no suchlarge decline, but since we would expect elite universi-ties to draw their students rom near the absolute topo the perormance curve, average scores by race arepotentially less significant than the Asian raction oAmericas highest perorming students.

o the extent that the hundred thousand or so un-

dergraduates at Ivy League schools and their approxi-mate peers are selected by academic merit, they wouldmostly be drawn rom the top one-hal to one percento their American age-cohort, and this is the appro-priate pool to consider. It is perectly possible that a

particular ethnic population might have a relativelyhigh mean SA score, while still being somewhat lesswell represented in that top percent or so o measuredability; racial perormance does not necessarily ol-low an exact bell curve distribution. For one thing,a Census category such as Asian is hardly homog-enous or monolithic, with South Asians and EastAsians such as Chinese and Koreans generally havingmuch higher perormance compared to other groupssuch as Filipinos, Vietnamese, or Cambodians, justas the various types o Hispanics such as Cubans,Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans differ widely in their

socio-economic and academic profiles. Furthermore,the percentage o a given group taking the SA maychange over time, and the larger the percentage tak-ing that test, the more that total will include weakerstudents, thereby depressing the average score.

Fortunately, allegations o anti-Asian admissionsbias have become a topic o widespread and heateddebate on the Internet, and disgruntled Asian-Amer-ican activists have diligently located various types odata to support their accusations, with the recent eth-nic distribution o National Merit Scholarship (NMS)semifinalists being among the most persuasive. Stu-

dents receiving this official designation represent ap-proximately the top one-hal o one percent o a stateshigh school students as determined by their scoreson the PSA, twin brother to the SA. Each year, theNMS Corporation distributes the names and schoolso these semifinalists or each state, and dozens othese listings have been tracked down and linked onthe Internet by determined activists, who have thensometimes estimated the ethnic distribution o thesemifinalists by examining their amily names.28Ob-

viously, such a name analysis provides merely an ap-proximate result, but the figures are striking enough

to warrant the exercise. (All these NMS semifinalistestimates are discussed in Appendix E.)29

For example, Caliornia has a population compara-ble to that o the next two largest states combined, andits 2010 total o 2,003 NMS semifinalists included wellover 1,100 East Asian or South Asian amily names.Caliornia may be one o the most heavily Asianstates, but even so Asians o high school age are stilloutnumbered by whites roughly 3-to-1, while therewere ar more high scoring Asians. Put another way,although Asians represented only about 11 percent oCaliornia high school students, they constituted al-



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most 60 percent o the top scoring ones. Caliorniaslist o NMS semifinalists rom 2012 also ollowed a

very similar ethnic pattern. Obviously, such an analy-sis based on last names is hardly precise, but it is prob-ably correct to within a ew percent, which is suffi-

cient or our crude analytical purposes.In addition, the number o test-takers is sufficientlylarge that an examination o especially distinctive lastnames allows us to pinpoint and roughly quantiy theacademic perormance o different Asian groups. Forexample, the name Nguyen is uniquely Vietnameseand carried by about 1 in 3.6 o all Americans o thatethnicity, while Kim is just as uniquely Korean, withone in 5.5 Korean-Americans bearing that name.30Bycomparing the prevalence o these particular nameson the Caliornia NMS semifinalist lists with the totalsize o the corresponding Caliornia ethnicities, we

can estimate that Caliornia Vietnamese are signifi-cantly more likely than whites to score very highly onsuch tests, while Koreans seem to do eight times betterthan whites and Caliornias Chinese even better still.(All these results rely upon the simpliying assump-tion that these different Asian groups are roughly pro-portional in their numbers o high school seniors.)

Interestingly enough, these Asian perormanceratios are remarkably similar to those worked outby Nathaniel Weyl in his 1989 book Te Geographyof American Achievement, in which he estimated thatKorean and Chinese names were over-represented by

1000 percent or more on the complete 1987 lists onational NMS semifinalists, while Vietnamese nameswere only somewhat more likely to appear than thewhite average.31 Tis consistency is quite impressivewhen we consider that Americas Asian populationhas tripled since the late 1980s, with major changes aswell in socio-economic distribution and other char-acteristics.

Te results or states other than Caliornia reflectthis same huge abundance o high perorming Asianstudents. In exas, Asians are just 3.8 percent o thepopulation but were over a quarter o the NMS semifi-

nalists in 2010, while the 2.4 percent o Florida Asiansprovided between 10 percent and 16 percent o the topstudents in the six years rom 2008 to 2013 or whichI have been able to obtain the NMS lists. Even in NewYork, which contains one o our nations most affluentand highly educated white populations and also re-mains by ar the most heavily Jewish state, Asian over-representation was enormous: the Asian 7.3 percent othe populationmany o them impoverished immi-grant amiliesaccounted or almost one-third o alltop scoring New York students.

Americas eight largest states contain nearly hal our

total population as well as over 60 percent o all Asian-Americans, and each has at least one NMS semifinalistlist available or the years 20102012. Asians accountor just 6 percent o the population in these states, butcontribute almost one-third o all the names on these

rosters o high perorming students. Even this resultmay be a substantial underestimate, since over halthese Asians are ound in gigantic Caliornia, whereextremely stiff academic competition has driven thequaliying NMS semifinalist threshold score to nearlythe highest in the country; i students were selectedbased on a single nationwide standard, Asian numberswould surely be much higher. Tis pattern extends tothe aggregate o the twenty-five states whose lists areavailable, with Asians constituting 5 percent o the to-tal population but almost 28 percent o semifinalists.Extrapolating these state results to the national total,

we would expect 2530 percent o Americas highestscoring high school seniors to be o Asian origin.32Tis figure is ar above the current Asian enrollmentat Harvard or the rest o the Ivy League.

Ironically enough, the methodology used to selectthese NMS semifinalists may considerably understatethe actual number o very high-ability Asian students.According to testing experts, the three main subcom-ponents o intellectual ability are verbal, mathemati-cal, and visuospatial, with the last o these representingthe mental manipulation o objects. Yet the qualiyingNMS scores are based on math, reading, and writing

tests, with the last two both corresponding to verbalability, and without any test o visuospatial skills. Evenleaving aside the language difficulties which studentsrom an immigrant background might ace, EastAsians tend to be weakest in the verbal category andstrongest in the visuospatial, so NMS semifinalists arebeing selected by a process which excludes the stron-gest Asian component and doubles the weight o theweakest.33

his evidence o a massively disproportionate Asianpresence among top-perorming students only in-creases i we examine the winners o national academ-ic competitions, especially those in mathematics andscience, where judging is the most objective. Each year,America picks its five strongest students to representour country in the International Math Olympiad, andduring the three decades since 1980, some 34 percento these team members have been Asian-American,with the corresponding figure or the InternationalComputing Olympiad being 27 percent. Te Intel Sci-ence alent Search, begun in 1942 under the auspiceso the Westinghouse Corporation, is Americas mostprestigious high school science competition, and since



1980 some 32 percent o the 1320 finalists have been oAsian ancestry (see Appendix F).

