In The Miseducation of America, Ralph Richard Banks, a Stanford Law Professor and founder of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, argues that higher education has become a luxury good, accessible only to those who need and benefit least from the opportunity it offers. Furthermore, despite claims of financial aid and equal opportunity admission, these higher learning institutions have actively promulgated this model—sometimes directly and purposefully, sometimes not—to the detriment of many potential students that are unable to break through these barriers.

Banks lays out the blueprint for a radical education equity movement, one in which education is valued for how many and how well it teaches and not by how many it keeps out. He also urges us to pay closer attention to the higher-achieving students who break through the barriers and then must juggle impossible academic expectations along with their physical, mental, and financial health. For our democracy to work, Banks argues, education must finally fulfill its promise as a public good—until it does that, it’s not really serving anyone.

Banks weaves his brilliant argument around a moving and personal story, one that only he can tell. As a first-generation college student, he tells how his family fled the Jim Crow south to give him the education that was his mother’s dying wish. As an alumnus of Stanford and Harvard and a Stanford Professor, he offers an insider look at the world’s most elite educational institutions, and, as a board member of Southern New Hampshire University, he gives us a glimpse of one of the most democratic. Finally, as a parent of three teenage sons, he speaks to the enormous pressure put on both students and parents and offers a powerful reframing of the admissions process that other families will welcome.