An eye-opening look at how America's elite colleges and suburbs help keep the rich rich-making it harder than ever to fight the inequality dividing us today The front-page news and the trials that followed Operation Varsity Blues were just the tip of the iceberg. Poison Ivy tells the bigger, seedier story of how elite colleges create paths to admission available only to the wealthy, despite rhetoric to the contrary. Evan Mandery reveals how tacit agreements between exclusive Ivy-plus schools and white affluent suburbs create widespread de facto segregation. And as a college degree continues to be the surest route to upward mobility, the inequality bred in our broken higher education system is now a principal driver of skyrocketing income inequality everywhere.
Mandery-a professor at a public college that serves low- and middle-income students-contrasts the lip service paid to opportunity by so many elite colleges and universities with schools that actually walk the walk. Weaving in shocking data and captivating interviews with students and administrators alike, Poison Ivy also synthesizes fascinating insider information on everything from how students are evaluated, unfair tax breaks, and questionable fundraising practices to suburban rituals, testing, tutoring, tuition schemes, and more. This bold, provocative indictment of America's elite colleges shows us what's at stake in a faulty system-and what will be possible if we muster the collective will to transform it.
An Emmy and Peabody Award winner, Evan Mandery is a professor at the City University of New York. He has written for the New York Times and Politico and has appeared on The Today Show, CNN, and NPR's Fresh Air. His journey as a Harvard alum publicly challenging legacy admissions at elite schools led him to write Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us (The New Press). He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
Title: Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us
Author: Mandery, Evan
ISBN: 9781620976951
Binding:
Publisher: The New Press
Publication Date: 2022-12-08
Number of Pages: 256
Weight: 0.6732 kg
Praise for Poison Ivy:
This book shines a light on the world of elite Ivy League universities in regard to their avowed support of education for all.
-Library Journal
A potent investigation into how elite colleges and universities in the U.S. perpetuate economic inequalities and fail to properly address the country's ongoing racial divide.
-Kirkus Reviews
Mandery argues that the pernicious unevenness of social class at elite colleges is a blueprint for other modes of injustice. Liberal audiences may be startled to see themselves mirrored unflatteringly in these pages, yet readers must not turn away from this book's cruel awakening. A necessary read for parents, academics, college officials, and most of all the students and alumni who benefit from this tilted system.
-Alissa Quart, author of Squeezed and executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
A staggering portrait of inequality in America, Poison Ivy offers poignant, lyrically written portraits of student lives on the margins of the American higher education system and a carefully constructed expose of the fundamental myth at its heart. Through conversations with experts, bolstered by data, Mandery shows that the well-recognized inequities at American elite colleges are not the consequences of segregation and disparities of opportunities, but rather the driver of them.
-Philip Dray, author of There Is Power in a Union
Beautifully written and engaging, Poison Ivy holds elite higher education accountable for exacerbating the gulf between poor and rich, black and white.
-Erin I. Kelly, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of Chasing Me to My Grave
It's time to wake up and realize that our best ladders of opportunity aren't at colleges with billion-dollar endowments-they're at our publicly funded institutions.
-Jack Schneider, co-author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door