Study backs affirmative action at 'U'

A national study released yesterday reaffirmed the University's stance that affirmative action is needed in order to achieve a diverse and successful student body.

Racial preferences at elite colleges and universities have opened the door to success for black Americans, according to a new book by two former presidents of Ivy League institutions.

The authors of "The Shape of the River" are Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, and William Bowen, former president of Princeton University. They found the experience of attending prestigious universities benefited minority students in their work and professional lives even though many had lower grades or admissions test scores and did less well academically than white students.

The book from the Princeton University Press is being released as the University's College of Literature, Science and the Arts and Law School face lawsuits targeting their use of race as a factor in the admissions process. The suit against the Law School is expected to go to trial in June of 1999.

University President Lee Bollinger said in a written statement that the study's conclusion "clearly supports the legal arguments we have made defending those admissions policies in the two lawsuits we're now facing.

"The wealth of empirical evidence presented by William Bowen and Derek Bok reinforces our strongly held belief that our admissions policies, including the consideration of race, are central to our educational mission," Bollinger said in the statement.

The University of California system and Texas state universities have already abandoned their use of preferences.

Critics argue that the policies deny opportunity to qualified white students and cause distress for lesser qualified students who find it difficult to keep up.

But the authors, advocates of race-based admissions policies, said their analysis of records from 45,000 students of all races proved that such policies of preference of race in its admissions policies worked. The study tracked the performance and attitudes of those students, who entered 28 selective colleges - including the University of Michigan - in either the fall of 1976 or the fall of 1989.

"Rather than having been overwhelmed they clearly appear to have benefited from having gone to these very select schools,'" Bowen said in a telephone interview from New York. The graduation rate among blacks at those institutions was higher than that for all black college students. They reported satisfaction with their college experience.

The authors reported that black graduates were slightly more likely than whites to obtain professional degrees in law, business and medicine "even though they had, on average, lower test scores and grades."

The black graduates from selective schools were almost twice as likely as black graduates from other institutions to get advanced degrees and were several times as likely to earn degrees in law, business and medicine.

Black men with bachelor degrees from those institutions earned an average of $85,000 in 1995, which is 84 percent higher than the average for all black males with bachelor degrees. The black women who graduated from the institutions earned an average of $65,000, higher by 71 percent than what other black women with bachelor degrees earned.

The black graduates of the prestigious institutions became more active than their white classmates in civic activities, including community endeavors, social service activities and politics. The authors called these graduates the "backbone" of an emergent middle class.

The data were supplied by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, which Bowen heads. Bok is a political scientist at Harvard's John F. Kennedy school of government. Because the book, "The Shape of the River," was just being released, no one was available who could comment critically on its methods or conclusions.

The book had more information on black students than on other minorities because fewer data were available on the others.

09-10-98