Given that Asians accounted or just 1.5 percento the population in 1980 and ofen lived in relativelyimpoverished immigrant amilies, the longer-term his-

torical trends are even more striking. Asians were lessthan 10 percent o U.S. Math Olympiad winners dur-ing the 1980s, but rose to a striking 58 percent o thetotal during the last thirteen years 20002012. For theComputing Olympiad, Asian winners averaged about20 percent o the total during most o the 1990s and2000s, but grew to 50 percent during 20092010 and aremarkable 75 percent during 20112012.

Te statistical trend or the Science alent Searchfinalists, numbering many thousands o top sciencestudents, has been the clearest: Asians constituted22 percent o the total in the 1980s, 29 percent in

the 1990s, 36 percent in the 2000s, and 64 percent inthe 2010s. In particular science subjects, the PhysicsOlympiad winners ollow a similar trajectory, withAsians accounting or 23 percent o the winners dur-ing the 1980s, 25 percent during the 1990s, 46 percentduring the 2000s, and a remarkable 81 percent since2010. Te 20032012 Biology Olympiad winnerswere 68 percent Asian and Asians took an astonish-ing 90 percent o the top spots in the recent Chem-istry Olympiads. Some 61 percent o the Siemens APAwards rom 20022011 went to Asians, includingthirteen o the ourteen top national prizes.

Yet even while all these specific Asian-American ac-ademic achievement trends were rising at such an im-pressive pace, the relative enrollment o Asians at Har-

vard was plummeting, dropping by over hal during thelast twenty years, with a range o similar declines alsooccurring at Yale, Cornell, and most other Ivy Leagueuniversities. Columbia, in the heart o heavily AsianNew York City, showed the steepest decline o all.

Tere may even be a logical connection betweenthese two contradictory trends. On the one hand,America over the last two decades has produced arapidly increasing population o college-age Asians,

whose amilies are increasingly affluent, well-edu-cated, and eager to secure an elite education or theirchildren. But on the other hand, it appears that theseleading academic institutions have placed a ratherstrict upper limit on actual Asian enrollments, orc-ing these Asian students to compete more and morefiercely or a very restricted number o openings. Tishas sparked a massive Asian-American arms-race inacademic perormance at high schools throughoutthe country, as seen above in the skyrocketing mathand science competition results. When a ar greater

volume o applicants is squeezed into a pipeline o

fixed size, the pressure can grow enormously.Te implications o such massive pressure may be

seen in a widely-discussed ront page 2005 Wall StreetJournal story entitled Te New White Flight.34 Tearticle described the extreme academic intensity at sev-

eral predominantly Asian high schools in Cupertinoand other towns in Silicon Valley, and the resultingexodus o white students, who preerred to avoid suchan exceptionally ocused and competitive academicenvironment, which included such severe educationaltension. But should the amilies o those Asian studentsbe blamed i according to Espensade and his colleaguestheir children require ar higher academic perormancethan their white classmates to have a similar chance ogaining admission to selective colleges?

Although the Asian iger Mom behavior de-scribed by author Amy Chua provoked widespread

hostility and ridicule, consider the situation romher perspective. Being hersel a Harvard graduate,she would like her daughters to ollow in her own IvyLeague ootsteps, but is probably aware that the vastgrowth in Asian applicants with no corresponding in-crease in allocated Asian slots requires heroic effortsto shape the perect application package. Since Chuashusband is not Asian, she could obviously encourageher children to improve their admissions chances byconcealing their ethnic identity during the applicationprocess; but this would surely represent an enormouspersonal humiliation or a proud and highly success-

ul Illinois-born American o Chinese ancestry.Te claim that most elite American universitiesemploy a de factoAsian quota system is certainly aninflammatory charge in our society. Indeed, our me-dia and cultural elites view any accusations o racialdiscrimination as being among the most horrific oall possible charges, sometimes even regarded as moreserious than mass murder.35So beore concluding thatthese accusations are probably true and consider-ing possible social remedies, we should careully re-consider their plausibility, given that they are largelybased upon a mixture o circumstantial statistical evi-

dence and the individual anecdotal cases presented byGolden and a small handul o other critical journal-ists. One obvious approach is to examine enrollmentfigures at those universities which or one reason oranother may ollow a different policy.

According to incoming student test scores and re-cent percentages o National Merit Scholars, ourAmerican universities stand at the absolute summit oaverage student qualityHarvard, Yale, Princeton, andCaltech, the Caliornia Institute o echnology; ando these Caltech probably ranks first among equals.36Tose three top Ivies continue to employ the same ad-



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missions system which Karabel describes as opaque,flexible, and allowing enormous discretion,37a sys-tem originally established to restrict the admission ohigh-perorming Jews. But Caltech selects its studentsby strict academic standards, with Golden praising it

or being Americas shining example o a purely meri-tocratic university, almost untouched by the financialor political corruption so widespread in our other eliteinstitutions. And since the beginning o the 1990s,Caltechs Asian-American enrollment has risen almostexactly in line with the growth o Americas underlyingAsian population, with Asians now constituting nearly40 percent o each class (See chart on p. 18).

Obviously, the Caltech curriculum is narrowly o-cused on mathematics, science, and engineering, andsince Asians tend to be especially strong in those sub-

jects, the enrollment statistics might be somewhat

distorted compared to a more academically balanceduniversity. Tereore, we should also consider the en-rollment figures or the highly-regarded University oCaliornia system, particularly its five most prestigiousand selective campuses: Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego,Davis, and Irvine. Te 1996 passage o Proposition209 had outlawed the use o race or ethnicity in ad-missions decisions, and while administrative compli-ance has certainly not been absoluteGolden notedthe evidence o some continued anti-Asian discrimi-nationthe practices do seem to have moved in thegeneral direction o race-blind meritocracy.38And the

2011 Asian-American enrollment at those five elitecampuses ranged rom 34 percent to 49 percent, with aweighted average o almost exactly 40 percent, identicalto that o Caltech.39

In considering these statistics, we must take into ac-count that Caliornia is one o our most heavily Asianstates, containing over one-quarter o the total nationalpopulation, but also that a substantial raction o UCstudents are drawn rom other parts o the country. Terecent percentage o Asian NMS semifinalists in Cali-ornia has ranged between 55 percent and 60 percent,while or the rest o America the figure is probably clos-

er to 20 percent, so an overall elite-campus UC Asian-American enrollment o around 40 percent seems rea-sonably close to what a ully meritocratic admissionssystem might be expected to produce.

