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The Shape of the River to Come
Martin Hall
Multimedia Education Group
Research Unit for the Archaeology of Cape Town
Department of Archaeology
University of Cape Town
Many conclusions about what is best for higher education are made without an empirical basis for anticipating their consequences. There is often good reason for this. Policy imperatives in education tend to be immediate but claims for their benefits are often long term. The effects of educational initiatives require assessment over a lifetime, and extend into new economic and political regimes. To leave forms of education unchanged in response to the long view is to risk anachronism in a fast-changing world. To initiate change may be to depend on a combination of theory, speculation, and hope, and to introduce the risk of an inappropriate match between higher education and the needs of its students.
William G. Bowen and Derek Bok's "The Shape of the River. Long Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions" (Princeton, September 1998) breaks this mold. Bowen and Bok track the admission records, university performance and subsequent careers of more than 30 000 students from a group of twenty-eight academically selective colleges and universities in the US - the "College and Beyond" database. At the heart of the study are the lives of those students who entered university in the autumn of 1976 and who, when they participated in this study twenty years later, were at the mid-point of their subsequent careers. Their profiles are assembled by means of a combination of statistical data - such as SAT scores and college grades - and questionnaire responses giving occupational histories, earnings and other data. This information has allowed Bowen and Bok to map the long term effects of education. They are also able to build retrospective scenarios that model the implications had policy planners made different decisions more than two decades ago.
"The Shape of the River" and the College and Beyond database have many implications for education policy-making. But the immediate importance of the book stems from current concerns. The study was begun in late 1994 with the aim of addressing a broad set of issues in higher education. But in 1996 the Court of Appeals ruled that the University of Texas law school could not take race into account when considering admission and, soon afterwards, a state referendum in California confirmed a similar decision by the Regents of the University of California. Suddenly, the widely established practices of affirmative action in American higher education were contentious issues of public policy and individual rights within the framework of the constitution. Not surprisingly, the potential of the College and Beyond database of addressing a multitude of issues has been narrowed in the short term to one principal question - the extent of the benefits of race-sensitive university admission policies for African Americans and for American society in general. This is what "The Shape of the River" is about. More court cases were pending as the printer's ink was drying, and it is clear that the book's arguments will rapidly be read into the legal record.
How can the implications of "The Shape of the River" be of consequence outside the US, specifically - because this is my own area of interest - in South Africa? The recent history of higher education in South Africa is, at one and the same time, a reverse image of the US situation, and its extreme case. South Africa's university system was designed for the advantage of white students, and to train black students for subservience. Universities were racially segregated, and those dedicated to whites were afforded far superior resources, and a far larger number of student places proportional to the population. White students in South Africa came to enjoy one of the highest participation rates in university education in the world and, over the space of a few decades, a qualified professional and bureaucratic class was created from rural families and a white, urban working class. This education policy was hitched to a nationalist programme through establishing Afrikaans-medium white universities. By the time that apartheid was formally dismantled in 1994, many generations of white students had benefited from what must rank as the most effective of affirmative action policies.
But, of course, apartheid's claims to privilege were made at the extreme disadvantage of the black majority in South Africa. Segregation in residential area, education and employment created structured disadvantage at least equivalent to the circumstances of African Americans in the US. In the middle of 1976, when the students who would become a focus for the College and Beyond database were preparing to take up their university places in the US, South Africa's black townships erupted in a wave of protests led by students objecting to the deprivations of apartheid education. Violently suppressed by the police and army, this was the beginning of South Africa's long revolution. Liberal English-medium white universities, sympathetic to black aspirations, began programmes of race-sensitive admissions, seeking to discover aptitude for success despite the crushing weight of prior educational disadvantage. These programmes gathered momentum through the 1980s, taking advantage of the loophole in repression opened by government attempts to court international favour through "soft" forms of segregation, and became a cornerstone in the transformation of universities after 1994. South Africa's heritage, then, is one of forty-six years of formal segregation to the benefit of a racially-defined minority, overlaid in its last decade by a growing policy of race-sensitive admissions in favour of a severely disadvantaged black majority.
