Description: Strengthening affirmative action programs and fighting discrimination present challenges to America's best private and public universities
Review Quotes:
"Anyone interested in the ways Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have responded to the twentieth and early twenty-first century challenges to enroll students more like the U.S. population as a whole, will need to read this book. Professor Synnott's exhaustive research from a wide array of sources demonstrates the degrees to which Jewish, black, women, disabled, LGBTQ students, and other minority groups have been admitted to these elite institutions, and how they have fared once enrolled. She illuminates the manner in which changes in federal policies, for example, "don't ask, don't tell" in the military, have impacts on campus programs and student life. Rather than advocating for an overall change in the way elite institutions admit students, Synnott lets the reader decide whether the current approach, favoring children of alumni/ae but also awarding generous need-based financial aid, is consonant with values of meritocracy."
--Leslie Miller-Bernal, professor emeritus of sociology, Wells College, and co-editor of Going Coed: Women's Experiences in Formerly Men's Colleges and Universities, 1950-2000.