Another Bend In 'The Shape Of the River'
December 14, 1998, Monday

Stephan Thernstrom

The recently published book by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok on racial preferences in higher education is "unique," Nathan Glazer argues [op-ed, Nov. 24]. He sees in it a rare instance of empirical research that has settled central issues in an important public-policy debate.

"The Shape of the River" does settle certain questions, although not those to which Glazer refers. For instance, the work clearly supports a crucial point that opponents of affirmative action have long made: that the preferences given to black applicants at highly selective colleges are enormous. Schools at which the average white or Asian student has SAT scores in the top 3 percent to 4 percent of all test-takers are accepting black students with average scores at the 75th percentile, as well as lower high school grade-point averages. Moreover, beneficiaries of preferences already are overwhelmingly middle class; racial identity is the decisive factor in their admission. It's now undeniable that colleges are employing a racial double standard on behalf of many privileged students.

That does not bother Glazer because a high proportion of the black students graduate. But a quarter of them did not collect their diplomas at the college in which they first enrolled, and 21 percent never earned a degree at all. Their dropout rate was 3.3 times that of their white classmates.

Glazer stresses that the black graduation rate was highest in the most selective of these schools -- higher at Yale than at Tufts, and higher at Tufts than at Michigan or Penn State. This, however, is true across the board: The more selective the school, the lower the dropout rate. If we take that fact into account and look at the ratio of black to white dropout rates, African Americans at the most prestigious schools were 4.2 times more likely than whites to end up with no degree; at the second tier, the ratio was 3.6, and in the least selective colleges studied by Bowen and Bok, it was 2.8.

Note that all of these figures for blacks are averages that include those who would have been admitted under race-neutral standards. Throughout "The Shape of the River," the authors lump together black students with outstanding academic qualifications with those whose admission was the result of the big break given to non-Asian minority applicants. Alas, Bowen and Bok do not calculate the graduation rate for the latter group, but it was surely much lower than that for the former.

Nor are graduation rates the only valid test of an admissions policy. Bowen and Bok admit that the grades of the average black student put him or her at the 23rd percentile of the class. Nevertheless, Glazer is pleased because an impressive number went on to top professional schools. This is hardly surprising; these professional schools employ the same racial double standards in admissions used in elite colleges.

No racial preferences are given in state bar examinations, however, and the results there suggest that racial double standards in admissions do not remedy the educational deficiencies that led to their adoption. Over the past two decades, between 57 percent and 70 percent of the blacks who took the New York and California bar exams each year failed, as compared with 18 to 27 percent of whites. A massive study of national data found that 43 percent of the blacks preferentially admitted to law schools in 1991 either failed to graduate or did not pass the bar exam with as many as six tries over three years.

Glazer also is impressed with how "happy" blacks are about their college experiences. But the Bowen and Bok findings in this respect hardly answer the "stigmatization" point made by critics. None of the items in the Bowen and Bok survey was designed to tap feelings of inferiority as a consequence of lowered academic standards for admission.

Nor do their findings "demonstrate," as Glazer asserts, that preferences account for the "remarkable increase . . . in the number of blacks playing important roles in American society." It's a classic example of the post hoc fallacy. How does he know that college preferences were the condition of black success? The new black elite in a racially changed America went to a wide range of schools.

Thus, while 44 African Americans with college degrees have received MacArthur "genius" awards since 1981, they went to 40 different schools, roughly 75 percent of which were basically nonselective. A recently compiled list of the top 50 African American federal officials also reveals that only a handful went to a college that Bowen and Bok would define as elite. Other evidence makes precisely the same point.

The writer is the Winthrop professor of history at Harvard University.

©1998 The Washington Post

About Stephan Thernstrom: articles, bio, and photo