By contrast, consider the anomalous admissionsstatistics or Columbia. New York City containsAmericas largest urban Asian population, and Asiansare one-third or more o the entire states top scoringhigh school students. Over the last couple o decades,the local Asian population has doubled in size andAsians now constitute over two-thirds o the studentsattending the most selective local high schools such as

Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, perhaps triple the lev-els during the mid-1980s.40Yet whereas in 1993 Asiansmade up 22.7 percent o Columbias undergraduates,the total had dropped to 15.6 percent by 2011. Tesefigures seem extremely difficult to explain except as

evidence o sharp racial bias.

Asian-Americans and Jews

A natural question to consider is the surprising lacko attention this issue seems to have attracted, despitesuch remarkably telling statistics and several articlesover the years in major newspapers by Golden andother prominent journalists. One would think thata widespread practice o racial discrimination byAmericas most elite private universitiesthemselves

leading bastions o Political Correctness and stri-dent anti-racist ideologywould attract much morepublic scrutiny, especially given their long prior his-tory o very similar exclusionary policies with regardto Jewish enrollment.41 Without such scrutiny andthe political mobilization it generates, the status quoseems unlikely to change.42

Indeed, Karabel convincingly demonstrates thatthe collapse o the long-standing Jewish quotas in theIvy League during the decade ollowing World War IIonly occurred as a result o massive media and politi-cal pressure, pressure surely acilitated by very heavy

Jewish ownership o Americas major media organs,including all three television networks, eight o ninemajor Hollywood studios, and many o the leadingnewspapers, including both the New York imesandthe Washington Post. By contrast, Asian-Americanstoday neither own nor control even a single signifi-cant media outlet, and they constitute an almost in-

visible minority in films, television, radio, and print.For most Americans, what the media does not reportsimply does not exist, and there is virtually no majormedia coverage o what appear to be de factoAsianquotas at our top academic institutions.

But beore we conclude that our elite media organsare engaging in an enormous conspiracy o silenceregarding this egregious pattern o racial discrimina-tion at our most prestigious universities, we shouldexplore alternate explanations or these striking re-sults. Perhaps we are considering the evidence romentirely the wrong perspective, and ignoring the mostobviousand relatively innocuousexplanation.

In recent decades, the notion o basing admis-sions on colorblind meritocratic standards such asstandardized academic test scores has hardly been anuncontroversial position, with advocates or a ully



diversified student body being ar more prominentwithin the academic community. Indeed, one o themain attacks against Caliornias 1996 Proposition 209was that its requirement o race-neutrality in admis-sions would destroy the ethnic diversity o Caliornias

higher education system, and the measure was vigor-ously opposed by the vast majority o vocal universityacademics, both within that state and throughout thenation. Most leading progressives have long arguedthat the students selected by our elite institutionsshould at least roughly approximate the distributiono Americas national population, requiring that spe-cial consideration be given to underrepresented orunderprivileged groups o all types.

We must remember that at all the universities dis-cussed above, Asian students are already enrolled innumbers ar above their 5 percent share o the na-

tional population, and the Iron Law o Arithmetic isthat percentages must always total to one hundred. Soi additional slots were allocated to Asian applicants,these must necessarily come rom some other group,perhaps blacks raised in the ghettos o Detroit or des-perately poor Appalachian whites, who might be thefirst in their amilies to attend college. Tese days inAmerica, most Asians are a heavily urbanized, highlyaffluent population,43overwhelmingly part o the mid-dle- or upper-middle class, and boosting their Harvardnumbers rom three times their share o the populationup to five or six might not be regarded as the best pol-

icy when other groups are ar needier. o be sure, thebroad racial category Asian hides enormous internalcomplexitywith Chinese, Koreans, and South Asiansbeing ar more successul than Filipinos, Vietnamese,or Cambodiansbut that is just as true o the equallybroad white or Hispanic labels, which also concealmuch more than they reveal.

Furthermore, elite universitiesexplicitly claim to consider a widerange o other admissions actorsbesides academic perormance.Geographical diversity would cer-

tainly hurt Asian chances sincenearly hal their population livesin just the three states o Calior-nia, New York, and exas.44 opathletes gain a strong admissionsedge, and ew Asians are oundin the upper ranks o basketball,ootball, baseball, and other lead-ing sports, an occasional JeremyLin notwithstanding. Since mostAsians come rom a recent im-migrant background, they would

rarely receive the legacy boost going to studentswhose amilies have been attending the Ivy League orgenerations. And it is perectly possible that ideologi-cal considerations o diversity and equity might makeadministrators reluctant to allow any particular group

to become too heavily over-represented relative to itsshare o the general population. So perhaps highly-qualified Asians are not being rejected as Asians, butsimply due to these pre-existing ideological and struc-tural policies o our top universities, whether or not wehappen to agree with them.45 In act, when an Asianstudent rejected by Harvard filed a complaint o racialdiscrimination with the U.S. Department o Educationearlier this year, the Harvard Crimsondenounced hischarges as ludicrous, arguing that student diversitywas a crucial educational goal and that affirmative ac-tion impacted Asians no more than any other applicant

group.46

Te best means o testing this hypothesis would beto compare Asian admissions with those o a some-what similar control group. One obvious candidatewould be the population o elite East Coast WASPswhich once dominated the Ivy League. Memberso this group should also be negatively impacted byadmissions preerences directed towards applicantsrom rural or impoverished backgrounds, but thereseems considerable anecdotal evidence that they arestill heavily over-represented in the Ivy League rela-tive to their academic perormance or athletic prow-

ess, strengthening the suspicion that Asian applicantsare receiving unair treatment. However, solid statis-tical data regarding this elite WASP subpopulation isalmost non-existent, and anyway the boundaries othe category are quite imprecise and fluid across gen-erations. For example, the two wealthy Winklevosstwins o Greenwich, Conn. and Harvard Facebook

Racial Trends for Americans

Age 18-21, 1972-2011

1972 1980 1990 2000 2011

Whites

Blacks

Hispanics

Asians

Other



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ame might appear to be perect examples o this so-cial class, but their grandather actually had an eighth-grade education and came rom a long line o impov-erished coalminers in rural Pennsylvania.47

