The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

Abstract

preferred sports and fraternities rather than wearing bell-bottom jeans or trying LSD. And in addition to more social history, The Lost Promise could have explored what happened in professional schools. Protests in colleges of education? MBA programs? Medical schools? Law schools beyond Yale? (Laura Kalman’s excellent 2006 Yale Law School and the Sixties described substantial dissent over race, governance, teaching methods, and courses.) A full defense of Schrecker’s title would also take more space. The post-World War II “promise”—higher education deserves to expand rapidly because it offers upward mobility at a reasonable cost—faded quickly after the 1960s, she claims. To make the case that higher education faltered—and to connect that decline with the late 1960s— would take several chapters. As she acknowledged during a Roosevelt House panel discussion on December 17, 2021, “the real title of the book is A Political History of American Higher Education during the Long 1960s.” Her epilogue is too brief to clinch the case that public confidence and policy support plunged, permanently, as a result of a few stormy years. Whatever the need to say more, Schrecker packs a great deal of important information in this well-written book. Instructors of survey courses will find it essential preparation for their week on the 1960s—this book will jog the memory and fill gaps. For graduate seminars, faculty could assign The Lost Promise along with John Thelin’s shorter but broader Going to College in the Sixties (2018) and, for a case study, Donald Alexander Downs’s Cornell ’69 (2014). Rather than quarrel about which one is best, the instructor can remind the seminar that one legacy of the 1960s is greater tolerance.