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PARTISAN REVIEW
blacks and whites, and as a study of the ethos of elite higher education. For
example, turning back to the data cited above about college completion
rates, Bowen and Bok offer several important qualifications of the general
picture. True, blacks in the 1989 cohort graduated at a lower rate than
whites, but graduation rates for both blacks and whites were highest at the
m05t
selective of their sample of selective colleges and universities. At the
top of the heap, very few of any race fail or are allowed to fail. To Bowen
and Bok, this finding routs the hypothesis that less-qualified students
admitted because of racial preferences are done a disservice by being made
to compete in a context dominated by better qualified students.
Bowen and Bok also break down the cohorts of students by several
measures of academic qualification. Some of the results are indeed surpris–
ing. For example, black non-completion rates are higher than white
non-completion rates
acr055 the whole range
of
SAT 5core5.
Students who score
above 1300 on their combined SATs clearly possess academic talent, but 19
percent of blacks in this category failed to finish college, compared to 10
percent of whites. Bowen and Bok relate this to "a troubling phenome–
non often called 'underperformance.' Black students with the same SAT
scores as whites tend to earn lower grades."
It
is in passages like these that the reader hears that distant tolling of
The Bell Curve.
Bowen and Bok subject all of their measures of high school
and college academic performance to regression analyses in search of the
factors that play the largest roles in determining success. Socioeconomic
status is rigorously factored in and out, along with grades, class standing,
field of study, and much else.
In
the end, however, some factor harmful to
the relative success of black students remains unaccounted for.
It
is, of course, precisely at this point in public debates that ideology
takes the place of evidence. Is the missing factor contemporary institu–
tional racism? The accumulated legacy of past discrimination that has
resulted in fewer blacks being raised
in
families with strong intellectual
foci? Or is the residuum of unaccounted poor performance, as Herrnstein
and Murray argued, the statistical trace of lower average ability? Bowen
and Bok own the second position:
College grades may well be less affected by family income and
parental education per se (which together make up our index of socio–
economic status) than they are by the number of books at home,
opportunities to travel, better secondary schooling, the nature of con–
versation around the dinner table, and, more generally, parental
involvement in their children's education.
