Minority education is focus of grant

Wechsler

arold Wechsler, professor at the Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, will use a $380,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation to study the development of minority access to higher education, and how institutional policies and actions affected it.

"Our country's quest for educational equity remains elusive after all these years," said Wechsler. "We need more analytical and less polemical treatment of issues related to promoting and hindering minority access to higher education."

During the three-year project, Wechsler will work with graduate student assistants to analyze a dozen U.S. colleges and universities by examining ethnic and racial histories, documents, surveys, and other materials that reveal student demographics, enrollment patterns, and institutional accommodations for minorities and women.

The project bridges Wechsler's previous research on early 20th century admissions policies with his studies of minority access to college since 1970. Other historians have looked at how elite Eastern colleges handle the academic and social lives of minority students and women. Wechsler is taking the next step by tracking how women, African American, Jewish, Hispanic, and Asian college students fared at municipal and state institutions

Wechsler, who earned his doctorate in history from Columbia University, is the author of several books and monographs, including The Middle College Movement: A History; Jewish Learning in American Universities: The First Century (with Paul Ritterband); and The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America 1870-1970.

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