Fortunately, an alternate comparison population

is readily available, namely that o American Jews,48

a group which is both reasonably well-defined andone which possesses excellent statistical inormation,gathered by various Jewish organizations and aca-demic scholars. In particular, Hillel, the nationwideJewish student organization with chapters on mostmajor university campuses, has or decades beenproviding extensive data on Jewish enrollment levels.Since Karabels own historical analysis ocuses so veryheavily on Jewish admissions, his book also serves as acompendium o useul quantitative data drawn romthese and similar sources.49

Once we begin separating out the Jewish portiono Ivy League enrollment, our picture o the overalldemographics o the student bodies is completelytransormed. Indeed, Karabel opens the final chaptero his book by perorming exactly this calculation andnoting the extreme irony that the WASP demograph-ic group which had once so completely dominatedAmericas elite universities and virtually all the ma-

jor institutions o American lie had by 2000 becomea small and beleaguered minority at Harvard, beingactually ewer in number than the Jews whose pres-ence they had once sought to restrict.50Very similar

results seem to apply all across the Ivy League, withthe disproportion ofen being even greater than theparticular example emphasized by Karabel.

In act, Harvard reported that 45.0 percent o itsundergraduates in 2011 were white Americans, butsince Jews were 25 percent o the student body, theenrollment o non-Jewish whites might have been aslow as 20 percent, though the true figure was probablysomewhat higher.51Te Jewish levels or Yale and Co-lumbia were also around 25 percent, while white Gen-tiles were 22 percent at the ormer and just 15 percentat the latter. Te remainder o the Ivy League ollowed

this same general pattern.Tis overrepresentation o Jews is really quite ex-

traordinary, since the group currently constitutes just2.1 percent o the general population and about 1.8percent o college-age Americans.52 Tus, althoughAsian-American high school graduates each year out-number their Jewish classmates nearly three-to-one,American Jews are ar more numerous at Harvard andthroughout the Ivy League. Both groups are highlyurbanized, generally affluent, and geographically con-centrated within a ew states, so the diversity actorsconsidered above would hardly seem to apply; yet Jews

seem to are much better at the admissions office.Even more remarkable are the historical trajecto-

ries. As noted earlier, Americas Asian populationhas been growing rapidly over the last couple odecades, so the substantial decline in reported Ivy

League Asian enrollment has actually constituted ahuge drop relative to their raction o the population.Meanwhile, the population o American Jews hasbeen approximately constant in numbers, and agingalong with the rest o the white population, leading toa sharp decline in the national proportion o college-age Jews, alling rom 2.6 percent in 1972 and 2.2 per-cent in 1992 to just 1.8 percent in 2012. Nevertheless,total Jewish enrollment at elite universities has heldconstant or actually increased, indicating a large risein relative Jewish admissions. In act, i we aggregatethe reported enrollment figures, we discover that 4

percent o all college-age American Jews are currentlyenrolled in the Ivy League, compared to just 1 percento Asians and about 0.1 percent o whites o Christianbackground.53

One reasonable explanation or these remarkablestatistics might be that although Asian-Americansare a high-perorming academic group, AmericanJews may be ar higher-perorming, perhaps not un-likely or an ethnicity that gave the world Einstein,Freud, and so many other prominent intellectual fig-ures. Tus, i we assume that our elite universitiesreserve a portion o their slots or diversity while

allocating the remainder based on academic merit,Jews might be handily beating Asians (and everyoneelse) in the latter competition. Indeed, the averageJewish IQ has been widely reported in the range o110115, implying a huge abundance o individualsat the upper reaches o the distribution o intellect. Soperhaps what had seemed like a clear pattern o anti-Asian discrimination is actually just the workings oacademic meritocracy, at least when combined witha fixed allocation o diversity admissions.

Te easiest means o exploring this hypothesis is torepeat much o our earlier examination o Asian aca-

demic perormance, but now to include Jews as parto our analysis. Although Jewish names are not quiteas absolutely distinctive as East or South Asian ones,they can be determined with reasonably good accu-racy, so long as we are careul to note ambiguous casesand recognize that our estimates may easily be off bya small amount; urthermore, we can utilize especiallydistinctive names as a validation check. But strangelyenough, when we perorm this sort o analysis, it be-comes somewhat difficult to locate major current evi-dence o the celebrated Jewish intellect and academicachievement discussed at such considerable length by



Karabel and many other authors.For example, consider Caliornia, second only to

New York in the total number o its Jews, and withits Jewish percentage ar above the national average.Over the last couple o years, blogger Steve Sailer and

some o his commenters have examined the complete2010 and 2012 NMS semifinalist lists o the 2000 or sotop-scoring Caliornia high school seniors or ethnic-ity, and discovered that as ew as 45 percent o thenames seem to be Jewish, a figure not so dramaticallydifferent than the states 3.3 percent Jewish population,and an estimate which I have personally confirmed.54Meanwhile, the states 13 percent Asians account orover 57 percent o the top perorming students. Tus,it appears that Caliornia Asians are perhaps threetimes as likely as Jews to do extremely well on aca-demic tests, and this result remains unchanged i we

adjust or the age distributions o the two populations.One means o corroborating these surprising re-sults is to consider the ratios o particularly distinctiveethnic names, and Sailer reported such exact find-ings made by one o his Jewish readers. For example,across the 2000-odd top scoring Caliornia studentsin 2010, there was just a single NMS semifinalistnamed Cohen, and also one each or Levy, Kaplan,and a last name beginning with Gold. Meanwhile,there were 49 Wangs and 36 Kims, plus a vast num-ber o other highly distinctive Asian names. But ac-cording to Census data, the combined number o

American Cohens and Levys together outnumber theWangs almost two-to-one, and the same is true orthe our most common names beginning with Gold.Put another way, Caliornia contains nearly one-fifho all American Jews, hence almost 60,000 Cohens,Kaplans, Levys, Goldens, Goldsteins, Goldbergs,Goldmans, and Golds, and this population producedonly 4 NMS semifinalists, a ratio almost identical tothat produced by our general last name estimates. Te2012 Caliornia NMS semifinalist lists yield approxi-mately the same ratios.

