September 11, 1998
By Robert Greene
AP EDUCATION WRITER
WASHINGTON - 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 experience benefited the students in their work and professional lives even though many had lower grad-es or admissions test scores and did less well academically than white students, according to the study by Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, and William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University.
The book from the Princeton University Press is being released in the midst of challenges to affirmative action in higher education. The University of California system and Texas state universities have already abandoned preferences, and the University of Michigan policies are being challenged in court.
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 worked. The study tracked the performance and attitudes of those students, who entered 28 selective colleges 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 prestige 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 W. 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.
The institutions were Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Columbia University, Denison University, Duke University, Emory University, Hamilton College, Kenyon College, Miami University (Ohio), Northwestern University, Oberlin College, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University, Rice University, Smith College, Stanford University, Swarthmore College, Tufts University, Tulane University, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, Washington University, Wellesley College, Wesleyan University, Williams College and Yale University.
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