Potential For Success A Key Factor

Two eminent American educators have taken a good hard look at affirmative action in college admissions and their conclusion is that by virtually any reasonable measure, affirmative action works.

This, say William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton, and Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, is not ideological musing - though both favor special efforts by elite universities to recruit black students. They insist their conclusion is based on proof of the effects of affirmative action - proof not available until recently, when the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (which Bowen now heads) built a database on three separate cohorts of students at 28 elite universities.

Their analysis (in their new book, “The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions”) might surprise even supporters of affirmative action. Certainly, it debunks a number of myths that have grown up around the issue. For instance:

Affirmative action tends, like the Peter Principle, to elevate black students up to their level of incompetence. This criticism, I confess, had made sense to me. Black students who might have been quite successful at a second-tier school are bumped up to the most competitive institutions, where they are apt to fail. Second-tier schools recruit black students who would have been successful at a third-tier school, and so on. The result, in the misguided name of “diversity,” is failure at nearly every level, where a little ratcheting down might have produced nearly universal success.

Except it’s not true. Black students overall are significantly less likely than white students to graduate after six years. But at the elite schools in the Mellon study, the graduation rates after six years were 85 percent for whites and 75 percent for blacks.

Blacks do less well in the broad range of schools that are members of the National Collegiate Athletic Association - 40 percent graduation, compared with 59 percent for whites. Indeed, it is almost the case that the lower one goes on the academic-toughness scale, the less the likelihood that black students will earn their degrees after six years.

As Theodore Cross argues in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, of which he is editor, there are many reasons for nongraduation, the most powerful one being lack of money.

Graduation rates are only a small piece of what Bok (now a Harvard professor) and Bowen uncovered. They found also that: Students in all three cohorts (the freshman classes of 1951, 1976 and 1989) agree, black and white, that their education benefited from the presence of a diverse student body. Further, well over half reported significant transracial interaction during their undergraduate years and said they got to know members of other races well.

Nearly half of the white students - 46 percent - said they thought the diversity policies should be strengthened; 21 percent would weaken them and 30 percent would leave them unchanged.

Even white students (in the 1979 cohort) who had been turned down by their first-choice schools remained supportive of affirmative action.

If whites did not see themselves as victims of affirmative action, black students did not see themselves as stigmatized by it - the other prevailing myth. Nor should they. After all, the data show, black graduates of elite institutions get good jobs, make good progress on their jobs and tend to extraordinary success in their careers - years after any supposed halo effect might be expected to have worn off. Indeed, says Bowen, “blacks did vastly better in everything but rank in class at the tougher schools.”

By the way, these two educators are not proposing that blacks be awarded extra admissions points just for being black. “The point is not just that they were black, but that they were picked and chosen by admissions committees that were looking for evidence that they would succeed. The evidence of the study is that those who did the picking and choosing must have done it pretty well.”

And that is their bottom-line point. Instead of merely favoring blackness or disadvantage, the highly competitive institutions - including the top public institutions - need to get beyond grades, test scores and the usual entrance criteria and do some judicious picking and choosing.

How they can do that in the face of new legislative and judicial prohibitions is something the book doesn’t tell us.