When we consider the apparent number o Jewish

students across the NMS semifinalist lists o other ma-jor states, we get roughly similar results. New York hasalways been the center o the American Jewish com-munity, and at 8.4 percent is hal again as heavily Jew-ish as any other state, while probably containing a largeraction o Americas Jewish financial and intellectualelite. Just as we might expect, the 2011 roster o NewYork NMS semifinalists is disproportionately filledwith Jewish names, constituting about 21 percent o thetotal, a ratio twice as high as or any other state whosefigures are available. But even here, New Yorks smallerand much less affluent Asian population is ar better

represented, providing around 34 percent o the topscoring students. Jews and Asians are today about equalin number within New York City but whereas a genera-tion ago, elite local public schools such as Stuyvesantwere very heavily Jewish, today Jews are outnumbered

at least several times over by Asians.55

Tis same pattern o relative Asian and Jewish per-ormance on aptitude exams generally appears in theother major states whose recent NMS semifinalist listsI have located and examined, though there is consid-erable individual variability, presumably due to theparticular local characteristics o the Asian and Jew-ish populations. Across six years o Florida results,Asian students are more than twice as likely to be highscorers compared to their Jewish classmates, with thedisparity being nearly as great in Pennsylvania. Terelative advantage o Asians is a huge actor o 5.0 in

Michigan and 4.1 in Ohio, while in Illinois Asians stilldo 150 percent as well as Jews. Among our largeststates, only in exas is the Asian perormance as lowas 120 percent, although Jews are the group that actu-ally does much better in several smaller states, usuallythose in which the Jewish population is tiny.

As noted earlier, NMS semifinalist lists are avail-able or a total o twenty-five states, including theeight largest, which together contain 75 percent oour national population, as well as 81 percent oAmerican Jews and 80 percent o 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 wholewould produce a similar ratio, especially when weconsider that Asian-rich Caliornia has among thetoughest NMS semifinalist qualification thresholds.Meanwhile, the national number o Jewish semifi-nalists comes out at less than 6 percent o the totalbased on direct inspection o the individual names,with estimates based on either the particularly dis-tinctive names considered by Sailer or the ull set osuch highly distinctive names used by Weyl yield-ing entirely consistent figures. Weyl had also ound

this same relative pattern o high Jewish academicperormance being greatly exceeded by even higherAsian perormance, with Koreans and Chinese beingthree or our times as likely as Jews to reach NMSsemifinalist status in the late 1980s, though the over-all Asian numbers were still quite small at the time.56

Earlier we had noted that the tests used to selectNMS semifinalists actually tilted substantially againstAsian students by double-weighting verbal skills andexcluding visuospatial ability, but in the case o Jewsthis same testing-bias has exactly the opposite impact.Jewish ability tends to be exceptionally strong in its



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verbal component and mediocre at best in the visuo-spatial,57so the NMS semifinalist selection methodol-ogy would seem ideally designed to absolutely maxi-mize the number o high-scoring Jews compared toother whites or (especially) East Asians. Tus, the

number o high-ability Jews we are finding should beregarded as an extreme upper bound to a more neu-trally-derived total.

But suppose these estimates are correct, and Asiansoverall are indeed twice as likely as Jews to rankamong Americas highest perorming students. Wemust also consider that Americas Asian populationis ar larger in size, representing roughly 5 percento college-age students, compared to just 1.8 percentor Jews. Tereore, assuming an admissions systembased on strictest objective meritocracy, we would ex-pect our elite academic institutions to contain nearly

five Asians or every Jew; but instead, the Jews are armore numerous, in some important cases by almost aactor o two. Tis raises obvious suspicions about theairness o the Ivy League admissions process.

Once again, we can turn to the enrollment figuresor strictly meritocratic Caltech as a test o our esti-mates. Te campus is located in the Los Angeles area,home to one o Americas largest and most success-ul Jewish communities, and Jews have traditionallybeen strongly drawn to the natural sciences. Indeed,at least three o Caltechs last six presidents have beeno Jewish origin, and the same is true or two o its

most renowned aculty members, theoretical physicsNobel Laureates Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. But Caltechs current undergraduates are just5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have beenaround this level or some years; meanwhile, Asianenrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger. It is in-triguing that the school which admits students basedon the strictest, most objective academic standardshas by a very wide margin the lowest Jewish enroll-ment or any elite university.

Let us next turn to the five most selective campuseso the University o Caliornia system, whose admis-

sions standards shifed substantially toward objectivemeritocracy ollowing the 1996 passage o Prop. 209.Te average Jewish enrollment is just over 8 percent,or roughly one-third that o the 25 percent ound atHarvard and most o the Ivy League, whose admis-sions standards are supposedly ar tougher. Mean-while, some 40 percent o the students on these UCcampuses are Asian, a figure almost five times as high.Once again, almost no elite university in the countryhas a Jewish enrollment as low as the average or thesehighly selective UC campuses.58

Another interesting example is MI, whose students

probably rank fifh in academic strength, just below thethree HYP schools and Caltech, and whose admissionsstandards are ar closer to a meritocratic ideal than isound in most elite schools, though perhaps not quiteas pristine as those o its Caltech rival. Karabel notes

that MI has always had a ar more meritocratic ad-missions system than nearby Harvard, tending to drawthose students who were academic stars even i sociallyundistinguished. As an example, in the 1930s Feyn-man had been rejected by his top choice o Columbiapossibly due to its Jewish quota, and instead enrolledat MI.59But today, MIs enrollment is just 9 percentJewish, a figure lower than that anywhere in the IvyLeague, while Asians are nearly three times as numer-ous, despite the school being located in one o the mostheavily Jewish parts o the country.

Te Strange Collapse of JewishAcademic Achievement

From my own perspective, I ound these statistical re-sults surprising, even shocking.

I had always been well aware o the very heavy Jew-ish presence at elite academic institutions. But theunderwhelming percentage o Jewish students whotoday achieve high scores on academic aptitude testswas totally unexpected, and very different rom theimpressions I had ormed during my own high school

and college years a generation or so ago. An examina-tion o other available statistics seems to support myrecollections and provides evidence or a dramatic re-cent decline in the academic perormance o Ameri-can Jews

Te U.S. Math Olympiad began in 1974, and all thenames o the top scoring students are easily availableon the Internet. During the 1970s, well over 40 per-cent o the total were Jewish, and during the 1980sand 1990s, the raction averaged about one-third.However, during the thirteen years since 2000, justtwo names out o 78 or 2.5 percent appear to be Jew-

ish. Te Putnam Exam is the most difficult and pres-tigious mathematics competition or American col-lege students, with five or six Putnam winners havingbeen selected each year since 1938. Over 40 percento the Putnam winners prior to 1950 were Jewish,and during every decade rom the 1950s through the1990s, between 22 percent and 31 percent o the win-ners seem to have come rom that same ethnic back-ground. But since 2000, the percentage has droppedto under 10 percent, without a single likely Jewishname in the last seven years.

