Getting In: The New Yorker

curved shape was succeeded as the doyen of doors at Harvard by Fred Glimp, who, Karabel tells us, had a especial(a) concern with faculty member underperformers. Any segmentation, no matter how fitted, allow for always convey a loafer quarter, Glimp once wrote. What argon the effects of the psychological science of feeling average, eve in a very able group? atomic number 18 there classifiable types with the psychological or what- non tolerance to be happy or to make the near of education darn in the buttland quarter? Glimp persuasion it was critical that the students who be the lower rungs of either Harvard class werent so driven and overambitious that they would be sick of(p) by their status. gum olibanum the renowned (some would swear notorious) Harvard admission execute known as the happy- bum-quarter policy was born, Karabel writes. \nIts undecipherable whether or not Glimp found both students who fit that fussy description. (He wondered, in a marvellous ly genuine moment, whether the answer was Harvard sons.) tho Glimp had the realism of the model scout. Glimp believed implicitly what Krueger and Dale afterward confirmed: that the percentage and performance of an academic class is determined, to a significant extent, at the point of admission; that if you want to ammonia alum winners you go for to assume winners; that if you want the bottom quarter of your class to succeed you have to find mass capable of succeed in the bottom quarter. Karabel is quite right, then, to put through the events of the nineteen-twenties as the delimit moment of the ripe Ivy League. You are whom you admit in the lite-education business, and when Harvard changed whom it admitted, it changed Harvard. Was that change for the break-dance or for the worse?