The Changing Face of Joe Harvard

In 1933, Harvard College admitted 82 of every 100 applicants. The Class of 1937 was overwhelmingly white, male, wealthy and Northeastern.

Times have changed since then, though the numerical majority of Harvard students is not that far away from the Joe Harvard '37 profile: White and male, maybe a little less affluent, probably a lot smarter.

As the number of applicants to the College continues to rise, choosing who gets in has become a far more complicated process than a simple consideration of grades and pedigree--though both can help, even today.

This year, Harvard's admit rate was the toughest in the country at 16.3 percent, and its matriculation rate was 75.2 percent, the highest in recent years.

The Class of 1996, by most measures, continues Harvard's steady progress towards diversity by academic interest, by race and by talent.

In recent years, admissions recruiters have highlighted Harvard's increasing diversity as a major selling point to potential applicants, even over educational quality or institutional prestige.

This year's first-year class has more women (42 percent) and more Asian-Americans (20 percent) than ever before--both trends that are likely to continue as the pool of qualified applicants keeps growing.

Diversity is high on the admissions office agenda. But with so many talented applicants--some 85 percent of whom senior admissions office David L. Evans calls "qualified"--selection criteria are multiplying and becoming ever-more decisive.

A rich, multicultural campus is one goal of Harvard's lengthy, highly selective admissions process.

"The kind of education that takes place here today is much richer and exciting than when I graduated 25 years ago," says Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons '67.

Figuring out good reasons to choose one student over another from a sea of highly qualified candidates is another goal.

The kind of records the Office of Admissions has maintained provide an insight into its constantly evolving agenda.

Before 1936, Harvard was largely an educational bastion for the regional country club, boarding school set.

"It was a place for the white, the rich, the male and those who lived relatively near," says Fitzsimmons, a Massachusetts native.

Following Harvard's tricentennial in 1936, the University launched new efforts to raise academic standards, to begin recruiting and to establish financial aid for students who lacked money to attend. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slowly began to build up funds for scholarship assistance.

Some historians assert that Harvard maintained quotas for Jewish students during this period. In the 1950s, then-Dean of Admissions William Bender developed an active outreach program to attract applicants from diverse geographic backgrounds.

A number of scholars, among them Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz, contend that the movement towards geographic diversity began as a means of limiting the number of Jewish students, most of whom came from New York and other Northeastern states.

But even the shift in geographic representation was significant at a time when the notion of diversity was considerably narrower. Ford Professor of Social Sciences David Riesman '31 recalls a friend from Butte, Montana, as seeming "strikingly different" from his classmates.

Another graduate from 1958 recounts how students from California and the Midwest were jokingly referred to as "GDs" or geographical distributions.

Later, in the 1960s, University administrators began to seek out members of previously untapped minority communities, Black students in particular.

The admissions office started using the national achievement scholarship program to target talented Black high school student. A need-blind admissions policy was implemented. Nevertheless, Fitzsimmons estimates that minorities accounted for less than three percent of his class, which graduated in 1967. (No numbers for minority enrollment were recorded at the time.)

It took the tumult which followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968 for the admissions office to take measures that achieved significant results.

In 1969, the College committed itself to an affirmative action admissions policy. The number of Black students admitted in that year jumped to 121, from 48 the previous year.

The number of Black students coming to Harvard each year since then has remained roughly the same, dipping below 100 only in 1986 and 1987 and once again this year.

Ninety-five Black students--the lowest since Harvard's affirmative action policy was implemented--will join the Class of 1996. OnltTy 27 of these students are male.

According to Fitzsimmons, many other potential students were lured away by lucrative non-need based financial aid packages from schools like Duke University and Washington University.

In the 1970s, Harvard expanded its recruitment of minorities to include Hispanic students, Chicanos and finally Asian-Americans. In 1980s, with the advent of planned internationalization at the University, the admissions office began recruiting worldwide.

The number of women undergraduates has steadily increased since the Harvard and Radcliffe admissions committees combined in 1976.

Originally Radcliffe was allocated a ratio of one student to every four Harvard students. In 1972, former President Derek C. Bok lowered the ratio to 2.5:1, a level that has steadily been moving up to parity. Currently the ratio is 1.34 men to one woman.

The admissions office has a long term goal of achieving equal proportions of men and woman at Harvard. Both have roughly the same acceptance rate, so the task seems to be one of attracting more qualified female applicants.

Fitzsimmons says his office has made a special effort to attract women interested in science, still predominantly a male domain, and last year recruited almost 1000.

Drawing lines between closely matched students sometimes becomes an almost arbitrary process, Fitzsimmons admits. But he insists the end result is a class consisting of the most talented members of the applicant pool.

Fitzsimmons sees Harvard's diversity, relative to the general population, as important for the nation's increasingly multicultural future.

"We want to do our share to educate the future leaders of America," he says. "We also think it's important to have people of various backgrounds."

Fitzsimmons points to the "myth" of tougher standards for Asian-Americans, whose numbers at Harvard continue to rise steadily out of proportion to their presence in the general population.

In 1990, the U.S. Justice Department concluded after a lengthy investigation that there was no discrimination against Asian-Americans in the Harvard admissions process.

Although Asian-Americans had a lower acceptance rate than many other groups, the Justice Department concluded that this was the result of preferential "tips" for athletes and children of alumni, groups in which Asian-Americans have traditionally been underrepresented.

Harvard uses the demographics of the general population as a rough template to structure its class, according to Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57, who was dean of admissions from 1972 to 1985.

Fitzsimmons insists, however, that any goals the admissions office may have are approached through aggressive recruitment practices, first pioneered by Harvard in the late 1930s.

Thus Harvard seeks to expand its applicant pool from underrepresented minority groups, rather than relaxing standards or helping them in with a "tip."

"Once the recruitment is over, then people have to get in one their own," Fitzsimmons says.

This, according to Evans, is the classic meaning of affirmative action: Comprehensive recruitment, increased access and uniform standards.

Some argue that the shifting admissions criteria have had an effect even on students who are already at the College.

Riesman says that in the early 1930s, when he was an undergraduate in the College, Harvard men were more concerned with debutante parties than with pre-professional training.

But that is true no longer, a fact that Riesman attributes to Harvard's tougher admissions procedures.

"[They make] students feel very uneasy about living up to standards," he says. SNAPSHOTS OF A COLLEGE

CLASS OF '52:

44.4% public, 55.6% private

New England 623

Mid-Atlantic 446

Southern 88

Central 62

Northwest territory/Midwest 201

Western 127

Territories/Foreign 34

Racial date for this class not available. Statistics courtesy of the Admissions Office. Geographic and racial categories are those used by the office.

CLASS OF '73:

58.3% public, 41.7% private

New England 28.5%

Mid-Atlantic 30.1%

Southern 9.8%

Midwest 15.9%

Central 3.0%

Mountain 2.3%

Pacific 7.6%

Foreign 2.9%

Afro-American 8.3%

CLASS OF '96:

6.65% public, 33.35% private/parochial

New England 19.7%

Mid Atlantic 3.1%

South 14.0%

Midwest 10.1%

Central 2.1%

Mountain/Pacific 16.7%

Territories/Foreign 7.3%

Afro-American: 5.6%

Asian-American: 20.0%

Mexican-American: 2.7%

Other Hispanics: 3.1%

Puerto Rican: 1.7%

Native American .5%

Other minorities: 2.9%