The Conditions for Admission: Access, Equity, and the Social Contract of Public Universities

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The Conditions for Admission: Access, Equity, and the Social Contract of Public Universities

By John Aubrey Douglass
Stanford University Press, Spring 2007
(Order from SUP)

Acclaim:

"John Aubrey Douglass brilliantly captures the dilemmas facing admissions at public universities in The Conditions for Admission" and "demonstrates the advantages of employing historical and comparative evidence to illuminate university admissions from the vantage point of an exemplary case study. . . Douglass is to be congratulated for crafting a volume on public university admissions that complements the current flourish of publications on the private sector (which includes Jerome Karabel's The Chosen, Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission, Michael L. Stevens's Creating a Class, and my own The Power of Privilege). There are other new books, including Peter Sacks's Tearing Down the Gates and Peter Schmidt's Color and Money, that range beyond the elite sector, but Douglass's treatment of public universities is unsurpassed.

- John A. Soares, review in Academe, and author of The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges

"John Aubrey Douglass' The Conditions for Admission connects past and present in the enduring policy debates about who goes to college and where. Admissions and access, whether from the point of view of system planners or parents and their children, provides the focus for putting the complex experience at the heart of serious analysis of American educational institutions and society."
- John Thelin, The University of Kentucky

"The Conditions for Admission expands our understanding of America's pioneering breed of public universities and confronts the real and often ignored differences between public and independent universities. The author notes that the United States is arguably no longer preeminent in its effort to build a high access and high quality network of colleges and universities‹a lead lost in part by a decline in government investment, but also by the increased demands of a constituent-driven society and by the actions of the institutions themselves."
- David Ward, President, American Council on Education

"California has been in the eye of the storm regarding university admissions, access, and affirmative action. John Douglass has been studying these issues for years and in his new book he provides a penetrating analysis of how changing access to the University of California has altered the historic social contract between higher education and the state. It should be read by everyone concerned about the question of equity and access to higher education in America."
- Robert Berdahl, President Association of American Universities

"John Aubrey Douglass' new work on the history of admissions policies at the University of California provides a model for historians who are interested in the relationship between the stories of the past and the challenges of the present . . . The book is lean, engaging, and judiciously supported by documents from UC archives. It also contributes to an emerging field of historical research on public institutions of higher education. [His] discussion of the history of affirmative action at UC connect squarely with current legal and political debates . . . [and explores the] productive tension between academic leadership and the volatile political sphere that forged and may continue to forge the social contract celebrated by Douglass' excellent new book and by other allies of public higher education.
- Scott Gelber, review in History of Education Quarterly

"[Douglass] confronts feel-good terms like 'disadvantaged' and 'underrepresented' that defy precise definition . . . The point of the book is that our popular belief in the social contract that America has with its colleges, that such institutions exist for the public good, is imperiled by dwindling government support."
- Chronicle of Higher Education

Summary:

The Conditions for Admission is the first comprehensive historical study of the admission policies and practices of public universities in the United States, linking their evolving “social contract” with contemporary debates over affirmative action, standardized tests, changing definitions of merit, the emerging influences of privatization and globalization, and the very purpose and future of these important institutions.

At its essence, that “social contract” included the profoundly progressive idea that any citizen who met a prescribed set of largely academic conditions would gain entrance to their state university—a sharp contrast to most private institutions that, throughout most of their history, proactively used sectarian and racial, and sometimes social caste criteria to exclude groups. Further, public universities sought to proactively mitigate barriers to access. How that social contract was formed, how it grew and has changed, its successes and failures, and the accompanying political battles, both past and present, over its meaning is the subject of this book.

Throughout much of the narrative, a case study of the University of California provides an illuminating window for exploring the historical and contemporary role of sectarianism, geographic representation, economic background, social standing, gender, and race in the evolving admissions policies in America’s public and private universities. In telling this story, the author brings the original purposes of a major public university more clearly into view. The intent is to give context for contemporary debates, and to perhaps arm academic leaders, lawmakers, and the public with a stronger sense of the broad social purposes of America’s groundbreaking grand tradition of public universities.

Previous historical studies on admissions and higher education access have largely focused on Ivy League and similar highly selective institutions. This book helps to fill a large gap in the scholarship, offering an in-depth analysis of the unique history and mission of public universities and the complex political world in which they must operate.

As the author details the question of who should or should not have access to a widely-perceived and increasingly-sought after public good is not new, but it has changed in its intensity, in the stakes for individuals, and in its role in creating a more equitable and prosperous society. In the postmodern and globalizing economy, access to higher education continues to grow mightily as a determinant of socio-economic mobility, and global competitiveness.

The result is a unique political and policy history that argues for greater autonomy of public universities in setting their admissions policy, but within a renewed idea and commitment to their “social contract” and a more concerted national effort to support pubic higher education. While the United States has been a world leader in developing mass higher education, and in using its pioneering network of public universities to help support the nation’s democratic experiment and promote its economic competitiveness, the author warns that access and graduation rates have stagnated and may be declining among younger students.

Competitors, and in particular key members of the European Union, along with China, India and other developing economies, are aggressively reforming and nurturing their higher education systems, expanding access, and better positioning themselves in the global economy. In the final chapters of the book, the author discusses why America’s higher education advantage is waning, and the possible consequences.

John Aubrey Douglass is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley. He is the author of The California Idea and American Higher Education and numerous articles on access and equity, international comparative higher education systems, and the evolving role of universities in national and supra-national economic and science policies. He has been a visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Oxford, and a Visiting Professor at Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (Sciences Po et CNRS).

Table of Contents

Preface – Acknowledgments

Part I: Building a Public University and Creating the Social Contract

Chapter 1: The Public University Movement and California

Chapter 2: Building a System and Broadening Access

Chapter 3: Inclusion, Exclusion and the Issue of Race

Part II: The Managerial University and the Post-World War II Era

Chapter 4: The Master Plan, the SAT, Growth and Managing Demand

Chapter 5: Countervailing Forces: Standardized Testing and Affirmative Action

Chapter 6: For Every Action a Reaction: Race, Bakke, and the Social Contract Revisited

Part III: Modern Battles Over Equity, Affirmative Action, and Testing

Chapter 7: California’s Affirmative Action Fight

Chapter 8: The First Aftermath: Outreach and Comprehensive Review

Chapter 9: The Second Aftermath: President Atkinson Versus the SAT

Part IV: Whither the Social Contract? The Post-Modern World and the Primacy of Higher Education

Chapter 10: Perils and Opportunities: Autonomy, Merit, and Privatization

Chapter 11: Is America’s Higher Education Advantage Waning?