Bell Curve

30 The Emergence ofa Cognitive Elite Cognitive Class and Education, 1900-1 990 3 1whelmingl~ white andChristian young men were home addresses fromplaces like Philadelphia's Main Line, the Upper East Side of New York,and Boston's Beacon Hill. A large proportion of the class came from ahandful of America's most exclusive boarding schools; Phillips Exeterand Phillips Andover alone contributed almost 10 percent of the freshmenthat year.And yet for all its apparent exclusivity, Harvard was not so hard toget into in the fall of 1952. An applicant's chances of being admittedwere about two out of three, and close to 90 percent if his father hadgone to ~arvard.' With this modest level of competition, it is not surprisingto learn that the Harvard student body was not uniformly brilliant.In fact, the mean SATVerbal score of the incoming freshmen classwas only 583, well above the national mean but nothing to brag about.'*]Harvard men came from a range of ability that could be duplicated inthe top half of many state universities.Let us advance the scene to 1960. Wilbur J. Bender, Harvard's deanof admissions, was about to leave his post and trying to sum up for theboard of overseers what had happened in the eight years of his tenure."The figures," he wrote, "report the greatest change in Harvard admissions,and thus in the Harvard student body, in a short time-two collegegenerations-in our recorded hi~tory."~ Unquestionably, suddenly,but for no obvious reason, Harvard had become a different kind of place.The proportion of the incoming students from New England haddropped by a third. Public school graduates now outnumbered privateschool graduates. Instead of rejecting a third of its applicants, Harvardwas rejecting more than two-thirds-and the quality of those applicantshad increased as well, so that many students who would have been admittedin 1952 were not even bothering to apply in 1960,The SAT scores at Harvard had skyrocketed. In the fall of 1960, theaverage verbaI score was 678 and the average math score was 695, anincrease of almost a hundred points for each test. The average Harvardfreshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of theincoming class by 1960. In eight years, Harvard had been transformedfrom a school primarily for the northeastern socioeconomic elite into aschool populated by the brightest of the bright, drawn from all over thecountry.The story of higher education in the United States during the twentiethcentury is generally raken to be one of the great American successstories, and with good reason. The record was not without blemishes,but the United States led the rest of the world in opening college to amass population of young people of ability, regardless of race, color,creed, gender, and financial resources.But this success story also has a paradoxically shadowy side, for educationis a powerful divider and classifier. Education affects income, andincome divides. Education affects occupation, and occupations divide.Education affects tastes and interests, grammar and accent, all of whichdivide. When access to higher education is restricted by class, race, orreligion, these divisions cut across cognitive levels. But school is in itself,more immediately and directly than any other institution, the placewhere people of high cognitive ability excel and people of low cogni.tive ability fail. As America opened access to higher education, itopened up as well a revolution in the way that the American populationsorted itself and divided itself. Three successively more efficientsorting processes were at work: the college population grew, it was recruitedby cognitive ability more efficiently, and then it was furthersorted among the colleges.THE COLLEGE POPULATION GROWSA social and economic gap separated high school graduates from collegegraduates in 1900 as in 1990; that much is not new. But the socialand economic gap was not accompanied by much of a cognitive gap, bedcause the vast majority of the brightest people in the United States hadnot gone to college. We may make that statement despite the lack ofIQ scores from 1900 for the same reason that we can make such state.ments about Elizabethan England: It is true by mathematical necessity.In 1900, only about 2 percent of 23.year-olds got college degrees. Evenif all of the 2 percent who went to college had IQs of 115 and above(and they did not), seven out of eight of the brightest 23-year-olds inthe America of 1900 would have been without college degrees. This sit.uation harely changed for the first two decades of the new century. Then,at the close of World War I, the role of college for American youths beganan expansion that would last until 1974, interrupted only by theGreat Depression and World War 11.The three lines in the figure show trends established in 1920-1929,1935-1940, and 1954-1973, then extrapolated. They are there to high.