Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School

ADMISSIONS is a book by Kendra James that explores the burden of being a Black student in a racially illiterate community. It deconstructs the lies and half-truths she herself would later tell as an admissions professional and the myths about boarding schools perpetuated by popular culture. It combines incisive social critique with uproarious depictions of elite nonsense and will resonate with anyone who has ever been the only one in a room, dealt with racial microaggressions, or suffered from homesickness.

Format: Hardback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 10 March 2022
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Kendra James, an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment for independent prep schools, began to feel like she was selling a lie early in her professional life. She persuaded students and families to embark on the same perilous journey she had made, to attend cutthroat and largely white schools similar to The Taft School, where she had been the first African-American legacy student only a few years earlier. Her new job forced her to reflect on her own elite education experience and to realize how disillusioned she had become with America's inequitable system.

In ADMISSIONS, Kendra looks back at the three years she spent at Taft, chronicling clashes with her lily-white roommate, how she had to unlearn the respectability politics she had been raised with, and the fall-out from a horrifying article in the student newspaper that accused Black and Latinx students of being responsible for segregation of campus. Through these stories, some troubling, others hilarious, she deconstructs the lies and half-truths she herself would later tell as an admissions professional, in addition to 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 microaggressions, or even just suffered from an extreme case of homesickness.

Weight: 492g
Dimension: 162 x 240 x 30 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781538753484