RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewHarris exposes the menace in the mundane. Through vivid storytelling, he documents how white presidents of all-white, state flagship universities worked tirelessly alongside state lawmakers throughout much of the 20th century to keep segregation alive to the detriment of Black colleges ... is about more than inequities in higher education. It is a meditation on racism and inequality in America ... Harris’s writing is as refreshing as it is haunting. His sobering account of Gaines, a sharecroppers’ son who became the lead complainant in the 1938 Supreme Court case, conveys the toll of uplifting the race ... Harris evokes a sense of urgency by laying out the stakes of letting longstanding inequalities among our colleges and universities continue as they are. He joins a new wave of scholars like Eddie Cole, Cristina Groeger, Matthew Johnson and Crystal Sanders looking critically at how race, education and history intertwine to shape our present-day reality ... a must-read, detailing the complex dynamics that both reflect our nation’s dark history and show us the way toward a more equitable future.
Jeffrey Selingo
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... Timely and engaging ... outlines the role that legacy and athletic preferences play in admissions, and forces us to grapple with whether their dominance is truly fair ... For children from more privileged families, Selingo is right: From the odds of graduating to earnings in adulthood, college selectivity does not matter much. Selingo is wrong, however, to claim that this point applies to everyone. The very economists he cites offer \'notable exceptions.\' For Black, Latino and first-generation college students, the effects of attending a selective college \'remain large.\' In fact, these groups aren’t even exceptions; they are growing in demographic representation in higher education. Latinos are entering college at unprecedented rates, and elite colleges serve as mobility springboards for first-generation college students. Their heeding of Selingo’s prescient advice for the privileged could further deepen racial and socioeconomic stratification in higher education, to the detriment of the disadvantaged ... Despite these critiques, Who Gets In and Why speak sto the current political moment, particularly when we consider the other, perennial debate in college admissions: affirmative action ... invites us all to a conversation about preferences in college admissions, but puts the privilege-hoarding pathways for the elite front and center. The lesson: Turning a blind eye to how money puts full fists on the scale permits affirmative action for the rich to run amok.
Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewPiercing the veneer of perfection worn by Hollywood A-listers and corporate elites, Korn and Levitz show how wealthy families bribed their way into colleges like Stanford and the University of Southern California rather than bet on their children’s potential ... outlines the role that legacy and athletic preferences play in admissions, and forces us to grapple with whether their dominance is truly fair ... Part of me ached for more than a narrative version of court documents from Korn and Levitz. At times their accounting of events appears to extend sympathy to recently divorced parents looking to assuage their guilt about the toll the separation took on the family. That stands in stark contrast to the public damning of parents who falsified addresses to register children in crime-free primary schools ... speaks to the current political moment.