Today, while race-sensitive admissions in the US are under question in the courts as unconstitutional, equity and redress policies are required by the provisions of the South African constitution and are supported by new legislation. Given that the issue of access to higher education affects a substantial majority of students in South Africa, it is not surprising that the general issue of access is a prominent issue in public policy debates. Indeed, this has been a focus of action for the liberal, English-medium universities since the mid-1980s. It is established that discrimination and disparities in the quality of primary and secondary education does not allow reliance on a common measure of attainment that can be used in ranking admissions. Instead, race-sensitive admissions in those South African universities attuned to the issue depend on a combination of scaffolded testing for aptitude (assessments of ability that seek as far as possible to be independent of the content of prior learning) and differential reading of matriculation results, backed by longitudinal studies of subsequent performance. These policies are by nature messy and open to challenge, but have by-and-large been judged successful, and continue to be refined.
Something of these simultaneous connections and contrasts between US and South African circumstances was captured in the first week of September this year. While "The Shape of the River" was launched in New York, America's nemesis, Fidel Castro, was visiting Soweto, outside Johannesburg. Standing by the monument to the first student victim of the 1976 uprising and condemning US imperialism, Castro asked "If Einstein had been born Hector Petersen, would the theory of relativity have been discovered?" Finding the Hector Petersens and providing them with the opportunity of realizing their potential has been the goal of race-sensitive admissions policies at institutions such as Princeton, a participant in the College and Beyond project and Einstein's intellectual refuge for many years. Reversing the discrimination that made Hector Petersen a victim is a major objective in higher education planning in South Africa's universities, and a matter of public and legal attention. Castro's words are a suitable leitmotif for both sides of the Atlantic.
Stating a goal, though, is only the tip of an iceberg that comprises a dense mass of complexity. In their study of US circumstances, Bowen and Bok are quick to point out that "affirmative action" - generally seen to be a simple matter of preferring one race over another, is far from straightforward in either its history or its application. Firstly, and contrary to a generally held assumption, race-sensitive admissions policies have only been applied at a minority of US higher education institutions - those that have applications significantly in excess of places. At least 70% of four-year colleges and universities in the US accept all qualified applicants, irrespective of race. Secondly, in those 20-30% of colleges and universities that are selective, admissions officers rarely use SAT scores alone in deciding who will have a place. A range of issues, including background, school history, athletic achievement and civic engagement, are often considered in attempts to enroll a diverse class of students.
Further, and of particular significance, Bowen and Bok demonstrate as incorrect the popular assumption - reinforced by a number of widely-read, conservative policy studies - that a race-neutral admissions policy is a simple matter of treating all SAT scores as equivalent measures for the purpose of ranking applicants. This is in part because there is a significant difference between the average test scores for African Americans and white students, a clear reflection of the cumulative consequences of disadvantage. In Bowen and Bok's words, "differences between blacks and whites in resources, environments and inherited intellectual capital (the educational attainment of parents and grandparents) have been long in the making".
Because these data on pre-admission testing are matched by information on the subsequent attainments of these same students, Bowen and Bok are able to pursue the key issues in the debate about affirmative action with a relentless persistence. Using statistical modeling, they show that the effects of race-sensitive admissions on the sector of the applicant pool denied affirmative treatment was negligible. They show that the argument that African American students will achieve better results if they are grouped with other students with similar test scores, rather than being placed in competition with more privileged students, is fallacious; the data show that the opposite is the case. The College and Beyond database demonstrates that African American graduation rates are consistently high, that black graduates have enjoyed notable career success and are extensively engaged in civic society, that their degrees and professional qualifications have conferred substantial financial advantages and that, while conscious of a pervasive racism in their daily lives, they regard their university education as a valuable foundation.
