I applied to college one evening, after dinner, in the fall of my senior year in high school. College applicants in Ontario, in those days, were given a single sheet of paper which listed all the universities in the province. It was my job to rank them in order of preference. Then I had to mail the sheet of paper to a central college-admissions office. The whole process probably took ten minutes. My school sent in my grades separately. I vaguely remember filling out a supplementary two-page form listing my interests and activities. There were no S.A.T. scores to worry about, because in Canada we didn’t have to take the S.A.T.s. I don’t know whether anyone wrote me a recommendation. I certainly never asked anyone to. Why would I? It wasn’t as if I were applying to a private club.
I put the University of Toronto first on my list, the University of Western Ontario second, and Queen’s University third. I was working off a set of brochures that I’d sent away for. My parents’ contribution consisted of my father’s agreeing to drive me one afternoon to the University of Toronto campus, where we visited the residential college I was most interested in. I walked around. My father poked his head into the admissions office, chatted with the admissions director, and—I imagine—either said a few short words about the talents of his son or (knowing my father) remarked on the loveliness of the delphiniums in the college flower beds. Then we had ice cream. I got in.
Am I a better or more successful person for having been accepted at the University of Toronto, as opposed to my second or third choice? It strikes me as a curious question. In Ontario, there wasn’t a strict hierarchy of colleges. There were several good ones and several better ones and a number of programs—like computer science at the University of Waterloo—that were world-class. But since all colleges were part of the same public system and tuition everywhere was the same (about a thousand dollars a year, in those days), and a B average in high school pretty much guaranteed you a spot in college, there wasn’t a sense that anything great was at stake in the choice of which college we attended. The issue was whether we attended college, and—most important—how seriously we took the experience once we got there. I thought everyone felt this way. You can imagine my confusion, then, when I first met someone who had gone to Harvard.
There was, first of all, that strange initial reluctance to talk about the matter of college at all—a glance downward, a shuffling of the feet, a mumbled mention of Cambridge. “Did you go to Harvard?” I would ask. I had just moved to the United States. I didn’t know the rules. An uncomfortable nod would follow. Don’t define me by my school, they seemed to be saying, which implied that their school actually could define them. And, of course, it did. Wherever there was one Harvard graduate, another lurked not far behind, ready to swap tales of late nights at the Hasty Pudding, or recount the intricacies of the college-application essay, or wonder out loud about the whereabouts of Prince So-and-So, who lived down the hall and whose family had a place in the South of France that you would not believe. In the novels they were writing, the precocious and sensitive protagonist always went to Harvard; if he was troubled, he dropped out of Harvard; in the end, he returned to Harvard to complete his senior thesis. Once, I attended a wedding of a Harvard alum in his fifties, at which the best man spoke of his college days with the groom as if neither could have accomplished anything of greater importance in the intervening thirty years. By the end, I half expected him to take off his shirt and proudly display the large crimson “H” tattooed on his chest. What is this “Harvard” of which you Americans speak so reverently?
相对于我的第二位和第三位选择,我是否因为被多伦多大学录取而成为一个更好更成功的人呢?这是我心里一直嘀咕的问题。在安省,大学没有严格的分档次。有一些好大学,有一些相对更好些,还有一些世界级的专业,比如滑铁卢大学的计算机。 但是因为所有的大学都是属于同一个公立大学系统,学费也都一样 (那时才几千元一年),一个高中成绩平均为B的学生基本能保证进大学。从来没有觉得挑选去哪一所大学上学是一件很重要的事。当时我们考虑的是要不要上大学,更主要的是,我们是否很看重在学校里的体验。我一直以为大家都是一样认为的。直到有一天我遇到了一个哈佛毕业生。你们可以想象我的错愕。首先,在谈论大学的时候有一种奇怪的勉强感觉,垂目扫一眼,挪挪脚,含糊地提一下剑桥(波士顿的一个区,哈佛所在地)。我问他,你是哈佛的?那时我刚到美国,不懂得规矩。他不自然地点了下头。他似乎在对我说不要以我的母校来判定我的水平, 其实又在暗示我他上的学校事实上可以表示他的水平。那是肯定的。在哪里只要有一个哈佛毕业的,不远处就会有另一个哈佛的,谈论着哪些深夜发生在Hasty Pudding(哈佛戏剧俱乐部) 俱乐部的故事,回忆大学入学申请论文的复杂,或者会大声询问,那个住在走廊另一端的什么王子现在在哪里,他家住在法国南部一个不可思议的地方。他们所写的小说中, 那些早熟灵敏的主角总是上哈佛的, 如果他有了麻烦,就从哈佛辍学, 最后他又回到哈佛完成他的毕业论文。有一次我参加了一个五十多岁哈佛校友的婚礼,伴郎提起他跟新郎一起在哈佛的那些日子时,似乎觉得如果不是哈佛的那段经历,他俩可能会在这毕业后三十年里一事无成。到最后,我差点以为他会脱掉他的衬衣,自豪地展示他胸脯上刺着个哈佛深红色大H的刺青。这到底是个什么样的哈佛能让你们美国人这么虔诚?
小树分割线 小树分割线 小树分割线 小树分割线
In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation for a school that historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex.
As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”
The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea—a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body—was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.
The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the “character” of candidates from “persons who know the applicants well,” and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities. “Starting in the fall of 1922,” Karabel writes, “applicants were required to answer questions on ‘Race and Color,’ ‘Religious Preference,’ ‘Maiden Name of Mother,’ ‘Birthplace of Father,’ and ‘What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).’ “
At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major boarding schools, with instructions to rate potential candidates on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was “very desirable and apparently exceptional material from every point of view” and 4 was “undesirable from the point of view of character, and, therefore, to be excluded no matter what the results of the entrance examinations might be.” The personal interview became a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, “to ensure that ‘undesirables’ were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment and physical appearance.” By 1933, the end of Lowell’s term, the percentage of Jews at Harvard was back down to fifteen per cent.
If this new admissions system seems familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day. According to Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn’t abandon the elevation of character once the Jewish crisis passed. They institutionalized it.
Starting in 1953, Arthur Howe, Jr., spent a decade as the chair of admissions at Yale, and Karabel describes what happened under his guidance:
小阿瑟 豪从1953起任耶鲁大学新生录取主任。卡拉贝尔描述了在小阿瑟指导下耶鲁录取的变化:
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.” Another candidate, admitted despite his schoolwork being “mediocre in comparison with many others,” was accepted over an applicant with a much better record and higher exam scores because, as Howe put it, “we just thought he was more of a guy.” So preoccupied was Yale with the appearance of its students that the form used by alumni interviewers actually had a physical characteristics checklist through 1965. Each year, Yale carefully measured the height of entering freshmen, noting with pride the proportion of the class at six feet or more.
Princeton University提高18.3%
Columbia University提高16%
Cornell University提高10%
Yale University提高9.1%
University of Pennsylvania提高7%
Harvard University提高5%
Brown University提高4.6%
Dartmouth College提高3.7%
大家一定要记住:Show not tell是写文书的第一原则!当你想要表达自己某个方面特点的时候,切忌直接地刻画自己的人物形象表明自己优点。自己的优点一定要从侧面表达,让读者自己去感受与判断。类似于“我历经了千辛万苦”这样的表述简直就是在直接告诉读者“你看我有多坚强”。然而想必大家一定知道,“直接告诉别人自己的优点”简直就是装逼的定义。