The law was supposedly enacted to avoid overcrowding schools and universities,[3] which cited apparent concerns at the time that large numbers of students would decrease the quality of higher education in Germany.
[4] After 30 July 1939, Jews were no longer permitted to attend German public schools at all, and the prior quota law was eliminated by a non-public regulation in January 1940.[5]p.
Starting in 1934, a regulation limited the overall numbers of students admitted to German universities, and a special quota was introduced reducing women's admissions to a maximum of 10%.
Five categories were set up: civil servants, war veterans and army officers, small landowners and artisans, industrialists, and the merchant classes.
These limitations were removed in the spring of 1917 after the tsar's abdication during the early phase of the Russian revolution of 1917–1918 (the so-called February Revolution of 1917); later, in the late 1940s, during the initial phase of the Cold War and the tide of the anti-"rootless cosmopolitan" campaign, a de facto gross discrimination of Jewish applicants was reintroduced in many institutions of higher education in the Soviet Union until Perestroika.
After Harvard’s 1926 announcement about instating a "new admissions policy [that] would place great emphasis on character and personality, the Yale Daily News praised its decision and put forward its own version of how Yale should select its students in a major editorial, ‘Ellis Island for Yale.’ It called on the university to institute immigration laws more prohibitive than those of the United States government.
"[17] According to historian David Oshinsky, writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place.