In keeping with this edition’s focus on top degree producing institutions, here are reviews of a few books that focus on the college experience:
From Diplomas to Doctorates: The Success of Black Women in Higher Education and its Implications for Equal Educational Opportunities for All, edited by V. Barbara Bush, Crystal Renee Chambers and Mary Beth Walpole with a foreword by Kassie Freeman and afterword by Wynetta Y. Lee, $24.95, Stylus Publishing, May 2010, ISBN-10: 1579223575, ISBN-13:978-1579223571, pp. 208.
Black women fare well in higher education, relative to Black men. This book argues, however, that the women face significant challenges at every step of the journey. The authors offer original research on some of the educational dilemmas, barriers and breakthroughs Black women experience.
Among the discussion topics: how young women attain social capital, how Black women adapt to subordinate status in graduate school and how Black women can successfully navigate the journey toward the doctorate. “This book documents that being a Black woman in the educational process is not easy,” writes Wynetta Y. Lee in the afterword.
Degrees of Inequality: Culture, Class, and Gender in American Higher Education, by Ann L. Mullen, $50, Johns Hopkins University Press, November 2010, ISBN-10:080189770X, ISBN-13: 978-0801897702, pp. 264.
By comparing the experiences of students at institutions only a few miles but worlds apart, Ann Mullen underscores how American higher education perpetuates inequalities in the social order. Mullen, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, interviewed 100 students — 50 each at Yale University, the Ivy League citadel in New Haven, Conn., and Southern Connecticut State University, a public institution serving a largely commuter population. Mullen demonstrates how social class determines whether and where a student goes to college, why he or she chooses a major, and whether the graduate has the luxury of pursuing further education. Thus, graduates emerge on separate trajectories that maintain or widen the gaps.
“In these ways, the elite tier of higher education is a powerful engine of social reproduction, whereby accidents of birth are transformed into legitimate achievements,” Mullen writes.
