Description
A landmark, revelatory history of admissions from 1900 to todayand how it shaped a nation The competition for a spot in the Ivy Leaguewidely considered the ticket to successis fierce and getting fiercer. But the admissions policies of elite universities have long been both tightly controlled and shrouded in secrecy. In The Chosen, the Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel lifts the veil on a century of admission and exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. How did the policies of our elite schools evolve? Whom have they let in and why? And what do those policies say about America? A grand narrative brimming with insights, The Chosen provides a lens through which to examine some of the main events and movements of America in the twentieth centuryfrom immigration restriction and the Great Depression to the dropping of the atomic bomb and the launching of Sputnik, from the Cold War to the triumph of the market ethos. Many of Karabel’s findings are astonishing: the admission of blacks into the Ivy League wasn’t an idealistic response to the civil rights movement but a fearful reaction to inner-city riots; Yale and Princeton decided to accept women only after realizing that they were losing men to colleges (such as Harvard and Stanford) that had begun accepting “the second sex; Harvard had a systematic quota on “intellectuals until quite recently; and discrimination against Asian Americans in the 1980s mirrored the treatment of Jews earlier in the century. Drawing on decades of meticulous research, Karabel shines a light on the ever-changing definition of “merit in college admissions, showing how it shapedand was shaped bythe country at large. Full of colorful characters, from FDR and Woodrow Wilson to Kingman Brewster and Archibald Cox, The Chosen charts the century-long battle over opportunityand offers a new and deeply original perspective on American history. JEROME KARABEL is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow of the Longview Institute, a new progressive think tank. An award-winning scholar, Karabel has appeared on Nightline, Today, and All Things Considered. He has written for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the Nation, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.
