Class action: why education needs quotas for poor kids.

• Author: Kahlenberg, Richard D.
• Position: Book by William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin - Book Review

Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education By William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin University of Virginia Press, $27.95

In 1998, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, and Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard, wrote a highly influential defense of affirmative action titled The Shape of the River. While affirming the consideration of race in university admissions, the book dismissed the idea that colleges should do a better job of admitting low-income students of all races: "The problem is not that poor but qualified candidates go undiscovered, but that there are simply very few of these candidates in the first place." The role of selective universities in promoting social mobility, Bowen and Bok declared, was limited mostly to admitting more middle-class children to elite institutions: "It usually requires more than a single generation to move up to the highest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder."

That was then, this is now. Today, the current president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, has essentially repudiated Bok's position and devised an innovative program to reach out to, admit, and pay the tuitions of qualified, low-income students. Summers calls the growing divide between the children of the rich and the children of the poor "the most serious domestic problem in the United States today." Bowen, the president of the Mellon Foundation, has followed suit, teaming up with colleagues Martin Kurzweil and Eugene Tobin to write a book advocating preferential treatment of poor applicants.

Despite its uninspired title, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education provides a fascinating look into how the admissions process at selective universities helps certain groups and not others. Mellon assembled a new data set of 180,000 students who applied to be in the 1995 freshman class at 19 selective colleges (five Ivies--Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania; 10 private liberal arts colleges; and four top public universities).

While the under-representation of low-income students should come as no surprise, the details the authors amass to depict its extent can be shocking. Only 11 percent of students at the top-tier universities come from families in the bottom income quartile (compared with 50 percent from the top income quartile). Only 3 percent of students are both from the bottom income quartile and the first generation to attend college. These numbers track roughly...