No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admissions and Campus Life (review)

Higher education has been under increasing scrutiny as economic pressures push up both the costs and importance of a college degree. In forefront have been questions about the continued necessity of race-based affirmative action. At the same time, broader questions are being raised as to whether colleges and universities, particularly elite institutions, are still providing avenues to upward mobility. These are among the issues addressed by Espenshade and Radford in No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal. Their examination of race and class diversity in higher education begins with a detailed look at the applicants to eight target institutions, including their family background, academic orientation, involvement in extracurricular activities, high school academic achievement, and their use of various strategies to potentially improve their college admissions prospects (eg., visiting colleges, test prep, choice school attendance, college consultants). They then analyze how each of these factors are related to admissions probabilities and subsequent matriculation, providing a rare behind the scenes glimpse of what matters in college admissions (and for whom). The book then follows three cohorts of students through these institutions, examining in detail how collegiate experiences and outcomes are shaped by race and class.

Central to discussions of diversity is the role that affirmative action plays and should play in higher education. And it is in this treatment of affirmative action that I think this book makes its strongest contribution. Even those who are firm proponents of affirmative action acknowledge that its days may be numbered, thus universities should consider alternate ways to achieve a diverse student body. The authors utilize their data on admissions to assess the efficacy of several alternate admissions regimes using the technique of microsimulation. The list of scenarios examined is extensive, and for each the authors provide the race, social class, race and social class, and mean SAT score for a hypothetical incoming class. I think this chapter provides much fodder in considering which admissions strategies best balance the goals of fairness to applicants, providing opportunities to the disadvantaged, and assembling a diverse incoming class. It is often argued, for example, that given the underrepresentation of low SES students in higher education that schools should do away with racial preferences and replace them with potentially more politically palatable SES preferences to ensure both racial/ethnic and social class diversity. The authors find some evidence to support this claim but ultimately conclude that the only way to attain the same levels of diversity we see with affirmative action is to eradicate the seemingly intractable achievement gap in secondary education.

The findings in this book speak to many contemporary debates in higher education beyond affirmative action. While they are not the first to show that students from lower SES backgrounds are increasingly underrepresented in the incoming classes at elite institutions, their examination of student backgrounds in application, admission and matriculation raises questions about the extent to which these elite institutions serve as engines of opportunity for upward mobility when considering the broader spectrum of underrepresented groups. The chapter on interracial contact was also rather provocative, exploring how social class structures interracial experiences on campus and student's assessment of what they learned from students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds in college. While the statistical analyses here and elsewhere in the book were both sophisticated and appropriate, the retrospective nature of the data raised some concerns for me. The survey used for these analyses was conducted in the early 2000s, which means that the oldest cohort in the study (1983) was reporting on college experiences that took place nearly two decades prior. How might one's current circumstances and life experiences influence assessments and recall of college life?

Of course, this study only provides part of the conversation about how class and race shape experiences in higher education as the focus here is on elite institutions. The authors do at points bring in research...