American higher education is becoming increasingly privatized and other countries are rapidly catching up to American standards. Two books from Stanford University Press, recently showcased in the Chronicle of Higher Education, show that the future the nation’s universities may well depend on lessons learned from the past.

John Aubrey Douglass’s The Conditions of Admission reminds us of public universities’ social contract to provide high quality and high-access higher education. As seen in a review in the History of Education Quarterly, Douglass uses the University of California system to address alarming trends in university admissions policies, both private and public. He finds that the distinction between public institutions, like UC, and private institutions has become increasingly blurred in terms of funding from public sources and the selectivity, or exclusivity, of the admission process. While private universities have had the luxury of celebrating their elitism and promoting tight admissions requirements as indicators of superior quality, public universities have continually struggled to reconcile their mission of high-access with their mission of high quality.

Joseph A. Soares’s book, The Power of Privilege, also covered in the Chronicle’s essay, attacks the elitism of private universities’ admissions policies. Soares targets Yale University in debunking the myth that elite universities pioneered, and still promote, pure meritocratic admissions policies. Soares exposes a long tradition of socially biased measures of merit and a complex relationship between intelligence, education, and social class. 

  Soares suggests having elite colleges directly connect their admissions standards with high school curriculum-based performance measures, such as grades and the ACT, and adopting socioeconomic-sensitive admissions policies. These solutions could be key starting points for achieving a true academic meritocracy.