Social closure in American elite higher education David L. Swartz Published online: 22 April 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008 Abstract Elite college admissions exemplify processes of social closure in which status-group conflict, organizational self-interest, the strategic use of cultural ideals of merit, and broader social trends and contingent historical events interweave to shape institutional power in the United States. The Chosen, Jerome Karabel’ s monumental study of the history of college admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton from 1900 to 2005, offers a political sociology of elite recruitment and a cultural and social history of the definition of merit that has guided these three schools and shaped much current thinking about college admissions. As Max Weber reminded us, the very definition of cultural ideals of an epoch bear the stamp of elite group domination: not cultural ideals but cultural interests and their strategic uses guide institutional power. The book provides an impressive empirical demonstration of that proposition: it identifies four different definitions of merit as organizational gatekeeping tools that have guided Harvard, Yale, and Princeton over the last hundred years and shows how these definitions were molded by status-group conflict and organizational interests. This essay outlines the central arguments of Karabel’ s book; it identifies key contributions for our understanding of the history, culture, organizational interests, and politics of these three institutions; it highlights the social closure framework guiding the analysis; and it reflects on a fundamental Theor Soc (2008) 37:409–419 DOI 10.1007/s11186-008-9064-2 A review essay on Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005, D. L. Swartz (*) Sociology Department, Boston University, 96-100 Cummington St., Boston, MA 02215, USA e-mail: dswartz@bu.edu