About the Author

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.

Reviews

"This is a remarkable book....It is a staggering hidden history." --Anthony Lewis "Jerome Karabel's marvelous study traces the titanic struggles that defined -- and re-defined -- the Ivy ideal....Utterly absorbing." --Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age "Vivid...electrifying...The Chosen is a refreshingly candid account of the admissions madness at elite colleges." --Lani Guinier, Harvard Law School "The Chosen is a fascinating study in American cultural history." --Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "An eye-opening examination...Karabel writes clearly and well, and he has dug deep." --Evan Thomas, Newsweek "An informed and fascinating account of how America's elite universities have selected their student bodies over the past 100 years." --Nathan Glazer, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Education, Harvard University "A magisterial, thorough, and even-handed account of a vexed and important issue." --Justin Kaplan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman "[A] tour de force of investigative sociology . . . Anyone who wishes to understand the shifting grounds of the American establishment should read The Chosen, get shocked by the raw bigotries of the past, and accept Karabel's challenge to rethink the meritocratic ideal." -- Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and author of The Sixties "This is a powerful book, which is richly documented, academically authoritative, and gracefully written...a remarkable combination of historical scholarship and sociological analysis." -- David F. Labaree, Stanford University "A remarkable history of the admissions process of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton." --Malcolm Gladwell The New Yorker "An epically scaled and scrupulously rendered history." --James Traub, slate.com "Karabel's thorough and definitive look at elite college admissions is fascinating . . . Karabel is a clear and engaging writer." --David Brooks The New York Times Book Review "The special value of The Chosen lies...in its stories, its...apt statistics, and its analysis of backroom university politics." --Jeffrey Kittay The Washington Post "Fascinating...The Chosen is a monumental work of scholarship" --Charles Matthews San Jose Mercury News "In vivid and electrifying prose, Karabel exposes the intimate and occasionally scandalous social and political relationships that marked college admissions at the Big Three throughout the twentieth century. The Chosen is a refreshingly candid account of the admissions madness at elite colleges, where merit often functioned simply as a handmaiden to power." -- Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor at Harvard Law School and coauthor of The Miner's Canary "Millions of Americans think of the Ivy League as a training ground for the best and brightest. But for most of the twentieth century Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were more interested in sustaining the aristocracy than in shaping the nation's intellectual elite. Jerome Karabel's marvelous study traces the titanic struggles that defined--and redefined--the Ivy ideal. An utterly absorbing account of politics and privilege on America's most revered campuses." -- Kevin Boyle, National Book Award-winning author of Arc of Justice "This is a remarkable book. Until you read it, you can have no real idea how crudely these elite universities discriminated in admissions -- against women, Jews, blacks, and others. It is a staggering hidden history." --Anthony Lewis, former New York Times columnist and author of Gideon's Trumpet "A magisterial and even-handed account of a vexed and important issue." -- Justin Kaplan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman

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 Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.