Tis consistent picture o stark ethnic decline recurs



when we examine the statistics or the Science al-ent Search, which has been selecting 40 students asnational finalists or Americas most prestigious highschool science award since 1942, thus providing ahuge statistical dataset o over 2800 top science stu-

dents. During every decade rom the 1950s throughthe 1980s, Jewish students were consistently 2223percent o the recipients, with the percentage then de-clining to 17 percent in the 1990s, 15 percent in the2000s, and just 7 percent since 2010. Indeed, o thethirty top ranked students over the last three years,only a single one seems likely to have been Jewish.Similarly, Jews were over one-quarter o the top stu-dents in the Physics Olympiad rom 1986 to 1997,but have allen to just 5 percent over the last decade, aresult which must surely send Richard Feynman spin-ning in his grave.

Other science competitions provide generally con-sistent recent results, though without the long trackrecord allowing useul historical comparisons. Overthe last dozen years, just 8 percent o the top studentsin the Biology Olympiad have been Jewish, with nonein the last three years. Between 1992 and 2012, only11 percent o the winners o the Computing Olym-piad had Jewish names, as did just 8 percent o theSiemens AP Award winners. And although I haveonly managed to locate the last two years o Chem-istry Olympiad winners, these lists o 40 top studentscontained not a single probable Jewish name.

Further evidence is supplied by Weyl, who estimat-ed that over 8 percent o the 1987 NMS semifinalistswere Jewish,60a figure 35 percent higher than ound intodays results. Moreover, in that period the math and

verbal scores were weighted equally or qualificationpurposes, but afer 1997 the verbal score was double-weighted,61which should have produced a large rise inthe number o Jewish semifinalists, given the verbal-loading o Jewish ability. But instead, todays Jewishnumbers are ar below those o the late 1980s.

aken in combination, these trends all providepowerul evidence that over the last decade or more

there has been a dramatic collapse in Jewish academicachievement, at least at the high end.

Several possible explanations or this empirical resultseem reasonably plausible. Although the innate poten-tial o a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly, achieve-ment is a unction o both ability and effort, and todaysoverwhelmingly affluent Jewish students may be arless diligent in their work habits or driven in their stud-ies than were their parents or grandparents, who livedmuch closer to the bracing challenges o the immigrantexperience. In support o this hypothesis, roughly halo the Jewish Math Olympiad winners rom the last two

decades have had the sort o highly distinctive nameswhich would tend to mark them as recent immigrantsrom the Soviet Union or elsewhere, and such nameswere also very common among the top Jewish sciencestudents o the same period, even though this group

represents only about 10 percent o current AmericanJews. Indeed, it seems quite possible that this large sud-den influx o very high perorming immigrant Jewsrom the late 1980s onward served to partially maskthe rapid concurrent decline o high academic achieve-ment among native American Jews, which otherwisewould have become much more clearly evident a de-cade or so earlier.

Tis pattern o third or ourth generation Ameri-can students lacking the academic drive or intensityo their oreathers is hardly surprising, nor uniqueto Jews. Consider the case o Japanese-Americans,

who mostly arrived in America during roughly thesame era. Americas Japanese have always been ahigh-perorming group, with a strong academictradition, and Japans international PISA academicscores are today among the highest in the world. Butwhen we examine the list o Caliornias NMS semi-finalists, less than 1 percent o the names are Japa-nese, roughly in line with their share o the Calior-nia population.62Meanwhile, Chinese, Koreans, andSouth Asians are 6 percent o Caliornia but contrib-ute 50 percent o the top scoring students, an eight-old better result, with a major likely difference being

that they are overwhelmingly o recent immigrantorigin. In act, although ongoing Japanese immigra-tion has been trivial in size, a significant raction othe top Japanese students have the unassimilatedJapanese first names that would tend to indicate theyare probably drawn rom that tiny group.

In his 1966 book Te Creative Elite in America,Weyl used last name analysis to document a similarlyremarkable collapse in achievement among Ameri-cas Puritan-descended population, which had onceprovided a hugely disproportionate raction o ourintellectual leadership, but or various reasons went

into rapid decline rom about 1900 onward. He alsomentions the disappearance o the remarkable Scot-tish intellectual contribution to British lie afer about1800. Although the evidence or both these historicalparallels seems very strong, the causal actors are notentirely clear, though Weyl does provide some pos-sible explanations.63

In some respects, perhaps it was the enormouslyoutsize Jewish academic perormance o the pastwhich was highly anomalous, and the more recentpartial convergence toward white European normswhich is somewhat less surprising. Over the years,



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claims have been widely circulated that the mean Jew-ish IQ is a ull standard deviation15 pointsabovethe white average o 100,64but this seems to have lit-tle basis in reality. Richard Lynn, one o the worldsoremost IQ experts, has perormed an exhaustive

literature review and located some 32 IQ samples oAmerican Jews, taken rom 1920 to 2008. For the first14 studies conducted during the years 19201937, theJewish IQ came out very close to the white Americanmean, and it was only in later decades that the averagefigure rose to the approximate range o 107111.65

In a previous article Race, IQ & Wealth, I had sug-gested that the IQs o ethnic groups appear to be armore malleable than many people would acknowl-edge, and may be particularly influenced by actorso urbanization, education, and affluence.66 Giventhat Jews have always been Americas most heavily

urbanized population and became the most affluentduring the decades in question, these actors may ac-count or a substantial portion o their huge IQ riseduring most o the twentieth century. But with mod-ern electronic technology recently narrowing the gapsin social environment and educational opportunitiesbetween Americas rural and urban worlds, we mightexpect a portion o this difference to gradually dissi-pate. American Jews are certainly a high-ability popu-lation, but the innate advantage they have over otherhigh-ability white populations is probably ar smallerthan is widely believed.

Tis conclusion is supported by the General SocialSurvey (GSS), an online dataset o tens o thousandso American survey responses rom the last orty yearswhich includes the Wordsum vocabulary test, a veryuseul IQ proxy correlating at 0.71. Converted into thecorresponding IQ scores, the Wordsum-IQ o Jews isindeed quite high at 109. But Americans o English,Welsh, Scottish, Swedish, and Catholic Irish ancestryalso have airly high mean IQs o 104 or above, andtheir combined populations outnumber Jews by al-most 15-to-1, implying that they would totally domi-nate the upper reaches o the white American ability

distribution, even i we excluded the remaining two-thirds o all American whites, many o whose IQs arealso airly high. Furthermore, all these groups are arless highly urbanized or affluent than Jews,67 prob-ably indicating that their scores are still artificiallydepressed to some extent. We should also remem-ber that Jewish intellectual perormance tends to bequite skewed, being exceptionally strong in the verbalsubcomponent, much lower in math, and completelymediocre in visuospatial ability; thus, a completely

verbal-oriented test such as Wordsum would actuallytend to exaggerate Jewish IQ.

