When William G. Bowen began analyzing data about admissions at the nation's elite colleges nearly a decade ago, one thing seemed clear to him from the start: Despite their efforts to recruit students from all walks of life, those campuses were still overwhelmingly dominated by the children of wealthy families.
In other words, as he would say later, they remained "bastions of privilege."
Former Princeton president William Bowen says elite colleges should admit more students of low-income parents or parents who did not attend college.
(Courtesy Of Princeton University)
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At the time, with a battle brewing over race in college admissions, the former Princeton University president turned his attention elsewhere. With coauthors, Bowen produced two books that many say had a huge impact on the debate, one arguing that affirmative action helps minority students advance without substantially hurting white applicants, the other noting that athletes of any race get a far bigger boost when they apply to college.
But now that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld many such policies with its ruling in a landmark case that involved the University of Michigan last year, Bowen has returned to the issue of socioeconomic class.
In a series of speeches this month at the University of Virginia, Bowen is calling upon selective colleges to open their doors to more students whose parents are poor or did not attend college by giving them the same extra consideration granted to minorities or children of alumni.
"Allegiance to this country's ideals requires that American higher education do more than it is doing at present to support the aspirations of high-achieving young people from modest backgrounds," Bowen said in an address last week.
In many ways, Bowen's philosophy jibes with views expressed recently by several higher education leaders -- notably the presidents of U-Va. and Harvard -- who have promised dramatic increases in financial aid for poor students.
Bowen, though, argues that financial aid does not go far enough. In his study of admissions at 19 competitive colleges, he found that students from underprivileged backgrounds who are accepted already choose to enroll at about the same rate as others, suggesting they're not deterred by costs.
Yet their overall numbers remain tiny: 3.1 percent of students in the 1995 entering class at the 19 schools were from lower-income families in which neither parent had attended college. So, Bowen says, colleges should put "a thumb on the scale" for such students' applications.
Other higher education researchers have made similar recommendations. Yet Bowen, an economist who three decades ago became Princeton's second-youngest president and is now president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is perhaps the most prominent and influential to do so.
Matter of Timing
Bowen said in an interview that he purposely waited until after the Supreme Court ruling to raise the class issue. Many opponents of affirmative action in admissions had promoted the idea that colleges should look at low-income status instead of race; Bowen, a staunch defender of affirmative action, said he didn't want his views confused with theirs.
Even now he argues that preferences for poor students should accompany, not replace, preferences for minorities. Many of the minorities enrolling in elite schools hail from well-off families, he said; if they lost their admissions edge, their numbers would drop sharply.
Still, some opponents of affirmative action are claiming vindication in the fact that Bowen is talking about socioeconomic diversity.
"Colleges argued that racial preferences were needed for broad-based diversity, but it was really about racial diversity," said Curt Levey, legal affairs director at the Center for Individual Rights, which brought the challenge of Michigan's admissions policies to the Supreme Court. Now, he said, the case "is forcing higher education to accept how shallow the current definition of diversity was."
Bowen's latest study, written with research associate Martin A. Kurzweil, draws upon an expanded version of the database he used for his earlier works, including "The Shape of the River," which he wrote with former Harvard President Derek Bok. It includes application, enrollment and academic progress data on students in the 1995 entering class at 15 competitive private colleges and four leading state universities, including U-Va.
In his speech last week, Bowen said that colleges have made great gains over the past generation in throwing open their doors to smart but impoverished students.
Poor students are accepted into the top colleges at about the same rate as wealthy students with similar SATs, he noted. And once they enroll, they earn similar grades and graduate at about the same rate.
However, Bowen said, "the odds of getting into this privileged pool in the first place depend enormously on who you are and how you grew up." Few poor students get on the academic fast track, beginning in elementary school, that would lead them to apply to a top college, he said. Many don't even take the SAT. Bowen cited a study showing that wealthy students are six times more likely to take the SAT and score at least 1,200 as students from poor homes.
By giving an edge in the admissions office to these kinds of applicants, Bowen said, elite universities would increase class diversity and send a strong message to underprivileged students.
"It says, in effect, 'you have done great, in the face of many obstacles; now, we will give you a well-deserved boost,' " he said.
Cautious Reception
Bowen's proposal has received a warm but cautious response from others in higher education. Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, applauded the challenge it sets out for a group of universities with healthy endowments. These institutions are better equipped than others to increase the number of scholarship students but traditionally have been reluctant to lower their academic standards.
"They've got the capacity to do this in a financial sense," Merisotis said. "What's been missing is their capacity to do this in the admissions sense."
But Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for the American Council on Education, warned that colleges are rightly reluctant to admit "academically underprepared" students into an environment where they might not be able to compete. "The risk is that instead of inspiring people, it will set them up for failure," he said.
Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that many of the elite institutions have always been open to accepting more low-income students, as demonstrated in their "need-blind" admissions policies.
Still, he said, money could hinder many schools from actively seeking out more poor students. "It's a limited budget we have to deal with," he said.
Bowen agreed that the cost would be high for colleges. Still, he noted, it's not likely that anyone can do anything soon to repair the culture of disadvantage that makes low-income students less prepared to apply to top colleges.
Giving them a boost once they reach the admissions process would, he argued, "help some substantial number of deserving students almost immediately."
Bowen will deliver a third and final speech at U-Va. this afternoon.
