Jerome Karabel is Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of many works, including The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which received the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award of the American Sociological Association and The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985 (with Steven Brint), which received the Outstanding Book Award of the American Educational Research Association. 

Since the 1970s, Professor Karabel has had a special interest in the social consequences of politics of university admissions. In 1989, he chaired the Admissions and Enrollment Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California at Berkeley and wrote the report, Freshman Admissions at Berkeley: A Policy for the 1990s and Beyond. His research on college and university admissions has appeared in such journals as The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Educational Record, Harvard Educational Review,and Theory and Society.

Professor Karabel is the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Institute of Education, and in 1993-1994 he was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2009-2010, he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, where he was working on a project entitled “American Exceptionalism, Social Well-Being, and the Quality of Life in the United States.” He writes frequently for non-academic audiences in such publications as The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, and Le Monde Diplomatique, and has appeared on such television and radio shows as Nightline, Today, and All Things Considered.