BOOKS
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as a pep talk to the beleaguered inhabitants of the city built on sand, but it
does not move them to higher ground.
Not that Bowen and Bok are unaware of the arguments against racial
preferences in college admissions. Three pages into the preface, they sum–
marize some of the reasons "why Americans are uncomfortable" with the
practice. Moreover, as they proceed, they offer themselves weary reminders
that "we have no expectation that the analyses presented in this study will
resolve complex issues to everyone's satisfaction." In other words, many of
us won't get it.
Perhaps the reason we won't is that objections to affirmative action in
college admissions do
not
center on the idea that African-American bene–
ficiaries of preferential admissions to elite colleges fail to benefit from the
opportunity. Some, of course, fail to realize a major benefit. Virtually every–
one who teaches in a selective college is familiar with instances of the
affirmative action matriculant who, despite every form of financial, psycho–
logical, and academic assistance the faculty and staff can provide, is
hopelessly out of his depth. Bowen and Bok provide the statistics that
generalize that aspect of affirmative action: 21 percent of black students in
their sample of students who began college in 1989 did not complete their
undergraduate degree programs, compared to 10 percent of Hispanic stu–
dents, 6 percent of white students, and 4 percent of Asian students.
Academic failure is clearly the exception, not the rule, for students
admitted to elite colleges because of racial preferences, and this is exactly
what most people outside the academy already assumed. Admission to an
elite college is rightly judged as a ticket to the top of American society.
Although some fail to take full advantage of the opportunity, most gradu–
ates of highly selective colleges and universities are, with minimal friction,
absorbed into the professions through graduate school and a richer net–
work of influential friends, acquaintances, and institutional supports than
are available to the graduates of the not-so-selective and the pay-and–
we'll-admit-you colleges and universities.
In short, Bowen and Bok's book belongs to that category of studies
that breathlessly prove the obvious. On average, it pays to be admitted to a
good college. On average, it also pays if someone fixes the process in your
favor. This is the source of the rising flood of discontent with race pref–
erences in admissions.
The Shape
if
the River
might even serve as fuel for
ressentiment,
providing affirmative action's opponents ample empirical evi–
dence of the magnitude of unjust rewards eventually reaped by the policy's
beneficiaries.
This point has been made in several reviews of
The Shape of the River,
perhaps at the expense of the book's considerable value as a fine-grained
analysis of the quantifiable factors affecting academic performance of
