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Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Mitchell L. Stevens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, 320 pages, $25.95 hardcover, $16.95 paper (Sept. 2009).
Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities. Camille Z. Charles, Mary J. Fischer, Margarita A. Mooney, and Douglas S. Massey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, 320 pages, $35.00 hardcover.
In public debates on higher education, emphasis is often placed on policies that might expand opportunities for underserved students—typically with a focus on open-access institutions such as community colleges. However, the two books reviewed here show that insight into the equity agenda can be gained by looking at institutions at the top of the prestige ladder as well. Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites, by Mitchell Stevens, focuses on access: what gets undergraduates from different backgrounds into such institutions. Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities, by Camille Charles, Mary Fischer, Margarita Mooney, and Douglas Massey, is about success: what happens to these students once they get in. Together, Creating a Class and Taming the River provide a sober, though not unhopeful, view of what America's recent commitment to diversity has and has not (yet) achieved in the upper reaches of higher education.
Mary Taylor Huber is a consulting scholar and senior scholar emerita at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She has written extensively about changing faculty cultures in U.S. higher education, focusing especially on the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is coauthor, with Pat Hutchings, of The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons (2005).
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