Minority preferences reconsidered.

• Date: 01 May 1999
• Author: Sandalow, Terrance

THE SHAPE OF THE RIVER: LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES OF CONSIDERING RACE IN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY ADMISSIONS. By William G. Bowen and Derek Bok. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pp. xxxvi, 472. $24.95.

During the academic year 1965-66, at the height of the civil rights movement, the University of Michigan Law School faculty looked around and saw not a single African-American student. The absence of any black students was not, it should hardly need saying, attributable to a policy of purposeful exclusion. A black student graduated from the Law School as early as 1870, and in the intervening years a continuous flow of African-American students, though not a large number, had been admitted and graduated. Some went on to distinguished careers in the law.

But with the rise in the number of young people seeking admission to law school that began in the 1960s, admission standards at Michigan and at other law schools rose significantly. The consequence was that during the three-year period beginning in 1963 not a single black applicant qualified for admission to the Law School. In response to that dismal fact, the faculty directed its admission officer to recruit black applicants and, if necessary to achieve a reasonable number of blacks in the student body, to admit black applicants who seemed likely to complete the School's program whether or not they satisfied the admission standards required of other applicants.

Similar programs were adopted at about the same time by a few other law schools and by a number of undergraduate schools. Within a few years, say by 1970, the use of racial and ethnic criteria in college and university admissions was widespread.(1) During the 1970s, race-sensitive policies became a pervasive feature of American life, at least in its largest and most influential institutions, extending also to financial aid programs, employment and promotion decisions in both the public and private sectors, governmental and corporate procurement programs, and decisions about the apportionment of legislative bodies.

Although the intensity of the debate has waxed and waned over the years, the legality and the wisdom of the policies have been sources of continuing controversy from their inception. Curiously, considering the amount of attention the policies have received from the public generally, and the academic community in particular, little is known about their consequences. In The Shape of the River, William Bowen and Derek Bok, the former presidents, respectively, of Princeton and Harvard, undertake to inform one important corner of the currently intense debate about minority preferences by presenting the results of the first comprehensive study of the consequences of those preferences in undergraduate education.(2) The study draws mainly upon the rich storehouse of information contained in the College and Beyond (C&B) database compiled by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, of which Bowen is currently president. The portion of the database on which they draw includes the records of all undergraduate students who matriculated in the fall of 1951, the fall of 1976, and the fall of 1989 at twenty-eight selective colleges and universities, institutions that are generally representative of the undergraduate schools at which race-sensitive policies play a role in the selection of students. Bowen and Bok supplement the C&B database with information obtained by surveying C&B matriculants to determine, inter alia, the course of their lives after college and how they viewed their college experiences (pp. xxvii-xxx). By studying the 1976 and 1989 entering classes, they are able to ascertain not only the effect of race-sensitive admission policies upon the composition of the entering classes, but also to learn a great deal about the achievements of those studied both during and after college. The result is a treasure trove of information about the consequences of minority preferences in undergraduate education.

The authors do not claim that an appreciation of those consequences will or should end the debate about either the legality or the wisdom of the policies. "Plainly," as they write, "data take us only so far in considering this subject" (p. xxiv). Proponents and opponents each make arguments of moral principle unaffected by facts. Moreover, data is often subject to differing interpretations. And, finally, no study of an issue as complex and as controversial as preferential admissions in higher education is likely to satisfy the disputants that all the relevant data has been collected. Still, increased knowledge of the consequences of the programs cannot fail to affect the terms of the debate and, perhaps, to modify the views of those who participate in it. Although many of Bowen and Bok's findings will be unsurprising to academics and others who have been immersed in the issues, the impressive array of data they report and analyze puts a much firmer foundation under what the latter may suppose they already "knew." And even experts may find that some of what they thought they knew is contradicted, or at least unsupported, by the available data. The audience likely to gain most from the book, however, is the far larger number of academics and those members of the general public whom three members of the Supreme Court have aptly described as "the thoughtful part of the Nation,"(3) those who understand that knowledge is relevant to judgment and that approval or disapproval of a policy ought to be grounded in reasons.

Members of both groups, however, would do well to approach the book with some care. What Bowen and Bok have written is, in many ways, a brief for the continuation of the policies whose consequences they are examining. As they acknowledge at the outset, both have for many years strongly supported race-sensitive admission policies. That support colors their analysis at nearly every point, affecting not only the conclusions they reach but the questions they ask of the data and the matters to which they draw the attention of readers. In saying that, I do not intend to suggest that they have unfairly defined the relevant issues or unfairly reported the data they have gathered. To the contrary, they are at pains to bring to the surface information other proponents have often sought to submerge and to identify possible interpretations of the evidence that differ from their own. But in doing so, they invariably attempt to lead readers to the conclusion that "academically selective colleges and universities have been highly successful in using race-sensitive admissions policies to advance educational goals important to them and societal goals important to everyone" (p. 290). In fact, as I shall attempt to demonstrate in the pages that follow, the evidence bearing upon the success of the policies and the wisdom of retaining them is a good deal more ambiguous than they seek to persuade readers.

1. THE SHAPE OF THE EVIDENCE

   1. The Effect of Racial Preferences on the Composition of the Entering Class

      An observer of higher education unfamiliar with the history of preferential admission policies for minorities might think it ironic that the policies originated at the end of a decade in which the nation -- speaking through all three branches of its government -- had adopted wide-ranging policies aimed at creating a "color-blind" society. At the outset, however, many who supported race-sensitive admission policies believed, not without reason, that those policies did not discriminate on the basis of race. Traditional predictors of academic success, it was commonly argued, might not be accurate for blacks. Admission tests, such as the SAT, were plausibly believed to be culturally biased. Moreover, since many blacks had attended inferior schools, their failure to perform well on the tests might reflect only an educational deficiency that could be overcome by remedial courses at the college level.

      Although some proponents of racial preferences continue to make such claims, experience gained in the intervening years demonstrates their invalidity. We now know that the most common predictors of academic success, SAT scores and high school grades, do not underpredict the performance of blacks in college. To the contrary, at every level blacks underperform whites with equivalent SAT scores and high school grades.(4) In other words, if probable success in college, as measured by grades, were the sole basis for deciding among applicants, race would count against blacks, not in their favor.

      Consequentialist arguments for admitting blacks unlikely to perform as well as the whites and Asian Americans who would have been admitted if race were not considered necessarily begin with the effect of a race-neutral admission policy on African-American college enrollment.(5) Bowen and Bok estimate that race plays a significant role in admission decisions at only 20 to 30% of four-year undergraduate institutions. "[T]he vast majority of undergraduate institutions accept all qualified candidates and thus do not award special status to any group of applicants, defined by race or on the basis of any other criterion" (p. 15). Abandoning racial preferences would not, thus, necessarily lead to a significant, or indeed any, reduction in overall black college enrollment.(6) Blacks currently admitted to selective institutions who were unable to meet the admission criteria for whites and Asian Americans might simply attend institutions that admit all qualified applicants.(7)

      The most important questions that The Shape of the River addresses, accordingly, are those that concern the consequences for the students of all races who attend selective undergraduate institutions, and for the larger society, of policies that promote the attendance of African Americans at those institutions.(8) The initial consequence is that a nationwide abandonment of the policies would lead to a dramatic reduction in the number of blacks attending those...