Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us

by Evan Mandery

Overview

Next Big Idea Book Club Nominee October 2022

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620976951
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	10/25/2022
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	347,591
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Author's Note xi

Introduction xiii

Part I The Shopping Mall 1

1 Going Up 3

2 Falling Off 18

3 The Top Floor and the Iron Ceiling 29

Part II How Elite Colleges Distort Communities 41

4 Finding the Escalator 43

5 Cracking the Code 55

6 Green Fences-The Games Kids Play 75

7 The Well-Rounded Man 91

8 Affirmative Action for Rich Whites 104

Part III How Elite Colleges Distort Student Lives 119

9 Doing Good 121

10 The Best and the Brightest-Building the Meritocracy Myth 133

11 The Doubly Disadvantaged 144

12 Learning to Party 160

Part IV Barriers to Change 171

13 How Liberals Become Conservative 173

14 Still Separate, Still Unequal 186

15 How Michael Lewis Ruined Baseball 198

16 You Say You Want a Revolution 213

Part V Change 225

17 Making College Pay 227

18 We Need You, Mr. Grassley 243

19 One Percent Solutions 254

20 Communities of Opportunity 269

Postscript: A Plea to the Privileged 279

Acknowledgments 289

Recommended Reading 293

Notes 297

Index 347

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Poison Ivy:
Next Big Idea Book Club Nominee, October 2022

“A scathing indictment of how elite colleges contribute to the nation’s increasing social and economic inequality.”
—Forbes

“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 exposé 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

“A no-holds-barred take-down . . . Mandery offers a detailed and scathing indictment of how elite colleges . . . contribute to the nation’s increasing social and economic inequality. One of the best higher education books of 2022.”
—Mike Nietzel, Forbes.com

“Lively and trenchant . . . Mandery presents his indictment with an appealing blend of storytelling and hard data.”
—Richard Kahlenberg, Washington Monthly

“[Poison Ivy] slams the role that the Ivy League and other private universities play in perpetuating and even worsening our vast social chasms.”
—Will Bunch, Philadelphia Inquirer

“One of several new and thoughtful books . . . asking whether it is fair that ostensibly meritocratic societies have handed such extensive power to a small clutch of academic institutions.”
—Brooke Masters, The Financial Times

“Drawing on individual stories and fascinating data, Mandery shows that . . . so-called top schools . . . are accessible almost exclusively to the already well-off.”
—Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon

“Mandery lays out compelling evidence that Ivy League universities—along with peer institutions such as Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Duke, and Georgetown—propagate segregation and income inequality.”
—Ross O’Hara, Psychology Today

From the Publisher

08/01/2022

This book shines a light on the world of elite Ivy League universities in regard to their avowed support of education for all. The author, a Harvard graduate who now works at a public university, looks at the reality behind these statements of support. He does so by investigating the landscape of higher education through the widening gap between socioeconomic levels in American communities. The author identifies initial and ongoing detriments and barriers, such as less initial access to well-funded schools and lack of transportation to higher-paying jobs. He also offers potential solutions for change and bases his conclusions on his own experiences, data from higher education research studies, and personal interviews with students who have been both inside and outside the system of elite higher education. This book paints a stark picture of the disparate worlds of the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy in American higher education. It shows how the Ivy League universities not only reinforce this gap, but exacerbate it. It also exposes the mythmaking that elite universities engage in to justify the current form of higher education. VERDICT Recommended for all library collections on higher education.—Karen Bordonaro

Library Journal

2022-07-05
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.None

Many people believe that private, elite colleges reward merit and hard work, and while that may be true, there are countless other factors at play. Mandery—a Harvard graduate, Emmy and Peabody winner, and author of A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America, among other books—plainly shows how “elite colleges are guilty of cementing, reproducing, and exacerbating inequality in America.” Ivy League colleges, and others of their ilk, open their doors mainly to those least in need. “For the overwhelming majority,” the author notes, “they take children who have been the beneficiary of a lifetime of privilege, convert that privilege into a degree of value, steer these students into careers in finance, cultivate disdain for those who work for the common good, [and] systematically disadvantage the handful of poor students of color who manage to make it through their gates.” On the other hand, public universities are “producing the lion’s share of upward mobility” and encouraging public service careers. The trend of excluding talented, low-income students from elite colleges is exacerbated by standardized testing biases, tax exemptions for higher education, the hoarding of endowments, and admissions criteria privileging legacy students and accomplishments (science fair awards, volunteering, expensive extracurricular activities, etc.) that favor affluent applicants. Mandery offers a variety of strategies to counter this problem—e.g., basing admissions decisions on high school rank and increasing the sizes of entering classes. Of course, students attend college for reasons other than status: gaining access to specific occupations, transitioning to adulthood, or just the sheer joy of learning. Living a decent and satisfying life, as Mandery shows, hardly depends on a degree from Harvard or Princeton.

A convincing indictment of elite colleges for reproducing inequality while hiding behind their historical clout.

Kirkus Reviews