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Crafting a Class: College Admissions and Financial Aid, 1955-1994, by Elizabeth A. Duffy and Idana Goldberg (Princeton University Press, 336 pp.; $ 29.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Lauren F. Winner, Kellett Scholar at Clare College, University of Cambridge.

Moms, I am convinced, all attend a class sometime during pregnancy where they learn a few authoritative tales to tell their children. Growing up, all of my friends and I heard slight variations on a small canon of stories, and each of our mothers sought to authenticate the tales by swearing to know the people involved. The story that most frequently passed my mother's lips was the one about the girl who wore a foot-high beehive and never washed her hair until one day when, in the middle of English class, great black bugs started crawling out.

When I was young, My mother also liked to tell a story about my grandmother, the first woman in my family to go to college-she had attended Woman's College, a normal school now known as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She had, the story went, written Woman's College a letter saying, "I want to come," and they had written back saying, "Fine, come Tuesday." All of my friends heard similar stories growing up, with grandmothers attending institutions ranging from Radcliffe to Brooklyn College; I seem to recall that a version of the same tale even made its way into one of the ubiquitous how-to-apply-to-college-and-get-in guides. Whether my grandmother indeed ever received such a letter from Woman's College, I do not know. What is clear, however, is that college admissions have changed radically since my grandmother matriculated in 1925.

Elizabeth A. Duffy and Idana Goldberg's recent book, which was funded by the Mellon Foundation, does not pick up the story of college admissions and financial aid until 1955. In the last four decades, Duffy and Goldberg argue, admissions have been transformed. Most obviously, a vast majority of single-sex schools became coed, and colleges began active minority recruitment. The central change Duffy and Goldberg pinpoint, however, is one of selectivity: at midcentury, few colleges denied admission to more than a handful of students. In the 1960s, the college-age population exploded, and financial-aid resources expanded. This resulted in a deluge of applicants, far more than the colleges could admit, even when they expanded their class size: For the first time, colleges were faced with the task of "crafting a class."

The flaw with this book's focus on selectivity lies in Duffy and Goldberg's sample. Their findings are based almost entirely on a study of 16 private liberal arts colleges in Massachusetts and Ohio, which include two Little Ivies (Williams and Amherst), three Seven Sisters (Smith, Wellesley, and Mount Holyoke), and one Christian college: Gordon. These are among the most selective colleges in the country, and one cannot generalize from their experiences to a Mars Hill or a Sweet Briar. Today many American colleges are worried about filling a class, not crafting a class.

This is particularly true of Christian colleges, many of which do not even manage to enroll their full capacity of students, much less achieve any measure of selectivity. The majority of Christian colleges, for instance, do not require a Christian commitment for admission; some see enrolling non-Christians as an opportunity for evangelism; others claim that the presence of non-Christians imbues the campus with an otherwise unavailable atmosphere. But many Christian colleges simply need the numbers and do not have the luxury of turning away non-Christian applicants.

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May 18 1998, Vol. 42, No. 6