20th-century Quotas Limited College Access for Jews

by Sherri Kimmel

January 1, 2011

Being Jewish once was seen as a barrier to achieving a college education, with Ivy League institutions leading discriminatory enrollment practices, starting in the 1920s and into the 1950s.

Harvard’s Jewish quota was 15 percent in 1926, according to Jerome Karabel, author of The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

In a 2005 column about Karabel’s book, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, “University administrators sensed that if they admitted too many Jews, they would alienate themselves from the power centers around them. So they restricted the number of Jews by shifting their admissions criteria and putting more emphasis on ‘character,’ measured by alumni connections, athletic skill and personal letters of recommendation. Applicants were less likely to be admitted if all they demonstrated was academic brilliance.”

Ben James ’34, who insisted on open enrollment when he accepted the dean of admissions job at Dickinson in 1946, says that during his student days and later, quotas were the norm at other colleges. “In fact, every college I knew had its quota, but I never saw it in writing here.”

Some Dickinsonians, however, remain skeptical that the college could have stayed above the fray when all its peers had quotas. Jerry Epstein ’57 feels Dickinson’s steady 10 percent Jewish enrollment during the 1950s provides evidence that there was a quota in effect.

“There were 20 Jews among 1,200, and I felt there was a quota, though not overtly stated,” opines Epstein who, like many of the Jewish students of his era became a physician. “I didn’t mind. I had a good time. The quota system was invoked everywhere.” Still, there is no hard evidence that Dickinson ever had a quota system.

According to Elizabeth Pincus Rubin ’78, whose 1976 paper on Jewish-recruitment practices remains the most thorough examination of Dickinson’s early Jewish campus life, the fluctuation of Jewish enrollment numbers from the late 1930s into the 1960s supports her belief that there were no quotas.

Rubin pointed out that at Dickinson “there was a smaller percentage of Jews than any other religious group,” which, she posited, could be a result of the college’s remoteness from urban centers, where Jews tended to live. Still, after sorting through materials in the archives and interviewing a dozen college-affiliated people, including Hyman Goldstein ’15, she concluded that “the college did not practice discrimination against its Jewish students.”

Read “The Experience of Jews in American Colleges between 1930 and 1960, with Special Emphasis on Discrimination Against Them and a Brief Study of the Treatment of Jewish Students at Dickinson College during the Same Time Period” by Elizabeth Pincus Rubin ’78.