The power of privilege; Yale and America's elite colleges

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2007

The power of privilege; Yale and America's elite colleges.

Soares, Joseph A.

Stanford U. Press

2007

238 pages

$19.95

Paperback

LB2351

Yale University (together with Harvard) stands at the center of an optimistic narrative about the rise of American meritocracy in the 1950s. The narrative essentially claims that by switching admission criteria from social connections to SAT scores and other measures of academic achievement, Yale produced an "academic and social revolution" that "wrecked the WASP establishment." More critical works, such as The Big Test by Nicholas Lemann, argued that the social composition of the elite academic institutions changed little because elite families still had greater access to social and cultural capital required for academic success, even if the process is objectively fair. In addition to weighing the evidence for these relatively conventional if competing claims, Soares (sociology, Wake Forest U.) adds a third to the discussion; the Pierre Bourdieu-influenced idea that the market needs of elite colleges and the class interests of their clientele converge in such a way that admission criteria will match the qualities of privileged groups such that the result is social reproduction disguised as a fair and meritorious academic competition.

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