Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (review)

William Bowen, the recently retired president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (and former president of Princeton University), has received much attention in recent years for his books that tackle the thorny issues of affirmative action and athletics in higher education. In his latest volume, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, coauthored with his Mellon Foundation colleagues Martin Kurzweil and Eugene Tobin, he takes on the issue of socioeconomic status and access to higher education. This volume is not the first scholarly examination of the intersection of social class and college admissions. A recent Century Foundation book (Kahlenberg, 2004), for example, came to similar conclusions. But Bowen's reputation and the visibility of his position is certain to bring much sorely needed attention to the topic.

Like the two earlier books Bowen coauthored, this volume is both an empirical examination of the volume's subject matter as well as a "call to arms." Also as in the earlier books, this work exploits the Mellon Foundation's College and Beyond database to present a wealth of data on the status of students from different social classes in a group of 19 selective institutions. Five are Ivy League universities, 10 are liberal arts colleges, and four are public flagship institutions. Through historical description, quantitative analysis, and references to research conducted by others, the authors reach two major conclusions: (a) Students from lower class families (as defined by family income and parental education) are quite underrepresented in these selective institutions, and (b) the remedy is to practice a form of affirmative action by placing a "thumb on the scale" (p. 178) in the admissions decisions for these students.

Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education opens with an excellent overview of the history of the intersection of social class and America's elite universities. The authors describe how access to higher education has been determined throughout the nation's history, both in terms of the processes used to provide the gatekeeping function at colleges and universities and the resulting outcomes. (Those interested in more on this topic should read Lemann, 1999, which provides an excellent history of the measurement of "merit" in the country.) The volume then moves into an analysis of the College and Beyond database to answer the question of how a variety of student characteristics affected the incoming freshman cohorts at these institutions in 1995. Controlling for a wide range of factors, including high school grades, standardized test scores, class rank, and the like, the authors analyze how a variety of "preferences" impacted the decisions at three critical points of the admissions process: application, acceptance, and enrollment. The preferences examined include those given to underrepresented minority students, recruited athletes, and legacies. The authors find that while all three of these groups received significant advantages in the admissions process, there was no advantage—or disadvantage—given to students based on their parents' income or level of education.

The lack of representation of lower-class students in these institutions, the authors conclude, is largely due to the correlation in the country between social class and the measures used in the admissions process. Because lower-class students are less likely to score high on these measures, they are less likely to apply to these colleges, be admitted if they do apply, and enroll if they are admitted. The authors argue that equity considerations—along with others, such as the value of maintaining not just a racially diverse student body but an economically diverse one as well—dictate that something needs to be done. To overcome this problem, Bowen, Kurzweil, and Tobin recommend that these students be given a preference in the admissions process. While they do not spell out exactly how much of a benefit such students should receive, they present a simulation to demonstrate that the same advantage as that received by legacies would result in an increase in the representation of...