The BOOKPRESS | December 1998 |
The Shape of
the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College
and University Admissions.
In the title of their scrupulously
objective and rigorous new study, William Bowen and Derek Bok invoke Mark
Twain’s Mississippi, which, as they point out, was "symbolically central
to the progress of the country." They go on to say that "[t]he image of
the river is also central to the story of our book, which is concerned
with the flow of talent—particularly of talented black men and women—through
the country’s system of higher education and on into the marketplace and
the larger society."
Bok and Bowen’s "story" is actually
a comprehensive examination of a revolutionary large new database of over
80,000 matriculants to 28 selected colleges in the falls of 1951, 1976
and 1989. In addition to analyzing admissions procedures and academic outcomes,
they evaluate the post-education careers of 45,000 students of all races
of the classes of 1976 and 1989. This post-school research constitutes
a "first."
Perhaps the most singular emphasis
in The Shape of the River is on the benefits to society in general
of race-sensitive admissions policies to superior colleges and professional
schools. Bok and Bowen produce remarkable statistics evidencing the financial
success, leadership, and civic participation of the minority graduates.
In a telling passage, the authors
construct a profile of the roughly 700 black matriculants in the 1976 cohort
they estimate would have been rejected by the schools involved in the study
had race-neutral admission policies been in effect. The results of their
analysis are striking:
• Over 225 members
of this group of retrospectively rejected black matriculants went on to
attain professional degrees or doctorates.
A large majority of interviewed matriculants,
both black and white, testified that diversity enhanced their ability to
understand and work well with members of other races. "Of the many thousands
of former matriculants who responded to our survey," Bok and Bowen write,
"the vast majority believe that going to college with a diverse body of
fellow students made a valuable contribution to their education and personal
development. There is overwhelming support for the proposition that the
progress made over the last thirty years in achieving greater diversity
is to be prized, not devalued."
In a detailed analysis of the admissions
records of five of the schools in the database, Bok and Bowen estimate
that a race-neutral standard would reduce black enrollment by 50-70%. The
most selective schools, they find, would experience the largest drops in
black enrollment, to less than 2% of all enrollment.
Furthermore, the authors estimate
that a race-neutral standard would result in only a modest increase in
white students’ odds of admission to these schools. If white students filled
all the places created by reducing black enrollment, the overall probability
of admissions for white students would rise only one-and-one-half percentage
points: from 25% to roughly 26.5%. Here the authors invoke Thomas Kane’s
shrewd analogy of misperception in the case of parking places reserved
for the handicapped: "Eliminating the reserve space would have only a minuscule
effect on parking options for non-disabled drivers. But the sight of the
open space will frustrate many passing motorists who are looking for a
space. Many are likely to believe that they would now be parked if the
space were not reserved."
This reviewer wishes the authors
were not quite so leery of commenting on the "affirmative action" given
to college legatees and athletes. Perhaps they would argue there are some
overall societal rewards to these policies, since they buttress the finances
of worthy institutions like those each author once headed—Bowen is a former
President of Princeton, Bok of Harvard. (Although, actually, these Ivy
League institutions are limited recruiters of athletes per se and chary
of mediocre legatees.)
Most of us personally experience
some informal "affirmative action." In my case, my father was a Woodstock
artist, broke after the 1930s Crash, who guilelessly persuaded the headmasters
of two top prep schools, Hackley and then Lawrenceville, to take a chance
on accepting me for free, which in turn facilitated my later getting full
scholarships at Princeton. Purely my luck—with benign chain-reaction consequences
for my own children.
From a long perspective, we practiced
affirmative action long before the term emerged. Economists identify "compensatory
transfers" in social welfare among all market-oriented nations. The Roosevelt
Administration’s PWA and collateral programs were instituted to help artists
collectively to survive the Depression, on the grounds they contributed
to society—this decades before the Kennedy and Nixon Administrations’ affirmative
action policies, such as mandating specific "outreach" measures for hiring
laborers on federally contracted projects, and minority employee "set asides."
The authors make clear that their
advocacy of race-sensitive admissions in higher education, their limited
focus, does not necessarily illuminate specifically how affirmative action
should be implemented in other areas. Nevertheless, their book constitutes
a powerful case for affirmative action’s benefits to society as a whole.
The Shape of the River bears
indirectly on the fundamental issue of socio-economic inequality,
which is on the increase in all capitalist-market-oriented polities, including
the United States. Egregious inequality is notoriously a source of societal
instability, crucially affecting crime, public health, mortality rates,
and, in the extreme, the risk of war. Humanity will never see "equal shares"
of the world’s goodies for all. But the subjection of the vast majority
of people to subsistence levels remains an abomination which, ignored,
is a peril for all of us. Bowen and Bok show that, with respect to inequality,
affirmative action policies, at least in America, can make an increasingly
important difference.
Edward Chase is the former
editor-in- chief of New York Times Books and senior editor at Scribner.
He is a frequent contributor to The Bookpress.
William G. Bowen and Derek Bok.
Princeton University Press.
472 pages, $24.95.
• About 70 of
them are now doctors, and roughly 60 are lawyers.
• Nearly 125
are business executives.
• Well over
300 are leaders of civic activities.
• The average
earnings of the individuals in the group exceeds $ 71 ,000.
• Almost two-thirds
of the group (65 percent) were very satisfied with their undergraduate
experience.
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