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> Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process".

They switched to that in the 30s because, and these are not my words, "Jews were overrunning the campuses".

Now it is being used to keep, and these are not my words, "Asians from overrunning the campuses".

This has been known for decades: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in

That's why sitting in an empty room 30 minutes a week arguing about what to put on a poster as a "student government" officer weighs as much as an A+ in math during the admissions process.

It's affirmative action for a certain class of people, but not the one everyone seems to think it is for.

The Ivies (and nearly every organization for that matter) only cares about underrepresented classes enough to keep people off their backs, what they really want to do is preserve the "feel" of the institution and that means a different class of individual who may need a leg up because their grades ain't cutting it.

> The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.”

In other words, they want white frat guys with pastel polo shirts, khaki shorts, boat shoes and (most importantly) mommy and daddy's money who slacked off in school so now they have to weigh laxbro-ness heavily during admission to ram those types through the system.

The most deliciously ironic part of all of this is that the class of people that actually benefits from this form of affirmative action is the one most likely to believe in meritocracy, which has never, will never, and does not exist in any form anywhere: unless your employer interviewed every qualified human being on earth and you were indeed the most qualified of the lot, it wasn't a meritocratic hire.

You may have been the most qualified of those with the temporal, informational, or geographic attributes needed to self-select for the job, but that ain't a meritocracy.

I think you're missing part of the point of the article. Of the current nine Supreme Court justices, how many went to an Ivy League school? All nine.

Out of the last 10 presidents, how many went to an Ivy League school? Seven. (The exceptions are Reagan, Carter, and Nixon. If I had asked how many of the most recent 5 presidents, the answer would be five.)

How many of the current US Senators and Representatives went to Ivy League schools? I'm not going to do the research to answer that, but I bet it's at least the majority, and probably the overwhelming majority.

As the article said, it's the "ocracy" part. We want merit in those who run things. But in those who rule, we also want that they understand where the rest of us are coming from.

This is why I think of the Ivy League people as the ruling class of this country.

This is also one reason I find the woke Ivy League left so ridiculous. They see themselves as fighting the power. If you think they are the power, they look very different.

If you think that they know that they are the power, things look still different. Then the "woke-ness" is just a technique of manipulation and maintaining their power.

I suspect that some know, and some don't. But I'm not of that class, and I have no concrete information on how they think.

I recall George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court and she didn't get appointed. Right, it was Harriet Miers. So instead Samuel Alito was appointed.

> George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court

She went to Southern Methodist University, not an Ivy but also far from a community college.

Also, in the South SMU Law holds as much weight as Ivy Law as far as credentials go.

Southern Methodist University (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Methodist_University) is not now, and never has been, a community college.

As for the "not being appointed",

"Miers met with the Senate Judiciary Committee after her nomination and in those meetings she was ill-prepared and uninformed on the law.[25] Senator Tom Coburn told her privately that she "flunked" and "[was] going to have to say something next time."[25] Miers had difficulty expressing her views and explaining basic constitutional law concepts.[26] Miers had no experience in constitutional law and did not have extensive litigation experience; at her Texas law firm, she had been more of a manager.[27] In addition, Miers had rarely handled appeals and did not understand the complicated constitutional questions senators asked of her.[27] To White House lawyers, Miers was "less an attorney than a law firm manager and bar association president."[28]

"In an unprecedented move, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter and ranking Democrat Patrick Leahy also requested that Miers re-do some of her answers to the questionnaire submitted to her by the Committee, noting that her responses were "inadequate", "insufficient", and "insulting" because she failed or refused to adequately answer various questions with acceptable accuracy or with sufficient detail.[29] Miers also was claimed to have privately expressed a belief in the right to privacy to the pro-choice Arlen Specter, only to later deny that she had communicated that position.[30] Her answers also included an error on constitutional law where she mentioned an explicit constitutional right for proportional representation; though many court rulings have found that legislative and other districts of unequal population violate the equal protection clause, the right to proportional districts is not explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution.[31]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Miers

Harriet Miers didn't go to an Ivy League school, but she also never served as any type of judge, and had no other background in constitutional law like litigation or academia. Now, in previous generations people with no direct judicial experience were appointed to the Supreme Court and served well, like Earl Warren, but this has not been customary for quite some time, and Miers did not have massive outside accomplishments like Warren (3-time Governor of California).

Miers was just tremendously unqualified for the job and was nominated because she was really close buddies with GW Bush and GWB lived his whole life based on personal loyalties and relationships.

