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.
