Free The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles A. Murray Page B

from an expanding number of affluent customers competing for scarce goods. Price increases for a wide variety of elite goods have outstripped changes in theconsumer price index or changes in mean income in recent decades, sometimes by orders of magnitude. The cost of Fifth Avenue apartments, seashore property, Van Gogh paintings, and rare stamps are all examples. Prices have risen because demand has increased and supply cannot. In the case of education, new universities are built, but not new Princetons, Harvards, Yales, or Stanfords. And though the proportion of families with incomes sufficient to pay for a Harvard education did not increase significantly during the 1950s, the raw number did. Using the 20-percent-of-family-income rule, the number of families that could afford Harvard increased by 184,000 from 1950 to 1960. Using a 10 percent rule, the number increased by 55,000. Only a small portion of these new families had children applying to college, but the number of slots in the freshmen classes of the elite schools was also small. College enrollment increased from 2.1 million students in 1952 to 2.6 million by 1960, meaning a half-million more competitors for available places. It would not take much of an increase in the propensity to seek elite educations to produce a substantial increase in the annual applications to Harvard, Yale, and the others. 24
    We suspect also that the social and cultural forces unleashed by World War II played a central role, but probing them would take us far afield. Whatever the combination of reasons, the basics of the situation were straightforward: By the early 1960s, the entire top echelon of American universities had been transformed. The screens filtering their students from the masses had not been lowered but changed. Instead of the old screen—woven of class, religion, region, and old school ties—the new screen was cognitive ability, and its mesh was already exceeding fine.
Changes Since the 1960s
     
    There have been no equivalent sea changes since the early 1960s, but the concentration of top students at elite schools has intensified. As of the early 1990s, Harvard did not get four applicants for each opening, but closer to seven, highly self-selected and better prepared than ever. Competition for entry into the other elite schools has stiffened comparably.
    Philip Cook and Robert Frank have drawn together a wide variety of data documenting the increasing concentration. 25 There are, for example, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search finalists. In the 1960s, 47 percent went to the top seven colleges (as ranked in the
Barron’
s listthat Cook and Frank used). In the 1980s, that proportion had risen to 59 percent, with 39 percent going to just three colleges (Harvard, MIT, and Princeton). 26 Cook and Frank also found that from 1979 to 1989, the percentage of students scoring over 700 on the SAT-Verbal who chose one of the “most competitive colleges” increased from 32 to 43 percent. 27
    The degree of partitioning off of the top students as of the early 1990s has reached startling proportions. Consider the list of schools that were named as the nation’s top twenty-five large universities and the top twenty-five small colleges in a well-known 1990 ranking. 28 Together, these fifty schools accounted for just 59,000 out of approximately 1.2 million students who entered four-year institutions in the fall of 1990—fewer than one out of twenty of the nation’s freshmen in four-year colleges. But they took in twelve out of twenty of the students who scored in the 700s on their SAT-Verbal test. They took in seven out of twenty of students who scored in the 600s. 29
    The concentration is even more extreme than that. Suppose we take just the top ten schools, as ranked by the number of their freshmen who scored in the 700s on the SAT-Verbal. Now we are talking about schools that enrolled a total of only 18,000 freshmen, one out of every sixty-seven nationwide. Just these ten