The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton

Jerome Karabel's engaging history of undergraduate admissions at the “big three”— Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—persuasively explains how academic leaders at these prestigious universities redefined merit over the course of the twentieth century. Faced with many-sided demands for a more inclusive student body after World War II, they ultimately responded by enrolling more public school graduates, Jews, African Americans, women, and members of other groups that sought admission based on their academic achievement. The old private-school boys, part of the venerable but declining Protestant establishment, hardly recognized their alma mater by the end of the sixties. Privilege had assumed a new form. Understanding how different generations of college presidents, faculty, alumni (who often interviewed applicants), and admission officers defined “merit” is the central, fascinating theme in The Chosen. To help ensure a more fluid social order, Americans generally endorse the concept of “equal educational opportunity,” based on the Jeffersonian ideal that talent inheres in all classes and that schools should reward talent and achievement rather than family background and wealth. Harvard president James Bryant Conant eloquently espoused those views in the 1940s and 1950s. Talent needed cultivation in an advanced technological society, and the recruitment of smart youth into the elite university system would help repel the Communist threat during the Cold War.