Admissions (ePub)

A sharp-witted and deeply insightful look into the storied world of elite prep schools from the first African-American legacy student to graduate from The Taft School, shedding light from the inside, while giving voice to those on the outside.

Kendra James began her professional life selling a lie. As an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment for select prep schools, her job was persuading students and families to embark on the same perilous journey, attending cutthroat and largely white schools, that she had years earlier as the first African American legacy student at The Taft School. Forced to reflect on her own elite educational experience, she quickly became disillusioned by America's inequitable system.

In ADMISSIONS, Kendra looks back at the three years she spent at Taft, from clashes with her lily-white roommate, unlearning the respectability politics she'd been raised, to a horrifying article in the student newspaper that accused Black and Latinxbrown students of being responsible for segregation of campus. She contemplates the benefits of the education she got from Taft, which Kendra credits as playing a role in her career's success, as well as the ways it coddled her--perhaps, she now believes, too much. Through these stories, she deconstructs the lies and half-truths she herself would later tell as an admissions professional, as well as the myths about boarding schools perpetuated by popular culture.

With its combination of incisive social critique and uproarious depictions of elite nonsense, ADMISSIONS will resonate with anyone who has ever been The Only One in a room, dealt with racial micro aggressions, or even just suffered with an extreme case of homesickness.