The chosen The hidden history of admission and exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton

Jerome Karabel

Book - 2005

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Subjects
Published
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co 2005.
Language
English
Main Author
Jerome Karabel (-)
Physical Description
viii, 711 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., ports. ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (p. [676]-682) and index.
ISBN
9780618574582
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

When gifted high-school students apply to the nation's most elite universities, they often have no idea just how admissions officers will determine their fate. But after poring over countless applicant files and institutional memos, one relentless Berkeley sociologist has unraveled the mystery. Focusing on America's Big Three (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton), Karabel recounts how the admissions office first emerged in the 1920s as an academic innovation designed to protect WASP privilege against the claims of the bright but socially marginal children of Jewish immigrants. By the time these anti-Semitic admissions policies ended, administrators had discovered the institutional utility of nonacademic admissions standards: Karabel shows in provocative detail how for decades the very university executives who have preached equal opportunity have extended special advantages to the offspring of wealthy alumni. He also addresses the first significant attempts to diversify student bodies in the 1960s and assesses the complex effects of affirmative-action policies. A useful overview of a still-controversial subject. --Bryce Christensen Copyright 2005 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The emphasis in college applications on balancing grades and extracurricular activities appears benignly positive at first glance. Yet, as Karabel explains, the top Ivy League schools created this formula in the 1920s because they were uncomfortable with the number of Jewish students accepted when applicants were judged solely on their grades. The search for prospective freshmen with "character" was, with varying explicitness, an effort to maintain the slowly declining Protestant establishment. At one point, Karabel says in this stimulating study of admissions policies, Harvard codified a policy of accepting applicants with weak academic credentials who could better appreciate the school's social opportunities, while Princeton promised to accept any alumnus's son with even the faintest hope of graduation. Karabel, a sociologist who once served on UC-Berkeley's admissions committee, extensively covers the "Jewish problem" at the Big Three colleges, but also tackles the cultural shifts that lowered the barriers for African-American students and ultimately led to the admission of women. The detailed analysis of the role of university presidents and other campus administrators in first stifling, then abetting ethnic diversity in the student body is so comprehensive, however, that his final remarks on the remaining lack of socioeconomic diversity feel like tacked on. (Oct. 26) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Who gets into what college, and why? Karabel (sociology, Univ. of California, Berkeley) has produced a powerful study of the origins of current practices of selective admission at the "Big Three" and the ways in which definitions of merit, and attendant admissions policies, evolved during the 20th century. Perhaps because access to higher education is becoming increasingly competitive (with so much made of the connection between higher education and economic success later in life), recent studies of college admissions, including Jacques Steinberg's The Gatekeepers, and the more academic Douglas S. Massey and others' The Source of the River, have focused on the role that social origin continues to play in admissions decisions at our most prestigious colleges. With merit-based admissions becoming the slogan for the Big Three, their definitions of merit were simply adjusted, Karabel notes, to assure that certain social classes continued to have an edge in admissions decisions, even while educational leaders touted their evolved admissions policies, which did not overtly identify social origins or wealth as factors. This study will join Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test, on the origins of the SAT, as required reading for those interested in the idea of meritocracy in America and the idea that truly merit-based access to higher education is the engine of social mobility. Recommended for all collections.-Scott Walter, Univ. of Kansas, Lawrence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Chapter 1 Elite Education and the Protestant EthosOn a clear fall morning in late September of 1900, a lanky young man with patrician features and pince-nez glasses stood among the more than five hundred freshmen gathered to register at Harvard. Though neither a brilliant scholar nor a talented athlete, the young man had a certain charisma about him - a classmate later described him as "gray-eyed, cool, self-possessed, intelligent... [with] the warmest, most friendly, and understanding smile."1 The freshman had been given a strong recommendation from his Latin teacher, who described him as "a fellow of exceptional ability and high character" who "hopes to go into public life."2 His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and in 1933 he became the fourth graduate of Harvard College to serve as president of the United States. Franklins acceptance at Harvard had been taken for granted. Having attended Groton, the most socially elite of Americas boarding schools, he was sure to be admitted to Harvard; in 1900, 18 of his Groton classmates (out of a class of just 23) joined him in Cambridge.3 There the Groton boys - along with their peers from St. Pauls, St. Marks, Milton, and other leading private schools - dominated the upper reaches of campus life. Even then, however, the children of the elite did not constitute the entire freshman class. Harvard, far more than Yale and especially Princeton, took pride in the diversity of its student body. In his address to new students, President Charles W. Eliot denounced as a "common error" the supposition that "the men of the University live in rooms the walls of which are covered with embossed leather." The truth, Eliot insisted, was quite the contrary: "the majority are of moderate means; and it is this diversity of condition that makes the experience of meeting men here so valuable."4 Though Eliot was downplaying the heavy representation of children of privilege at Harvard, there was in fact a surprising degree of heterogeneity among the students. More than 40 percent of Roosevelts freshman class came from public schools, and many were the children of immigrants.5 And of Harvards leading feeder schools, the top position in 1900 was occupied not by Groton or St. Pauls (18 students) but by Boston Latin (38 students), a public institution that had long since lost its cachet as a school for the sons of Boston Brahmins.6 Yet the Harvard attended by public school boys was separated from the Harvard of Roosevelt and his friends by a vast social chasm. Its physical symbol was the divide between Mount Auburn Streets luxurious "Gold Coast, where the patrician students lived," and the shabby dormitories of Harvard Yard, some of which lacked central heating and plumbing above the basement, where the more plebeian students stayed.7 Roosevelt was, by birth, a natural member of the Mount Auburn group; even before he enrolled at Harvard, he visited Cambridge with his future roommate, Lathrop Brown, to select Excerpted from The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.