A Sweeping New Defense of Affirmative Action
Former presidents of Harvard and Princeton muster a wealth of data

By Ben Gose

Date: September 18, 1998
Copyright (c) 1998, by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.
Posted with permission on DiversityWeb.

Race-sensitive admissions policies have achieved the goals of providing promising careers for black students and promoting interracial interaction on elite campuses, according to a book released last week by the former presidents of Harvard and Princeton Universities. But the book, based on a mammoth analysis of student data, also documents the extent to which black students are admitted to selective colleges with lesser academic qualifications, and go on to perform less well academically than their white counterparts.

The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton University Press), the most comprehensive look ever at how students who benefited from racial preferences have fared both during and after college, is based on a study of 45,184 students who entered 28 selective colleges in the fall of 1976 or the fall of 1989.

The authors, William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, the former presidents of Princeton and Harvard Universities, respectively, hope that their work will help recast the debate over affirmative action, which has been rolled back in California and Texas. They say their study shows that those black students who might have been turned away by selective colleges if race had not been a factor have accomplished much in life. The findings of the study, they say, disprove the claim by some opponents of affirmative action that black students with low test scores would be better off at less-selective institutions, where their scores would more closely parallel the average.

Among the findings:

• About 75 per cent of the black students who entered the 28 colleges in 1989 graduated within six years -- almost twice the graduation rate of black students at 305 National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I universities (40 per cent). Black students with the lowest SAT scores had the best chance of graduating if they attended the most-selective colleges. Of the black students with combined SAT scores below 1000 who attended the eight most selective colleges in the data base (such as Williams College and Princeton), 88 per cent graduated. Only 65 per cent of the black students with SAT scores below 1000 who attended the six least-selective colleges in the data base (such as Tulane University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) graduated.
• Black graduates were more likely than white graduates to earn graduate degrees. Forty per cent of the black students who entered the 28 colleges in 1976 earned a graduate or professional degree, compared with 37 per cent of the white students who entered in that year.
• Black graduates of the colleges were more likely than white graduates to go on to become leaders of community, social-service, and professional organizations.
• The salary gap among black and white graduates of the 28 colleges was much smaller than in the nation as a whole. Black female graduates who entered college in 1976 went on to earn an average of $64,700 in 1996, just 2 per cent less than their white female classmates earned. (The salary gap among black women and white women in the national population is 14 per cent.) Black male graduates earned an average of $85,000, 17 per cent less than white male graduates. (The gap is 35 per cent in the national population.)
• "If black students suffered, they certainly don't show that in how they did," Mr. Bowen says. "It's time to abandon the notion that the minority students recruited by these schools have somehow been victimized."
• The book includes relatively little data about American Indian, Asian-American, and Hispanic students. The authors decided to focus on black students, in part because "so much of the debate over race-sensitive admissions policies has centered on black-white cmparisons."
• Supporters of affirmative action expressed hope that the dense treatise (the appendices alone take up 160 pages) would help win over an increasingly skeptical public.

"The discussion of affirmative action is all heat and no light," says Robert M. Solow, an emeritus professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Here are two very smart people with a long background in higher education who actually have collected data. You naturally live in hope that people will read it, and the character of the discussion will change."

Mr. Bok and Mr. Bowen acknowledge that they "worked hard, over more than three decades" to enroll more minority students, but they say they tried to approach the study as dispassionate scholars. "It was important, we thought, to try to understand and come to terms with any disappointing results as well as to learn from positive outcomes."

But several conservative scholars say the two authors paid only lip service to objectivity. "It's like so much social science regarding race that we've seen in the last several years -- it's entirely ideologically driven," says Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, a conservative think tank in Stanford, Cal. "If you look at the questions they ask and the conclusions they come to, both perfectly coincide with the contours of the liberal position on affirmative action."

The data in the book will probably be seized upon by both advocates and opponents of affirmative action.

The authors say that without race-sensitive admissions, black enrollment at the five colleges for which complete statistics were available would plunge "to early 1960s levels." (The five colleges, which are unidentified, are "roughly representative" of the 28 in the study.) If black students who entered the five colleges in 1989 had been admitted and had chosen to enroll at the same rates as white students, their proportions would have fallen from 7.1 per cent to 3.6 per cent.

Meanwhile, the odds of admission for white students would have increased only slightly -- from 25 per cent to about 27 per cent. Mr. Bowen and Mr. Bok suggest that the emotion of the debate obscures the fact that few white students are affected by affirmative action. They cite an analogy in a forthcoming paper by Thomas J. Kane, of the Brookings Institution, in Washington, to make their point: Reserving a parking space for a disabled person has only a "minuscule effect" on the availability of parking spots, he notes, but it frustrates virtually every driver who passes it.

But Michael S. Greve, executive director of the Center for Individual Rights, a non-profit law group in Washington that has represented white students who have sued colleges over racial preferences, says the authors' use of the analogy may backfire. "Even if the displacement costs aren't terribly large, and the chance of admission would go up only incrementally, what that proves is that for every one student who was actually rejected, there are thousands of people who think they may have been. That in itself is a very, very severe social cost of these policies."

The study also found that black students lag in the classroom.

The average cumulative grade-point average for black students who matriculated at the 28 colleges in 1989 was 2.61 on a 4.0 scale, compared with 3.15 for white students. The average black matriculant was ranked at the 23rd percentile -- in the bottom quarter -- of the class.

