Where Have Harvard’s Jews Gone?

A new report on Harvard’s Jewish enrollment suggests that the Ivy League’s abandonment of Jewish life begins not in the classroom but in the admissions office. The analysis, conducted by a consortium of Jewish alumni, puts Harvard’s undergraduate Jewish population at 7 percent. That is the lowest recorded level since before World War II and half of what it was a decade ago. “No school has seen a steeper recent-decade decline,” the report notes. Why? Harvard doesn’t have the answers. The school’s admissions office, though careful to track and report its new students’ race, gender, geography, income, and first-generation status, stopped collecting data on religious preferences in the 1990s. “The result is a monitoring gap that went unaddressed for a decade,” the report’s authors note. By the time the pattern was visible from the outside, they add, “it had been compounding for years.” The report traces the start of the enrollment decline to 2004. That’s around the time that Harvard began to adopt admissions priorities that “collectively pointed away from the demographic profile that Jewish applicants disproportionately occupy.” It began prioritizing low-income, first-generation, and racially diverse applicants while de-emphasizing academic credentials and legacy status. It also expanded enrollment of international students. It’s easy to predict how Jewish applicants, finding themselves “on the unfavored side of every major admissions priority Harvard has implemented since 2004,” would fare under these circumstances. Yet those policies, the report argues, fail to fully explain the decline. Princeton University adopted similar frameworks and saw only a fraction of Harvard’s drop. At Brown and Cornell, Jewish enrollment held or grew. It’s not because Jewish students stopped applying either, the report claims. So what gives? It’s not entirely clear. The authors, offering “the most parsimonious explanation,” suggest that admissions readers may be systematically scoring Jewish applicants lower on personal ratings, as was found to be the case with Asian American applicants during the Students for Fair Admissions suit against Harvard over its race-based admissions policies. A similar phenomenon may be at play with Jewish applicants, though the authors concede that Harvard alone holds the data needed to test the hypothesis. To start, the authors recommend the school track Jewish self-identification and investigate its admissions scoring process. The end goal, they note, is not to compel Harvard to enroll more Jews, but to give Jewish students a fair shot at attending America’s most prestigious university. Harvard first stole that opportunity from Jewish students in the 1920s when President Abbott Lawrence Lowell instituted “character evaluations” and geographic mandates to cap Jewish enrollment at 15 percent. His policies were mentioned in the concurring opinions of Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which analogized Lowell’s practices to the race-based admissions programs the Court struck down. At Harvard — which championed these discriminatory practices before becoming the face of their reversal — Jews may still be facing an unfair disadvantage. “Today’s mechanisms are different,” says the report’s principal author and president of the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, Adrian Ashkenazy. “But the outcome raises uncomfortable historical echoes: a narrowing gate with an uneven effect on a particular community.” Should those reasons fail to motivate, the authors provide another: “If Harvard’s admissions process is producing a roughly 50 percent decline in a group historically defined by academic achievement, intellectual engagement, and contributions to university life, the process is working against Harvard’s own interest in assembling the most exceptional student body it can,” they write. “That is reason enough to look.”

Where Have Harvard’s Jews Gone?

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