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How did you get interested in studying college-admissions practices?
What was originally intended to be a 12-month study grew to be a 10-year study. The original provocation was this: Two Harvard faculty members had observed that if you look at the black undergraduate students at Harvard, the majority were not what most people have in mind when you talk about the beneficiaries of race-based affirmative action. In other words, the majority of the black students at Harvard were not descendants of the American slave population but rather they were first- or second-generation immigrants with parents from the Caribbean or Africa or they were multiracial students. The majority of the black undergraduate students at Harvard were more like the Barack Obamas of the world than the Michelle Obamas of the world. [So we decided to] do a quick study and find out if what these faculty members observed at Harvard is true generally throughout selective schools.
Once we were going to do a survey, it became evident that we shouldn't just focus on black students and issues of immigrant backgrounds. There were a whole bunch of other interesting things having to do with admissions and campus life, surrounding not just black students but [also] white, Hispanic and Asian. And then we decided that social class was an interesting aspect to look at. So it just mushroomed very quickly into a much, much bigger study.
How long did it take you to put the study together?
Longer than I had anticipated. [In 1999] we first approached 10 elite colleges and universities and asked them to participate, and then we asked them for data: individual student information for all applicants for admission in 1983, 1993 and 1997. Then we also wanted to supplement that information with a student survey, so we took a sample of 18,000 students who had applied to or enrolled at one of these top schools and sent them a 16-page questionnaire, and it took a while to up our response rate. And we added other information to our database, from the Census Bureau, from the Department of Education and other places, so the actual writing of the book started in about June of 2005, and we finished it in about three years. It came out in October of 2009, about a decade after we originally conceived of this project.
When the study came out in October, what findings did people tend to latch onto?
One of the issues that always concerns people is whether we still need affirmative action, because we have evidence that underrepresented minority students get a plus factor in the admission process, and there are some conservatives who find this very distressing. One of our chapters has a whole bunch of simulations where we look at a series of what if questions. One of the things we asked was what would happen if we did away with race-based affirmative action. Some people argue that all we need to do is substitute economic or class-based affirmative action and we'll get the same results. Well, it turns out that we don't get the same results. And after having done a whole bunch of simulations, what we concluded is that there really is no feasible alternative to race-based affirmative action if you want to preserve today's [ethnically diverse] profile.