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A landmark, revelatory history of admissions from 1900 to today?and how it shaped a nation
Houghton Mifflin
October 2005
720 pages
ISBN: 0618574581
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The competition for a spot in the Ivy League—widely
considered the ticket to success—is 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 century—
from 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 shaped—and was shaped by—the
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 opportunity—and
offers a new and deeply original perspective on American
history.
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