> How many of the current US Senators and Representatives went to Ivy League schools? I'm not going to do the research to answer that, but I bet it's at least the majority, and probably the overwhelming majority.

You would lose your bet, especially in the House of Representatives, where less than one in six went to an Ivy League school. Just take a look at the Education column in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the...

Among current Senators, I find that 29 = 12 (R) + 16 (D) + 1 (I) went to Ivy League Schools and 71 = 41 (R) + 29 (D) + 1 (I) didn't. Only one person in the leadership of the majority party (10 people, including the president of the Senate--himself not a Senator) went to an Ivy League school. Leadership is indicated by an ﹡ below.

Ivy: (R) Braun, Cotton, Crapo﹡, Cruz, Hawley, Hoeven, McSally, Portman, Romney, Sasse, Sullivan, Toomey, (D) Bennet, Blumenthal, Booker, Brown, Coons, Gillibrand, Hassan, Kaine, Klobuchar﹡, Merkley﹡, Reed, Schumer﹡, Smith, Van Hollen, Warner﹡, Whitehouse, (I) King

Not Ivy: (R) Alexander, Barrasso﹡, Blackburn, Blunt﹡, Boozman, Burr, Capito, Cassidy, Collins, Cornyn, Cramer, Daines, Enzi, Ernst﹡, Fischer, Gardner, Graham, Grassley﹡, Hyde-Smith, Inhofe, Johnson, Kennedy, Lankford, Lee﹡, Loeffler, McConnell﹡, Moran, Murkowski, Paul, Perdue, Risch, Roberts, Rounds, Rubio, R. Scott, T. Scott, Shelby, Thune﹡, Tillis, Wicker, Young﹡, (D) Baldwin﹡, Cantwell, Cardin, Carper, Casey Jr., Cortez Masto﹡, Duckworth, Durbin﹡, Feinstein, Harris, Heinrich, Hirono, Jones, Leahy﹡, Manchin﹡, Markey, Menendez, Murphy, Murray﹡, Peters, Rosen, Schatz, Shaheen, Sinema, Stabenow﹡, Tester, Udall, Warren﹡, Wyden, (I) Sanders﹡

Ivies manage the demographics of the study body for political reasons, but you can rest assured that this is an added priority to securing the best and brightest. Prestige is rarely completely without substance.

> There's a whole world outside of this author's, full of mostly good people who just want good people to do good jobs.

I don't think you're wrong, per se, but that "mostly good people" do not rule the world, and this is no coincidence. They're not ruthless and driven enough to end up on top. See Nils Gilman's "Twin Insurgency": https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-in...

> don't even pretend to be objective any more

Could you say more about why you think they ever were objective? From the get-go, the Ivies were explicitly for the white male children of well-off white men. I know the Industrial Revolution changed American higher education some, as there was a sudden need for a lot of agricultural and technical education, making it less of a class marker. But My impression is that the Ivies stayed pretty aloof from that.

But out of that limited pool, they could have some half-hearted attempt at objectivity and not worry about the wrong type of person getting in, since they'd do the real screening at step 1 in the process.

The problem is that the objective criteria aren't much better. What do we mean? GPA? Test score?

Those correlate maybe .4 with first year GPA in school, and even less with later criteria. So, putting aside variability from one day to the next in when you take the test, inequities in students' preparedness on the day of the exam, etc and so forth, you're left empirically with a fairly weak correlation with one very immediate criterion, that gets even weaker with time.

I don't disagree with your concerns at some level, but think the alternative has its problems too. We discuss "merit" as if people can't change, can't improve, and that, more importantly, all the proxies we assess are equal to what we're really looking for. And then we use it as some statement about individual ability as an inherent, perfectly assessed metric.

Imagine if we measured people's weights at age 18 with a scale that correlated only .40 with true weight, and then used that as an index of physical fitness that then determined important trajectories in their lives. It sounds absurd because it is.

Meritocracy is broken because we've become used to treating proxy metrics as equal to the real attribute of interest, and assuming that attribute can't change and is fixed with time. I think a lot of the problems we have in the US all come back to this, whether it be inequality, resentment, distrust, or dysfunction: there's very much a class divide built on sand, and a sort of daily cognitive dissonance we're asked to just accept.

I'm not saying these purely holistic strategies are better or worse; I have no problems with "objective" criteria, if used appropriately, but now they're not used appropriately.