Offers a solid overview and a forceful reminder that money still trumps merit on the most prestigious campuses.
A blunt book about inequality in admissions at elite colleges.
After four decades of affirmative action and much official rhetoric about making higher education available to all qualified students, the nation’s most selective colleges and universities remain “bastions of privilege,” writes Schmidt, deputy editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Each year, tens of thousands of excellent applicants are turned down by Yale, Harvard and other top schools to make way for the wealthy and well connected. As a result, a rich kid has about 25 times as much chance as a poor one of enrolling at one of 160 selective colleges. All of this, the author contends, contradicts the 2003 Supreme Court decision upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan, which said colleges must be “visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.” Much of Schmidt’s book recounts the history of college admissions from the 1900s, when virtually any graduate of feeder boarding schools could enter Harvard and Yale. While societal changes such as standardized tests, the G.I. Bill, 1960s social unrest and affirmative action transformed higher education and weakened the hold of the wealthy, working class and poor students are still underrepresented at top schools. The author draws on studies and his own reporting to show how affirmative action has played out in recent years. Economic class continues to shape children’s fates, he argues; poor kids grow up in segregated neighborhoods with inadequate schools, while wealthy whites enjoy outstanding schooling, special preparation for standardized tests and preferential college admission. All the while, colleges try to project a diverse image. They also capitalize on society’s diversity-consciousness by joining with corporations (in return for major financial support) to recruit minority students in package deals under which the students then go to work for the same companies upon graduation.
Offers a solid overview and a forceful reminder that money still trumps merit on the most prestigious campuses.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4039-7601-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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