<p><a href="http://www.mat.jhu.edu/%7Esormani/affirm-impact.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.mat.jhu.edu/~sormani/affirm-impact.html</a>
"The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions." written by two former Ivy League presidents, William Bowen of Princeton University, an economist, and Derek Bok of Harvard University, a political scientist.
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The study begins by documenting the problem clearly: blacks who enter elite institutions do so with lower test scores and grades than those of whites. And as they work their way through liberal arts colleges like Yale and Princeton and state schools like the Universities of Michigan and North Carolina, black students receive lower grades and graduate at a lower rate.
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Despite "on average" lower stats and graduation rates the benefits to the students are great.
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But after graduation, the survey found, these students achieve notable successes. They earn advanced degrees at rates identical to those of their white classmates. They are even slightly more likely than whites from the same institutions to obtain professional degrees in law, business and medicine. And they become more active than their white classmates in civic and community activities.</p>
<p>The authors call black graduates of elite institutions "the backbone of the emergent black middle class" and say that their influence extends well beyond the workplace. "They can serve as strong threads in a fabric that binds their own community together and binds those communities into the larger social fabric as well."</p>
<p>One of the most striking findings is how much an elite college education serves as a pathway to success for all races. Blacks who graduate from elite colleges earn 70 percent to 85 percent more than do black graduates generally.
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What about those that feel displaced??
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A more troubling question, the authors acknowledge, regards the white students whom these black students displaced. Would society have been better off if they had attended instead of the blacks?</p>
<p>"That is the central question," the authors write, "and it cannot be answered by data alone." It is a clash of "principle versus principle, not principle versus expediency." They come down firmly on the side of admitting the blacks, saying that society needs them because of the scarcity of black professionals.</p>
<p>But they added a statistical argument and illustrated it with an analogy to parking spaces for handicapped drivers drawn from a forthcoming article by Thomas J. Kane. "Eliminating the reserved space would have only a minuscule effect on parking options for non-disabled drivers," Kane writes. "But the sight of the open space will frustrate many passing motorists who are looking for a space. Many are likely to believe that they would now be parked if the space were not reserved."</p>
<p>Bowen and Bok point out that if more than half of the blacks accepted at selective colleges had been rejected, the probability of acceptance for another white applicant would rise only 2 percent, to 27 percent from 25 percent.</p>
<p>In other words, like handicapped parking spaces, race-conscious admission policies have a major impact on the minority group in question whereas eliminating them would only marginally help members of the majority community.
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The vast majority of students aren't affected at all by preferential admission policies.
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The authors' focus on selective universities illustrates what they consider an often-ignored point: the debate over race-conscious admissions is relevant only to about 25 percent of American universities. The rest take all or nearly all who apply.
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<p>Washington Post Article - "Another bend in the Shape of the River" by Stephan Thernstrom has a less sanguine view.
<a href="http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_washpost-another_bend_in_the_.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_washpost-another_bend_in_the_.htm</a>
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No racial preferences are given in state bar examinations, however, and the results there suggest that racial double standards in admissions do not remedy the educational deficiencies that led to their adoption. Over the past two decades, between 57 percent and 70 percent of the blacks who took the New York and California bar exams each year failed, as compared with 18 to 27 percent of whites.
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<p>It really comes down to: What type of society do we want to be?
Private Colleges have the right to shape their classes the way they want to.
The Admissions Process is not a magic box with GPA's EC's SAT's being put in one side and an admitted class being pushed out the other side.</p>