Minority report.

• Author: Mathews, Jay
• Position: THE SOURCE OF THE RIVER: The Social Origins of Freshman at America's Colleges and Universities by Douglas s. Masse, Camille Z. Charles, Garvey F. Lundy, and Mary J. Fischer

THE SOURCE OF THE RIVER: The Social Origins of Freshman at America's Colleges and Universities by Douglas s. Masse, Camille Z. Charles, Garvey F. Lundy, and Mary J. Fischer Princeton University Press, $29.95

THERE ARE IN THIS WORLD A few blessed spots where the very best yearn to perform. For baseball players, it is Yankee Stadium; for lawyers, the courtroom of the U.S. Supreme Court; for astronomers, the Keck Observatory at Manna Kea. And for educational researchers, particularly those interested in higher education, it is the College and Beyond Survey, a colossal database of 75,000 students who enrolled in 34 colleges in 1951, 1976, and 1989. Such a rich statistical layer cake makes economists' and sociologists' mouths water and has been the source of many studies on the impact of college on American lives.

The Mellon Foundation, which supplied the money for College and Beyond, has now served up a new treat: the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen (NLSF), funded jointly by Mellon and the Atlantic Philanthropies to the tune of $3.5 million. The Source of the River, written by a team of scholars from the University of Pennsylvania, draws on the survey's list of 959 Asians, 998 whites, 1,051 African Americans, and 916 Latinos who in the fall of 1999 enrolled at 28 selective colleges and universities, from Howard to Northwestern, Georgetown to Swarthmore.

And it appears just in time. As the University of Michigan affirmative action lawsuit comes before the Supreme Court, college admissions policy is once again one of the great flashpoints in American life. As the nation plunges into another soul-and-statistic-searching debate about whether and under what conditions affirmative action on campus can be justified, all sides in the dispute will be turning to data troves like the NLSF to build their arguments. This is scholarship of the first order, a study that will influence thinking about our society for the next generation. General readers of this book may be irked to discover that it contains only the first tentative results from what is likely to be a rich vein of information yielding several volumes. But specialists will love it. And those of us who like to sound smart in luncheon conversations will discover many intriguing statistical gems.

In future debates over how much of a preference to give minority college applicants, the NLSF will be able to shed light on a number of murky questions: Do black students ill prepared in ghetto...