The wealthy the brilliant the few : elite education in contemporary American discourse Frontmatter Contents Acknowledgements Introduction I. Exposition: Approaching the Elite Educational Space 1. Introductory Remarks 2. Starting Points: Eliteness and Education in American Culture 3. Very Important Very Powerful or Very Prominent: Eliteness in America 4. Excellence and Equity: Merit as the Price of Admission 5. A Touchy Subject Class and Elite Education 6. Concluding Remarks II. Critique: Elite Education and Its Discontents 1. Introductory Remarks 2. Mapping the Critical Landscape 3. Progressivist Critiques 4. Conservative Critiques 5. Concluding Remarks III. Affirmation: Self Representation at Princeton University 1. Introductory Remarks 2. Elite College Admissions: A Discourse of Impossibility and Pathology 3. A Meritocracy of Affect 4. Epistemological Frames: Diversity the Good Life Community 5. Concluding Remarks IV. Imagination: Fictionalizations of the Elite Educational Experience 1. Introductory Remarks 2. Exposition: Fiction in the Discourse of Elite Education 3. Prep in the Discourse: Publicity Preppiness and the Neoliberal Imagination 4. Diversity Class Mobility: Preps Cultural Work 5. Concluding Remarks Conclusion Works Cited How do the US make sense of their own elite educational system given that it seems to be at odds with core American values such as equality of opportunity or upward mobility Sophie Spieler explores scholarly and journalistic investigations self representational texts and fictional narratives revolving around the Ivy League and its peers in order to understand elite education and its peculiar position in American cultural discourse. Among the books most surprising and groundbreaking insights is the tenacity and adaptability of meritocratic ideology across all three sub discourses despite its fundamental incompatibility with the American educational system