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

A remarkable work of social and cultural history, "The Chosen" vividly reveals the changing dynamics of power and privilege in America over the past century. Full of colorful characters (including Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, James Bryant Conant, and Kingman Brewster), it shows how the ferocious battles over admissions at Harvard,Yale, and Princeton shaped the American elite and bequeathed to us the peculiar system of college admissions that we have today. From the bitter anti-Semitism of the 1920s to the rise of the "meritocracy" at midcentury to the debate over affirmative action today, Karabel sheds surprising newlight on the main events and movements of the twentieth century. No one who reads this landmark book will ever thinkabout college admissions-or America-in the same way again.

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.