Word: mans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This does not mean that the 24-man admissions committee-composed of staff and a varying number of Faculty-has only to rate its 7000 applicants on "personality," and then simply accept the 1400 or so with the highest ratings; for example, no student will be accepted unless the committee believes he can at least get C's here. But it does mean that an outsider, given only the computer data and asked to guess which applicants the committee will accept, will come close if he chooses those with the highest personal ratings, tossing in about 100 students...
Hunch material can be found almost anywhere. One applicant in the early sixties, for example, concluded his autobiographical essay with the sentence, "I aspire to become a student at Harvard so that I may live and work with the creme de la creme. " That young man from Illinois had an academic rating of 2, and achievement scores over 780 in both American History and Chemistry. But his personal rating was 4, and he was rejected. "That kind of phrase can ruin you," Peterson says...
This reliance on the instantaneous reaction of interviewers, the wording of autobiographies, and the readability of reports appears subjective enough, but is only the beginning. Perhaps the pivotal factor is how all this already subjective data is assessed by the applicant's advocate-the man who must present a student's case to the admissions board...
...student is accepted by the area committee, his case must come up again before the full committee, since far too many students are accepted on the first run-through. Here the advocate must not only argue his man's case, but convince a majority of those present that his is a better applicant than some others whose cases are being argued...
While the selection process now approaches the ultimate in meritocracy, with each man considered as an individual who might or might not profit from four years at Harvard, there is nonetheless an incredible statistical consistency to the Harvard classes. The number of students admitted from California never doubles from one year to the next, and Exeter is never shut out completely. The number of Harvard sons admitted stays rather constant (although the number rejected is increasing rapidly), and the ratio of public school students to private school students changes at a slow and smooth rate, in the direction...