No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life

No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, by Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. 547pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780691141602.

Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford have written a tremendous, encyclopedic text on the relationship between race, class, admissions, and campus IUe at elite colleges and universities. If you want to know how many white applicants participated m extracurricular activities compared to nonwhites, the predicted probability of being accepted by a school based on race and class, the percentage of black students from multiracial or immigrant famUies, what percentage of students date within or outside their race, or just about anything else on the topic of class, race, and coUege, chances are there is a table or chart for you Ui this book. One wUl learn a tremendous amount simply by wading through this text. But it is not clear what can be said in general.

The book f oUows students through the college process - from the applicant pool to admissions to the college experience. The findings wtil be somewhat familiar to readers. Espenshade and Radford report a strong "Asian penalty" in coUege admissions processes - though comparatively more quatified, Asians are significantly less likely to be accepted. By contrast, the likelihood of blacks being accepted is far higher than for any other racial group. The predicted probabUity of a lower-class black student being accepted into an eUte private university is .87, compared...