Social closure in American elite higher education

Elite college admissions exemplify processes of social closure in which status-group conflict, organizational self-interest, the strategic use of cultural ideals of merit, and broader social trends and contingent historical events interweave to shape institutional power in the United States. The Chosen, Jerome Karabel’s monumental study of the history of college admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton from 1900 to 2005, offers a political sociology of elite recruitment and a cultural and social history of the definition of merit that has guided these three schools and shaped much current thinking about college admissions. As Max Weber reminded us, the very definition of cultural ideals of an epoch bear the stamp of elite group domination: not cultural ideals but cultural interests and their strategic uses guide institutional power. The book provides an impressive empirical demonstration of that proposition: it identifies four different definitions of merit as organizational gatekeeping tools that have guided Harvard, Yale, and Princeton over the last hundred years and shows how these definitions were molded by status-group conflict and organizational interests. This essay outlines the central arguments of Karabel’s book; it identifies key contributions for our understanding of the history, culture, organizational interests, and politics of these three institutions; it highlights the social closure framework guiding the analysis; and it reflects on a fundamental ambiguity in Karabel’s thinking about meritocratic ideals as governing principles for modern stratified societies. A review essay on Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005,

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David L. SwartzEmail:

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David L. Swartz   is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University. He is the author of Culture & Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (University of Chicago Press 1997) and co-editor (with Vera L. Zolberg) of After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration (Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004). He is a Senior Editor and Book Review Editor for Theory and Society. His research interests include the study of elites and stratification, education, culture, religion, and social theory, and he is currently writing a book on the political sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.