Main idea: Social Inequality

This is a constant issue with our higher education system. People are often confused about why minorities get preferential admission into colleges yet many others think minorities are overly disadvantaged in our education system. In either case, the following statistics still stand:"Being African American is statistically the same as adding roughly 200 points to a total SAT score (out of 1600) for admissions purposes" - The Early Admissions Game"Only 2% of students in the Ivy League come from the bottom quartile of wealth in the United States" - The Power of Privilege. Overall, it can be argued many different ways how the education system should be reformed to reduce such inequality and to ultimately level the playing field. Nearly all of the books I will recommend touch on this subject because it has such a profound social impact.

Related books:

The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges by Joseph Soares. This book is filed under Sociology/Education and is the most directly interesting to me currently. I am reading it now (and have the Barrington library's copy checked out for myself - sorry) and am finding it very interesting so far. It discusses the use of eugenics in admissions, the reason for the invention of the SAT (to weed out Jews from Yale and Harvard), and ultimately how even though policies have changed from year to year over Yale's 300 year history, it is still some 75% upper middle class (or above) students, and policies will keep changing to keep it that way.

The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates by Daniel Golden. This is a book of similar length that is available at the library (two copies) and looks to be a pretty popular and well reviewed book on this subject.