Response to review by Terrance Sandalow.

• Date: 01 May 1999
• Author: Bowen, William G.

Mark Twain tried to convey the size and complexity of the Mississippi by explaining to his readers that the river draws its water from every state between Delaware and Idaho, discharges 338 times as much water as the Thames, and is fed by 54 subordinate rivers each of which was large enough for steamboat travel. We borrowed Twain's image of the Mississippi for the title of our book (The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions) because we were trying to convey the complexity of the college admissions process, the college experience, and the myriad effects of the educational process on the subsequent lives of black and white students. While there is much of interest in Professor Sandalow's thoughtful and deep reading of our book, we would like to correct a major misunderstanding about the admissions data and the admissions process itself that lurks beneath one of Sandalow's main critiques of our research -- his complaint that we should have (or could have) done more to disentangle the streams that feed the river, to distinguish, in particular, "special admits" from "regular admits."

The line of thinking with which we cannot agree first appears in Sandalow's discussion of graduation rates of black and white students and reverberates through his article. "Oddly," he writes, "... [Bowen and Bok] seem to have made no effort to determine the graduation rate of `specially admitted' students" (presumably in contrast to those who might be regarded as "regularly admitted").(1) Professor Sandalow goes on to suggest that our failure to distinguish between these two groups biases major conclusions; in his words, "the evidence bearing upon the success of the policies and the wisdom of retaining them is a good deal more ambiguous than [Bowen and Bok] seek to persuade readers."(2) His argument is that lumping together the outcomes of individual black students who would have been admitted under a race-neutral admissions process with those of students who were admitted only because of a race-sensitive policy has the effect of inflating the outcomes for "specially admitted" minority students.(3)

But both Sandalow's argument and his inference are wrong. First, it is important to understand why it is impossible, even with the reasonably complete admissions records available to us for five academically selective schools, to identify the particular students who were admitted because of race-sensitive admissions policies. All that an observer of the admissions data can know is that the probability of having been admitted was, say, 50 percent, for an African-American student with SAT scores in the 1100-1200 range, that roughly 35 percent of black applicants with SAT scores between 1000 and 1100 were admitted, and that an average of about 75 percent of black applicants with test scores in the 1300-1500 range were admitted (p. 27, Fig. 2.5)(4) In choosing to admit particular individuals within each of these ranges, the...