Stratiying the white American population alongreligious lines produces similar conclusions. Ananalysis o the data rom the National LongitudinalSurvey o Youth ound that Americans raised in theEpiscopal Church actually exceeded Jews in mean

IQ, while several other religious categories camequite close, leading to the result that the overwhelm-ing majority o Americas high-ability white popula-tion had a non-Jewish background.68

Finally, in the case o Jews, these assimilation- orenvironment-related declines in relative academicperormance may have been reinorced by poweruldemographic trends. For the last generation or two,typical Jewish women rom successul or even ordi-nary amilies have married very late and averaged littlemore than a single child, while the small raction oJewish women who are ultra-Orthodox ofen marry in

their teens and then produce seven or eight children.69

As a consequence, this extremely religious subpopula-tion has been doubling in size every twenty years, andnow easily exceeds 10 percent o the total, including aar higher percentage o younger Jews. But ultra-Or-thodox Jews have generally been academically medio-cre, ofen with enormously high rates o poverty andgovernment dependency.70 Tereore, the combina-tion o these two radically different trends o Jewishreproduction has acted to stabilize the total number oJewish youngsters, while probably producing a sharpdrop in their average academic achievement.

Meritocracy vs. Jews

Although the relative importance o these individualactors behind Jewish academic decline is unclear, thedecline itsel seems an unmistakable empirical act,and the widespread unawareness o this act has hadimportant social consequences.

My casual mental image o todays top Americanstudents is based upon my memories o a generationor so ago, when Jewish students, sometimes includ-

ing mysel, regularly took home a quarter or more othe highest national honors on standardized tests orin prestigious academic competitions; thus, it seemedperectly reasonable that Harvard and most o theother Ivy League schools might be 25 percent Jewish,based on meritocracy. But the objective evidence indi-cates that in present day America, only about 6 percento our top students are Jewish, which now renders suchvery high Jewish enrollments at elite universities totallyabsurd and ridiculous. I strongly suspect that a similartime lag effect is responsible or the apparent conusionin many others who have considered the topic.



For example, throughout his very detailed book,Karabel always seems to automatically identiy in-creasing Jewish enrollments with academic meritoc-racy, 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 toearn his Ph.D. in 1977, so this may indeed have beenthe reality during his ormative years.71But he seemsstrikingly unaware that the world has changed sincethen, and that over the last decade or two, meritocracyand Jewish numbers have become opposing orces:the stricter the meritocratic standard, the ewer theJews admitted.

Most o my preceding analysis has ocused on thecomparison o Asians with Jews, and I have point-ed out that based on actors o objective academic

perormance and population size, we would expectAsians to outnumber Jews by perhaps five to one atour top national universities; instead, the total Jew-ish numbers across the Ivy League are actually 40percent higher. Tis implies that Jewish enrollmentis roughly 600 percent greater relative to Asians thanshould be expected under a strictly meritocratic ad-missions system.

Obviously, all these types o analysis may be appliedjust as easily to a comparison o Jews with non-Jewishwhites, and the results turn out to be equally strik-ing. Te key actor is that although Jewish academic

achievement has apparently plummeted in recent de-cades, non-Jewish whites seem to have remained rela-tively unchanged in their perormance, which mightbe expected in such a large and diverse population.As a consequence, the relative proportions o top-perorming students have undergone a dramatic shif.

We must bear in mind that the official U.S. Cen-sus category o Non-Hispanic white (which I willhenceorth label white) is something o an ethnichodgepodge, encompassing all the various white Eu-ropean ancestry groups, as well as a substantial ad-mixture o North Aricans, Middle Easterners, Ira-

nians, urks, Armenians, and Aghans. It amountsto everyone who is not black, Hispanic, Asian, orAmerican Indian, and currently includes an estimat-ed 63 percent o all Americans.

Determining the number o whites among NMSsemifinalists or winners o various academic com-petitions is relatively easy. Both Asian and Hispanicnames are quite distinctive, and their numbers canbe estimated by the methods already discussed.Meanwhile, blacks are substantially outnumberedby Hispanics and they have much weaker academicperormance, so they would produce ar ewer very

high scoring students. Tereore, we can approxi-mate the number o whites by merely subtracting thenumber o Asian and Hispanic names as well as anestimated black total based on the latter figure, andthen determine the number o white Gentiles by also

subtracting the Jewish total.Once we do this and compare the Jewish and non-Jewish white totals or various lists o top academicperormers, we notice a striking pattern, with thehistorical ratios once ranging rom near-equalityto about one-in-our up until the recent collapsein Jewish perormance. For example, among MathOlympiad winners, white Gentiles scarcely outnum-bered Jews during the 1970s, and held only a three-to-two edge during the 1980s and 1990s, but since2000 have become over fifeen times as numerous.Between 1938 and 1999, Putnam Exam winners had

averaged about two white Gentiles or every Jew,with the ratios or each decade oscillating between1.5 and 3.0, then rising to nearly 5-to-1 during 20012005, and without a single Jewish name on the win-ner list rom 2006 onward.

Te elite science competitions ollow a broadlysimilar pattern. Non-Jewish whites had only outnum-bered Jews 2-to-1 among the Physics Olympiad win-ners during 19861997, but the ratio rose to at least7-to-1 during 20022012. Meanwhile, white Gentileswere more numerous by nearly 6-to-1 among 19922012 Computing Olympiad winners, 4-to-1 among

the 20022011 Siemens AP Award winners, and over3-to-1 among 20032012 Biology Olympiad champi-ons. Across the sixty-odd years o Americas Sciencealent Search, Jews had regularly been named finalistsat a relative rate fifeen- or even twenty-times that otheir white Gentile classmates, but over the last de-cade or so, this has dropped by hal.

Te evidence o the recent NMS semifinalist listsseems the most conclusive o all, given the huge sta-tistical sample sizes involved. As discussed earlier,these students constitute roughly the highest 0.5 per-cent in academic ability, the top 16,000 high school

seniors who should be enrolling at the Ivy Leagueand Americas other most elite academic universi-ties. In Caliornia, white Gentile names outnumberJewish ones by over 8-to-1; in exas, over 20-to-1;in Florida and Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in NewYork, Americas most heavily Jewish state, there aremore than two high-ability white Gentile studentsor every Jewish one. Based on the overall distribu-tion o Americas population, it appears that approx-imately 6570 percent o Americas highest abilitystudents are non-Jewish whites, well over ten timesthe Jewish total o under 6 percent.



