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.

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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.

As any parent with children of college age could attest, financial aid is a crucial part of the admissions picture. Financial aid has been the subject of tremendous controversy in recent years as several elite private universities have contemplated abolishing need-blind admissions. The question of aid is debated endlessly on the floors of state legislatures, where state aid to students attending private colleges is increasingly challenged as a diversion of funds away from the public universities. And the question is not limited to the American higher-education landscape: If federal tax breaks for college tuition has been a topic of some prominence recently in America, the question of government grants to college students has aroused rather more ire and passion in England, as New Labor launches tremendous cuts in aid to students.

Duffy and Goldberg chart the development of financial aid from 1955-when there was no federal aid program-to 1994, when federal aid amounted to more than $35 billion, and the 16 Massachusetts and Ohio institutions studied in Crafting a Class spent on average approximately $10.3 million on financial aid. Although Duffy and Goldberg do not touch on the issue of financial aid to religious colleges, it is worth noting that Christian colleges rely on federal financial-aid dollars no less than their secular counterparts, but several recent court cases have challenged the constitutionality of these allocations. If government aid is found to violate the separation of church and state-and a good argument can be made that it does-many Christian colleges would have difficulty replacing this money. In a 1996 survey of 13 Christian colleges, the average revenue from federal grants-not including federal loans or state grants-was $900,000.

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Need-based aid constitutes only part of financial aid in contemporary America. In recent years, some colleges have increased their merit-based scholarships, designed to lure top-notch students away from competitors. When they began their research, Duffy and Goldberg were disdainful of merit-based aid programs, assuming that merit scholarships diverted funds away from need-based aid. The most interesting finding of their book is that, in fact, "merit aid seems to have had at most a marginal impact on need-based allocations. Although none of the colleges that award merit aid guarantee that they will meet the need of all admitted students, all except one have continued to increase their spending on need-based aid, even as they have expanded their merit programs."

But for all their analysis of increased selectivity and the development of financial aid, Duffy and Goldberg fail to focus on the most important change in higher education during the last half-century: colleges have crawled into bed with the market, and their cozy relationship seems only to solidify each year. This has dramatic consequences for all areas of university life, not least admissions and financial aid. The mentality of the university is increasingly one of customer satisfaction, and the cultivating of customers-students-begins at the admissions office.

Admissions offices now devote an inordinate amount of their resources to selling their school and recruiting students. As Mark Edmundson pointed out in a recent essay in Harper's, the marketing of a school to prospective consumers begins most aggressively in the junior year of high school, when kids are bombarded with videotapes, CD-ROMs, and glossy picturebooks portraying university life. "Colleges don't have admissions offices anymore," Edmunson quotes one financial aid officer as saying; "they have marketing departments."

One admissions officer at a small Christian college told me that his school had recently debated changing its admission policy to admit only Christian students. "That would be truly in keeping with the mission of the school," he said, "but we can't do it, any more than we can limit our student body to the kind of high academic achievers we'd like to see. We have to remember the mission of the college, but the main concern is the bottom line."

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It seems to me that my friend has his priorities reversed. In fact, while we must always remember the bottom line, the main concern must be the mission of the university-which is not to turn a profit.

Duffy and Goldberg suggest that, during the last 40 years, the central change in college admissions has been the transformation of admissions officers from mere gatekeepers to administrators-cum-artisans who cull their students like so many gourmands hunting for the finest ingredients. Perhaps this is the case at elite institutions like Amherst, but things are much different outside that charmed circle. As one administrator at a small college in the South recently told me, "We used to be able to think about what students the college wants. Now we think instead about what college the students want, and our job has become for us to convince them they want us, not the other way around. And then we take whoever we can get. And if we have any real room for choice, we take whoever can pay."

Another admissions officer echoed the sentiment: "We have a need-blind admissions policy, but people pretty much look the other way. We're urged to be selective, of course, but at the end of the day, all the extracurricular and personal statements and letters of recommendation are more or less irrelevant-we select on the basis of bank accounts, and if we don't happen to have that information handy, we go by the zip code."

Crafting a Class clearly is not intended to serve as a guide for students and their parents-how to get in, how to get your kids in-but the advice implicit in Duffy and Goldberg will mislead unwary readers who try to use the book for that purpose. Field hockey and the Junior Classical League and violin lessons may be prerequisites for Smith and Williams. If, however, your child is aiming at a less prestigious institution, you may want to do no more or less than move to a tonier neighborhood. Then, you will have to worry not about whether your child will be admitted to said institution, but only what type of experience he will have once he gets there.

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