Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubashov | Hacker News Reader

The assertion that "elite" status is more meritocratic today than in the past (in America) is highly questionable. Go look at 100 year old university admissions tests. Note that they didn't care what "clubs" you were in.

Brooks goes on about diversity and the decline of WASP dominance as an obvious sign of the shift to meritocracy. This out of hand dismisses the possibility the WASPs just actually were/are elite. Why is this a fair assumption?

http://blog.jim.com/culture/not-the-cognitive-elite-3.html

View on HN

Yes, but they cared very much whether you were Jewish, black or female. And they still care if your parents went to school there.

On black and Jewish I'm not going to take your point as granted. I'd need an unbiased analysis.

Instead of being lazy, why don't you google the question? Even a simple query like 'jewish discrimination college' will give you materials to work with, ranging from US immigration policy restricting Eastern Europeans to the SAT being devised for reducing Jewish enrollment in elite universities, and if you go far enough afield, you will find gems like the 'Jewish questions' (compiled in a paper on ArXiv) that Soviet Russia used to block any but the very most brilliant Jewish mathematics students from higher education.

Then your knowledge of American history is sorely lacking.

Uh...

I don't think this "rubashov" guy is an American. No American could possibly have THAT pointed a lack of knowledge of our history. Our educational system is not THAT bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus...

President Lowell of Harvard tried to impose a 12% quota on Jewish admits in the early 20th century, and also attempted to exclude African American students from residing in the freshman dorms. You can find similar behavior at other universities until well after WWII ended. For example, Georgetown's first black student enrolled in 1950.

OK, so some colleges in the 20s and 30s discriminated against Jews and others (vast majority?) didn't. Your link goes on about Feynman and Salk going to NYU and MIT instead of their first choices. These men both easily found their way to the elite.

The question is not, "were some geniuses able to surmount discrimination", but "was there discrimination".

Your intellectual dishonesty is showing.

It's possible you're not American and thus unaware, but with black students in particular, it wasn't subtle discrimination, but outright bans: many universities, up until the 1960s, explicitly prohibited black students.

You are ignorant of basic facts, to the point that you should be ashamed of the laziness implicit in your reply.

Do some research, starting with googling "Jim Crow" and "Jewish quota".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com