Perhaps most telling, though, is Bowen and Bok's retrospective model of the consequences for applicants for places in selective colleges and universities in 1976 if race-sensitive policies had not been in place. The data show that some 700 African American matriculants would not have gained their places in the institutions included in the College and Beyond database. The longitudinal study of the subsequent careers of this group reveals that about a third continued beyond their first degrees, obtaining doctorates or professional qualifications. A third are high-earning doctors, lawyers and business executives, and half of the group are leaders in civic activities. This model takes the debate about affirmative action out of the realm of speculation and shows that abandoning race-sensitive admissions will return higher education in the US to the pre-civil rights era. It also projects the magnitude of the consequences for African American applicants for admission to the nine universities in the University of California state system this autumn, and the sort of long-term price that California as a society is likely to pay for this decision.
Because of the nature of their study, Bowen and Bok limit themselves to the implications of race-sensitive admissions within their universe of selective colleges and universities. But there are important implications for the rest of the US higher education system, and for policy planning elsewhere. A naïve reading of "The Shape of the River" might suggest that the 70% of four-year universities in the US that accept all qualified applicants - and that are therefore not sampled in the College and Beyond database - are race-neutral in their admissions. However, Bowen and Bok's careful study of the differential in SAT scores between African American and white applicants in their sample shows that this cannot be so in the larger sense; prior educational disadvantage is a national phenomenon, not one specific to applicants to selective institutions. Consequently, and although Bowen and Bok do not spell this out, it is often likely to be the case that prior disadvantage will determine who is deemed "qualified" in the standardized testing procedure for college admissions, creating wide-spread discrimination against minorities. What does it mean, in other words, to be qualified for admission to higher education in the face of clear evidence for the pervasive effects of prior disadvantage and when, as Bowen and Bok put it, "there is no reason to suppose that any set of policies is likely to eliminate this gap in pre-collegiate preparation during our lifetimes"?
Access, of course, is only the beginning of the story, and it would be simplistic to assume that prior disadvantage is reversed by the act of selective admission, either in the US or in South Africa. "The Shape of the River" shows clearly that African American students admitted in terms of race-sensitive policies largely eradicated disadvantage in the course of their full careers but achieved lower college grades than white students in the same cohort. Again, this aspect is shown in stark relief in the extreme case of South African higher education. Disadvantage in pre-university education means that many of the skills traditionally assumed by university teachers are not in place. Dexterity in the use of a library, computers, essay writing and working with numbers are measures of experience, not aptitude alone. Combined, they constitute a formidable academic discourse that must be mastered in order for there to be equality of opportunity within university systems of assessment. Again, Bowen and Bok imply a wider set of questions for higher education. How appropriate are curricula to the student diversity that colleges and universities seek to foster? Is adequate advantage being taken of students' wide range of prior experiences? What is being measured by college grades, and are the assumptions behind systems of assessment justified? South African universities have to face these issues head-on because it has become very clear that race-sensitive admissions without concomitant attention to curriculum content, the environment of teaching and learning and forms of assessment results in unacceptable levels of achievement by black students, and unacceptable rates of retention.
For Bowen and Bok, the results of their study are a vindication of more than twenty years of liberal admissions policies in response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and their own terms as Presidents of Princeton and Harvard. But the 1990s have seen the preeminence of an aggressive neo-liberal economics in education planning that stresses investment value, and education as commodity, over the emphasis on the public good. Rather than engaging this gargantuan debate in vitriolic combat, Bowen and Bok dive into the thicket of data - represented by thousands of long-term case studies - and emerge from behind to give the elephant's tail a sharp twist. "The Shape of the River" shows that lifelong, qualitative attributes and consequences of higher education - civic participation, insight and awareness, personal satisfaction and fulfillment - have a direct value in market terms, catching neo-liberalism at its own game. And here, yet again, South Africa is the extreme case. Higher education is one of the most salient ways of reversing prior discrimination on the basis of race and, by definition, race-sensitive admissions must be at the heart of such a policy. Equally, the effectiveness of such a policy will depend on the quality of teaching and learning. South Africa, no less than the US, cannot afford not to invest in equality of opportunity in universities and colleges.