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…