Even those black students whose SAT scores were in the same range as those of white students subsequently earned worse grades. White students with SAT scores above 1300, for example, were ranked, on average, in the top 40 per cent of their classes. Black students with the same scores were in the bottom 40 per cent of their classes.

"Being a member of a small and visible minority group in an overwhelmingly white community that is known to have excluded black students for generations surely increases the odds of encountering" academic problems, the authors write.

Hugh B. Price, president of the National Urban League, says the fact that black students tend to earn worse grades than white students isn't catastrophic, given that the data show that black graduates do about as well as white graduates in the job market.

"A white summa cum laude with 1600 on the SAT who goes brain dead and becomes lazy after graduation is not going to accomplish much," Mr. Price says. "Someone with an 1150 who hustles is going to accomplish a lot more. Success stories come in all colors."

But Mr. Steele, of the Hoover Institution, says that in areas where merit counts, black people remain underrepresented. Mr. Bowen and Mr. Bok missed that point, he argues, because they saw signs of professional success where none exist. One graph in the book, for example, shows that 33 per cent of the black students who earned doctorates went on to lead community or social-service activities. Only 6 per cent of white students with doctorates reported such activities.

"What in God's name does that have to do with professional achievement and excellence?" Mr. Steele asks. "As everyone in the academic world knows, people who are not at the top of their profession try to compensate for that by doing a lot of community work."

The study finds, for example, that black physicians are twice as likely as white physicians to lead community or social-service activities, but Mr. Steele speculates that given the choice, many of the black physicians would rather be busy with lucrative practices. "Why shouldn't blacks be able to practice heart surgery in Beverly Hills? If affirmative action is doing so well, why aren't they there?"

Mr. Bowen and Mr. Bok have an entirely different take on those statistics. They write that black students are giving back to their communities rather than mimicking "white flight" to the suburbs or "allowing the lure of personal gain and affluent life styles to remove them from feeling an obligation to social service."

Mr. Steele and others have argued that affirmative action stigmatizes the best black students by linking them with those who need a helping hand. Mr. Bowen and Mr. Bok, however, say the data are "unequivocal" in showing that that is not so. They note, for example, that 75 per cent of the black students who scored 1300 or better on the SAT believe that colleges should place "a great deal" of emphasis on racial diversity.

"Black students do not seem to think they have been harmed as a result of attending selective colleges with race-sensitive policies," the two authors argue. "Were it otherwise, one would assume that the ablest black students would be resentful of these policies and the colleges that adopted them."

But even black students with high test scores benefit from affirmative action. The study shows that at the five colleges with complete admissions statistics, three out of four white students who scored 1300 to 1349 on the SAT were rejected. Fewer than two of five black students in the same range were rejected.

Lino A. Graglia, a professor of law at the University of Texas, says those odds may prompt black students to look past the stigmatization. "They may be grateful that they got out of a much more selective school than they otherwise would have" graduated from, says Mr. Graglia, who sparked an angry protest on the Austin campus a year ago when he said that black and Hispanic students in general cannot keep up with white students because their cultures do not emphasize academic success.

Mr. Bowen and Mr. Bok also assessed the educational value of diversity. Far more black and white students in the 1989 cohort than in the 1976 group found it very important to "get along with people of different races and cultures."

Among the students who entered in 1989, 88 per cent of the black students said they "knew well" two or more white students, and 56 per cent of the white students said they knew well two or more black students. "The results of this survey speak very strongly and clearly to the value of racial diversity," the authors write.

Mr. Bok came up with the idea for the study after fellow educators urged him to speak out about the continuing importance of affirmative action. The U.S. Supreme Court's 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke permitted admissions officers to "take race into account" as one factor among many. But in 1996, in the Hopwood case, a federal appeals court barred the use of race by the University of Texas law school. That same year, California banned racial preferences.

"My feeling was that we didn't need to have a restatement of the kind of rhetorical arguments that have been made many times," Mr. Bok says. "What was really missing were some hard data."

He knew that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which gives more than $100-million per year to colleges and universities, was building a data base, known as "College and Beyond," to examine the long-term benefits of studying at the 28 selective colleges. He and Mr. Bowen, who is president of the foundation, decided to study race-sensitive admissions by surveying students from the 1976 and 1989 groups. The response rate for the 1976 group was 70 per cent, and for the 1989 group, 76 per cent.

Mr. Bok, who was dean of Harvard Law School before he became the university's president, says he hopes that the book's findings will be considered by courts that grapple with the issue in years to come.

The University of Michigan, for example, faces two lawsuits -- one against its law school, the other against the undergraduate arm of the university -- brought by white students who say its admissions policies are discriminatory.

Lee C. Bollinger, Michigan's president, said in a statement last week that the book "clearly supports the legal arguments" that the university has made in defending its race-conscious admissions policies.

Justice Lewis F. Powell, who wrote the Supreme Court's decision in the Bakke case, "was kind enough to assume that college presidents who said this was important knew what they were talking about," Mr. Bok says. "Twenty years later, judges are inclined to say, 'Hmmm, there ought to be some data.' "

Section: Students
Page: A46
Copyright (c) 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.
Title: A Sweeping Defense of Affiramative Action
Published: 98/09/18