“During the 1920s two alumni of New England colleges attempted to persuade college presidents to limit the size of entering freshmen classes. They explained the plan: “It may be said that this method produces an aristocracy of culture. But we must have an aristocracy, if we would have the highest culture, and it will be no less, rather a gain, to the nation and to the world if some of the colleges will be content to remain small, to drop the unworthy and the hopeless, and devote themselves to training for scholarship and leadership”
This approach had the potential for both good and ill. If indeed it caused deans of admissions to give priority to applicants with strong academic records and scholarly inclinations, then the approach favored merit. Unfortunately, there is no compelling evidence that selective procedures always rewarded talent. Often as not, the selective-admissions machinery was used to increase the social homogeneity of a campus by rejecting applicants from religious and ethnic minority groups. President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard and Dean Frederick P. Keppel of Columbia, for example, expressed open concern about the “Jewish problem” at their institutions when estimates of Jewish enrollment reached between 15 percent and 40 percent. Their fear was that such imbalances would scare away applicants from established white Protestant families. Their solution was to impose admissions quotas, both overt and covert.
The implications of admissions policies had become more complicated by 1910. Thanks in large measure to the success of the American public high school, college admissions offices had to take seriously the strong academic records presented by a growing number of applicants from cities and schools outside the college’s familiar orbit of nearby boarding schools. The nationwide improvements in the college preparatory studies that public high schools provided also raised the question of what was the actual aim of selective-admissions reform. Was it to raise academic standards by identifying talent? Or, rather, was it to use testing as a transparent social screening mechanism whose ultimate accomplishment was to reduce the friction caused by diversity in the student body?
Even if a college opted for admissions policies that made the college student body smaller and more homogeneous, college presidents were still left with the growing problems of an unruly, autonomous student culture. The result at most colleges after 1900 was an expansion of the administrative bureaucracy to include a growing number of deans and assistant deans whose main responsibility was policing student conduct. At the larger universities, mutual avoidance had increased the gulf between students and faculty. Into that void entered the new student-affairs officials who acted as both mediators and enforcers.
The problems spawned by the gregarious “college life” of undergraduates brought about another administrative change. Colleges and universities increasingly recognized that they had to make formal provisions for curbing if not controlling alumni affairs. When alumni associations and clubs first sprouted in the 1890s, college presidents had no precedent for synchronizing their own agendas with these groups’ activities. And as alumni and booster groups put more and more energy and money into supporting such student activities as sports, college officials were caught in a curious bind. Presidents had missed their timing: the crucial moment at which they could have exerted authority over external affairs had passed, and now they could no longer afford to alienate alumni as donors. The administrative compromise was to encourage alumni activities and to concede to their involvement in college sports, in the vague hope that this distraction would keep them from meddling in serious academic business. Best of all, this compact might even turn out to stimulate generous support of other university projects.
It was wishful thinking. The typical university president of 1920 had essentially mortgaged his tenure in office in such a way that educational policies had to coexist, and even compete, with the sideshows of college life. Henceforth he would have to cooperate with a coalition that included a board of trustees, an athletics association, and an alumni office that were often all enthusiastic products of the same undergraduate “college system” the academic administration wanted to bring to heel. For the president of a state university, successful alumni were now occupying seats in the state general assembly or even the governor’s office, and they all wanted prime seats at the Homecoming game.” from John Thelin’s A History of American Higher Education
Deep Thoughts on Higher Ed 