Rejoinder.

• Author: Sandalow, Terrance
• Position: Response to article by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok in this issue, p. 1917 - 1999 Survey of Books Related to the Law

In The Shape of the River, presidents Bowen and Bok pronounce the race-sensitive admission policies adopted by selective undergraduate schools a resounding success. The evidence they adduce in support of that conclusion primarily concerns the performance of African-American students in and after college. But not all African-American students in those institutions were admitted in consequence of minority preference policies. Some, perhaps many, would have been admitted under race-neutral policies. I argued at several points in my review that since these students might be expected to be academically more successful than those admitted because of their race, the evidence on which Bowen and Bok rely provides a potentially distorted view of the latter's performance, almost certainly suggesting a greater level of success than those students actually achieved.

Bowen and Bok respond that distinguishing between African-American students who would have been admitted under race-neutral policies and those whose admission was attributable to their race "would require a method of analysis ... that is beyond the capability of our database."(1) Indeed, they go further, arguing that a determination of which students were admitted because of their race is impossible in principle. The decision whether or not to admit an applicant, they contend, "`depends upon all the attributes of a candidate together,'" so that even an experienced admissions officer reports that "even with all the information he has ... he himself could not say who was and who was not admitted because of the candidate's race."(2) These responses bring to mind the familiar story of the social scientist who was observed searching for his keys under a lamppost some distance from the spot where they had been dropped. When questioned by a passerby, he explained that the light was better under the lamppost.

I accept, of course, Bowen and Bok's description of the limitations of their database, and I am willing to assume arguendo that they accurately characterize admission decisions.(3) Nothing that I wrote in calling attention to their failure to address the performance of "specially admitted" students suggests the need to identify the "particular students who were admitted because of race-sensitive admissions policies."(4) To the contrary, I explicitly acknowledged that because of "the multiplicity of considerations that enter into admission decisions, it is impossible to determine how many African Americans would have been admitted under race-neutral policies without reexamining the applications of the entire applicant pool."(5) Even if the individuals cannot be identified, however, it is common ground that half or more of all African Americans attending selective colleges...