Review Essay: Race, Class, and Student Experiences in Elite Colleges and Universities

American higher education is stratified by race and class. Low-income, African American, and Hispanic students are less likely to enroll in college than middle-class, White, and Asian students. They are also less well academically prepared for higher education, on average, when they enroll (Bowen, Kurzweil, & Tobin, 2005). This assertion contrasts with the conclusion of Bowen and Bok (1998) about the success of race-sensitive admissions in highly selective colleges and universities. In their volume The Shape of the River, Bowen and Bok (1998) advanced the conclusion that “academically selective colleges and universities have been highly successful in using race-sensitive admissions policies to advance educational goals important to them and societal goals important to everyone” (p. 290). This compelling conclusion gives rise to the question of how well elite institutions are serving their African American, Hispanic, working-class, and poor students. Are these groups being given a fair chance in admissions, and when they enroll, are their academic, social, and financial experiences similar to those of their peers? Two recently published volumes serve to answer these questions by comparing several dimensions of the elite college experience among the major social class and racial groups.

Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities, authored by Camille Z. Charles, Mary J. Fischer, Margarita A. Mooney, and Douglas S. Massey, compares the early college experiences of Asian, African American, Hispanic, and White students in selective colleges and universities using data from students’ freshman and sophomore years. No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, by Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria W. Radford, similarly compares college experiences among racial groups at highly selective institutions, but the book includes some additional themes, such as pre-college characteristics, admissions, and comparisons among social class groups. Espenshade and Radford’s dataset, the National Study of College Experience, is more dated than Charles et al.’s National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen. In this essay, we compare Charles et al. and Espenshade and Radford’s discussions of admissions and affirmative action, social life, students’ academic choices and achievement, and financial aid.

Admissions and Affirmative Action

Espenshade and Radford focus their affirmative action chapter on showing that race-based affirmative action is the most effective policy for achieving an acceptable degree of racial diversity on highly selective college campuses. Using Fall 1997 application data, Espenshade and Radford demonstrate that if the NSCE colleges had practiced completely race-neutral admissions, African American and Hispanic acceptance rates would have been severely reduced, but the Asian acceptance rate would have been noticeably greater, such that 39.0 percent of accepted students would have been Asian instead of 23.9 percent.

Espenshade and Radford also simulate admissions models that give a preference to lower-class and working-class students, who are underrepresented at elite institutions. If NSCE colleges had not been affirmative for African American or Hispanic students in 1997, but instead had extended that preference to lower-class and working-class students, fewer admitted students would have been African American and Hispanic, and more would have been White, Asian, lower-class, and working-class than actually were. Thus, the use of class-based preferences rather than race-based preferences does not appear to be able to produce the racial diversity that elite colleges desire. Espenshade and Radford argue that colleges should continue to be affirmative for African American and Hispanic students while extending the policy to lower-class and working-class applicants.

Charles et al. explore the negative effects of affirmative action and stereotypes on students’ academic performance. They show that externalization of stereotypes is associated with...