A Private University Called to a Public Mission: Selective Higher Education, Diversity, and Access

Abstract

This chapter is an examination of the recent history of access for marginalized racial and socioeconomic groups to the United States’ most selective institutions of higher education, including Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL). Utilizing WUSTL as a case study, we review the university’s place in this narrative from the Black Manifesto and the 1968 sit-in in Brookings Hall to the school’s current effort to shed its status as the nation’s least socioeconomically diverse institution as determined by the fraction of undergraduates receiving Pell grants. Through this exploration of the trend toward the diversification of admissions pools in elite higher education, the chapter concludes with the acknowledgment that selective universities in the United States have the opportunity to significantly impact the country’s racial and socioeconomic disparities.

Citation

Macrander, A. and Thorp, H.H. (2016), "A Private University Called to a Public Mission: Selective Higher Education, Diversity, and Access", The Crisis of Race in Higher Education: A Day of Discovery and Dialogue (Diversity in Higher Education, Vol. 19), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 343-354. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-364420160000019018