EXCERPTS FROM WILLIAM BOWEN AND DEREK BOK’S TESTIMONY IN UM AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CASE William Bowen There has been little hard evidence of how these policies work and what their consequences have been. To remedy this deficiency, Derek Bok and I examined the college experiences of more than 60,000 students -- approximately 3,500 of whom were black – who had entered 28 selective colleges and universities in the fall of 1976 and the fall of 1989 At bottom, admissions officers must decide which set of applicants, considered individually and collectively, will take fullest advantage of what the college has to offer, contribute most to the educational process in college, and be most successful in using what they have learned for the benefit of the larger society In my experience, in deciding among this group, a school does not start from the premise that any applicant has a "right" to a place in a college or university. Instead, the starting premise is that a school has an obligation to make the best possible use of the limited number of places in each entering class so as to advance as effectively as possible the broad purposes the school seeks to serve. Within the very real limits imposed by the fallibility of any selection process of this kind, a school should try hard to be fair to every applicant; but the concept of fairness itself has to be understood within the context of the obligations of a university. In a residential college setting, in particular, a great deal of learning occurs informally. It occurs through interactions among students of both sexes; of different races, religions, and backgrounds; who come from cities and rural areas, from various states and countries; who have a wide variety of interests, talents, and perspectives; and who are able, directly or indirectly, to learn from their differences and to stimulate one another to reexamine even their most deeply held assumptions about themselves and their world. As a wise graduate of Princeton University observed, "People do not learn very much when they are surrounded only by the likes of themselves." The task of an admissions office is not simply to decide which applicants offer the strongest credentials as separate candidates for the college; the task, rather, is to assemble a total class of students, all of whom will possess the basic qualifications, but who will also represent, in their totality, an interesting and diverse amalgam of individuals who will contribute through their diversity to the quality and vitality of the overall educational environment. The data in our study prove what I have observed for years through experience -- that diversity is valued and that "learning through diversity" actually occurs. . . Diversity is a benefit for all students, minorities and nonminorities alike. Moreover, the data overwhelmingly demonstrate that minority students admitted to selective schools . . . graduated in large numbers and did very well after leaving college. By every measure of success (graduation, attainment of professional degrees, employment, earnings, civic participation, and overall satisfaction), the more selective the school, the more blacks achieved (holding constant their initial test scores and grades). It is true that compared with their extremely high-achieving white classmates, black students in general received somewhat lower college grades and graduated at moderately lower rates. The reasons for these disparities are not fully understood, and selective institutions need to be more creative in helping improve black performance, as a few universities already have succeeded in doing. Still, 75 percent graduated within six years from the school they first entered, a figure well above the 40 percent of blacks and 59 percent of whites who graduated nationwide from the 305 universities tracked by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Moreover, blacks did not earn degrees from these selective schools by majoring in easy subjects. They chose substantially the same concentrations as whites and were just as likely to have difficult majors, such as those in the sciences and engineering. These and other findings refute the argument that when black students are admitted to schools where many other students have stronger academic qualifications than their own -- as measured by grades and test scores -- that those students not only will drop out, but that they would have been better off attending a less selective institution. Although over half of the black students attending these selective schools would have been rejected under a race-neutral admissions regime -- that is, if only the same proportions of black and white students had been admitted within each SAT interval -- they have done exceedingly well after college. Fifty-six percent of the black graduates who had entered these selective schools in 1976 went on to earn advanced degrees. A remarkable 40 percent received either PhDs or professional degrees in the most sought-after fields of law, business and medicine, a figure slightly higher than that for their white classmates and five times higher than that for blacks with bachelor's degrees nationwide. (As a measure of change, it is worth noting that by 1995, 7.5 percent of all law students in the United States were black, up from barely 1 percent in 1960; and 8.1 percent of medical school students were black, compared with 2.2 percent in the mid-1960s. Black elected officials now number more than 8,600.) Despite their high salaries, the blacks in our study were not just concerned with their own advancement. In virtually every type of civic activity, from social service organizations to parent associations, black men were more likely than their white classmates to hold leadership positions. Much the same pattern holds for women. Derek Bok Our society--indeed, our world--is and will be multi-racial. We simply must learn to work more effectively and more sensitively with individuals of other races, and a diverse student body can contribute directly to the achievement of this end. In the 1960s, barely one percent of law students and two percent of medical students in America were black. At that time, few leading professional schools and nationally prominent colleges and universities enrolled more than a handful of blacks. Late in the decade, however, selective institutions set about to change these statistics, not by establishing quotas, but by considering race, along with many other factors, in assembling a diverse student body of varying talents, backgrounds, and perspectives. Schools sought to achieve diversity to cross the racial borders that separated large segments of society and to reap the educational benefits to all students of learning on a diverse campus, in which they would transcend the misperceptions and stereotypes that had been born of racial separation.