MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksThe peculiarity of Sandel’s argument is that, despite his talk of a common good, he locates that good in private institutions such as the Ivy League rather than in public ones. A public, widely accessible merit-based system such as the University of California seems to have no prominent place in Sandel’s vision, yet I would argue that such a system is our best hope ... I just don’t think it matters much to the world how the roughly 1,600 Harvard students in a given year feel about their admission to the university, and I don’t think most of the rest of the 3.7 million American high school graduates in that year spend much time thinking about Harvard’s admissions process. I applaud Sandel for showing that a theorist’s perspective on our intimate problems (stressed-out teenagers) and structural ones (class rigidity) can shed light and bring hope. But by placing Harvard’s and other elite private colleges’ admissions practices at the center of his story, Sandel overstates their significance both as a cause of the problem and as a source of the solution.
