Traub on Open Admissions

As recounted by Scherer and Anson in their book, Community Colleges and the Access Effect (2014, Chapter 11):

Traub famously wrote in City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College, a chronicling of the 1969 lowering of admissions standards motivated by the pursuit of equity, “Open admissions was one of those fundamental questions about which, finally, you had to make an almost existential choice. Realism said: It doesn’t work. Idealism said: It must.”