I've brought this up before, but I think a lot of people are misreading the story of Jerome Karabel's The Chosen by focusing too much on the fate of Jewish applicants to America's elite universities. Nathan Glazer's review in the new TNR, for example, states:

Anti-Jewish discrimination was long gone. Indeed, at Princeton there was public discussion and concern over the decline in the percentage of Jews, which was taken as a sign that the institution was less attractive to the most intellectually gifted. And the new emphasis on intellectual achievement meant a disproportionate number of Asian students in the elite institutions. There was some concern in admissions offices in the 1980s, some investigation of complaints of discrimination by Asian organizations. But Harvard, Yale, and Princeton seem content to let Asian admissions rise to whatever level their intellectual attainments permit.

This about the Asians seems wrong to me on several counts. It's certainly true that there are "a disproportionate number of Asian students in the elite institutions" in the sense that the proportion of Asian Harvard students is higher than the proportion of Asian-Americans in America. The same, however, was true of Jews -- at Harvard and Yale, at least, if not Princeton -- throughout the period of discrimination against Jews. Jewish students were always "disproportionately represented" they simply weren't as disproportionately represented as they would have been had admissions taken place under a strict meritocratic rule.

Meanwhile, the number of Asian-American students has been remarkably stable, ranging from 18 percent of Harvard College in the fall of 1997 to just 17 percent in fall 2004 and fluctuating within that narrow band in the intervening years.

It should also be understood that, according to Karabel, the idea of formal, public quotas on Jewish students fell out of vogue pretty quickly. Instead, as Glazer writes:

After the great public struggle at Harvard--with Professor Felix Frankfurter and Judge Julian Mack, an Overseer of the university, and both Jews, leading the opposition to President Lowell--no other college or university administrator thought it wise to raise the question publicly. The admissions office was under the control of the president, which was sufficient. It took the necessary measures to reduce the number of Jews.

And so the pattern of admission to elite institutions was set in the 1920s. It consisted in a limitation of numbers (there was none before the 1920s, when colleges competed for larger numbers); an admissions office that required pictures, interviews, and other means to determine the identities of those to be excluded; a strong preference for athletes and alumni children; and an effective sidelining of the faculty, which, when it made its views known, generally called for higher academic standards. The admissions offices generally looked for the "all-American boys," and a well-rounded class that included a sufficient number of happy academic mediocrities from the upper social strata.

The photographs and interviews are still with us. The upper social strata are still favored in admissions. What's more, the major departures from a principle of academic meritocracy -- preferences for legacies, preferences for athletes, preferences for African-American and Latino students, and efforts to achieve geographical diversity -- all happen to cut against Asian-American applicants just as, back in the day, those same factors (except preferences for black and Hispanic applicants) all cut against Jewish applicants.