Education

Period N/J White Asian Jewish

20022011 31% 61% 8%

U.S. Math Olympiad Teams

Competition N/J White Asian Jewish

Computing, 19922012 62% 27% 11%

Biology, 20032012 25% 68% 8%

Chemistry, 20112012 10% 90% 0%

U.S. Physics Olympiad Winners

College Putnam Math Winners

Science Olympiad Winners

Siemens Science AP Winners

Science Talent Search Finalists


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%

0

20

40

60

80

100%

0

20

40

60

80

100%

0

20

40

60

80

100%

0

20

40

60

80

100%

0

20

40

60

80

100%

1970-74 1975-79 1980-84 1985-89 1990-94 1995-99 2000-04 2005-09 2010-12

1938-42 1950-54 1960-64 1970-74 1980-84 1990-94 2000-04 2010-12

1986-89 1990-94 1995-99 2000-04 2005-09 2010-12

Computing,

1992-2012

Biology,

2003-2012

Chemistry,

2011-2012

1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s

N/J White

Asians

Jewish


1970s 56% 0% 44%

1980s 54% 9% 37%

1990s 45% 27% 28%

2000s 43% 53% 3%

2010s 28% 72% 0%


193849 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%


1980s 49% 23% 28%

1990s 55% 25% 20%

2000s 46% 46% 9%

2010s 14% 81% 5%



State/Years Total (2011) N/J White Asian Jewish

Alabama/2008, 2010 208 83% 14% 2%

Arizona/2013 342 68% 26% 5%

California/2010, 2012 1,999 37% 58% 4%

Colorado/2012, 2013 256 78% 14% 7%

Florida/2008-13 867 74% 13% 8%

Illinois/2011-2013 693 71% 21% 8%

Indiana/2010, 2012-13 327 75% 18% 5%

Iowa/2011 191 80% 15% 4%

Kansas/2011 159 87% 9% 4%

Louisiana/2013 190 76% 19% 5%

Maryland/2010 327 57% 32% 11%

Michigan/2012, 2013 570 68% 30% 2%

Minnesota/2010, 2011 318 81% 13% 6%

Missouri/2011 344 87% 11% 2%

Nevada/2010, 2011 85 67% 20% 9%

New Mexico/2011 99 76% 11% 6%

New York/2011, 2012 957 45% 34% 21%

Ohio/2012, 2013 642 76% 20% 4%

Oklahoma/2008 187 83% 14% 3%

Pennsylvania/2012 700 72% 20% 9%

Tennessee/2010 279 80% 17% 2%

Texas/2010 1,344 68% 28% 3%

Virginia/2009 411 74% 19% 6%

Washington/2013 344 64% 31% 5%

Wisconsin/2012 324 87% 11% 3%

Eight Largest States 7,772 60% 33% 7%

25 State Aggregate 12,163 65% 28% 6%

National (estimated) 16,317 65-70% 25-30% 6%

Elite University Undergraduate Enrollments, 2007-2011

Recent NMS Seminalists for Available States

University Non-JewishWhite

Asian UnknownRace

Jewish

Harvard 18% 16% 12% 26%

Yale 20% 14% 11% 26%

Princeton 37% 16% 5% 13%

Brown 22% 15% 12% 24%

Columbia 15% 16% 10% 25%

Cornell 24% 16% 14% 23%

Dartmouth 42% 14% 6% 11%Penn 17% 18% 13% 27%

All Ivy League 23% 16% 11% 23%

Caltech 33% 39% 2% 6%

MIT 27% 25% 6% 9%

Stanford 28% 21% 4% 10%

UC Berkeley 21% 40% 7% 10%

UCLA 24% 37% 4% 9%

Non-Jewish White

Asian

Jewish

Non-Jewish White

Asian

Unknown Race

Jewish

NationalAverage6%

26.5%

66.5%

Harvard Yale Princeton All Ivy Caltech

0

20

40

60

80%

CA FL IL MI NY OH PA TX

Eight Largest States,

by Percentage

Source: Appendices C-F



Education

Needless to say, these proportions are considerablydifferent rom what we actually find among the ad-mitted students at Harvard and its elite peers, whichtoday serve as a direct unnel to the commandingheights o American academics, law, business, and

finance. Based on reported statistics, Jews approxi-mately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whitesat Harvard and most o the other Ivy League schools,which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the o-ficial statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Har-

vard are Americas most under-represented popula-tion group, enrolled at a much lower raction o theirnational population than blacks or Hispanics, despitehaving ar higher academic test scores.

When examining statistical evidence, the properaggregation o data is critical. Consider theratio o the recent 20072011 enrollment o Asianstudents at Harvard relative to their estimated shareo Americas recent NMS semifinalists, a reasonableproxy or the high-ability college-age population, andcompare this result to the corresponding figure orwhites. Te Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly abovethe white ratio o 61 percent, with both these figuresbeing considerably below parity due to the substan-tial presence o under-represented racial minoritiessuch as blacks and Hispanics, oreign students, andstudents o unreported race. Tus, there appears tobe no evidence or racial bias against Asians, even

excluding the race-neutral impact o athletic recruit-ment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.However, i we separate out the Jewish students, their

ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ra-tio or non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, lessthan hal o even the Asian figure. As a consequence,Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews bya actor o seven, while non-Jewish whites are by arthe most under-represented group o all, despite anybenefits they might receive rom athletic, legacy, orgeographical distribution actors. Te rest o the IvyLeague tends to ollow a similar pattern, with the over-

all Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian figure at62 percent, and the ratio or non-Jewish whites a low35 percent, all relative to their number o high-abilitycollege-age students.

Just as striking as these wildly disproportionatecurrent numbers have been the longer enrollmenttrends. In the three decades since I graduated Har-

vard, the presence o white Gentiles has dropped byas much as 70 percent, despite no remotely compa-rable decline in the relative size or academic peror-mance o that population; meanwhile, the percent-age o Jewish students has actually increased. Tis

period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the numbero Asian, Hispanic, and oreign students, as well assome increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd thatall o these other gains would have come at the ex-pense o whites o Christian background, and none

at the expense o Jews.Furthermore, the Harvard enrollment changesover the last decade have been even more unusualwhen we compare them to changes in the underlyingdemographics. Between 2000 and 2011, the relativepe

the myth of american meritocracy-unz

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