  Perhaps the cost is high, or even too high. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom certainly think so. They contend that most of the cost falls on the very persons affirmative action is supposed to benefit. Under-prepared African-Americans are thrown into academic environments where they cannot succeed (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1997, 395–411). In the Thernstroms’ view, race-blind admissions policies will result in a desirable “cascading,” with African-American and Hispanic students ending up at colleges and universities where the academic credentials of their fellow students match their own. However, the Bowen and Bok study provides some evidence that cascading isn’t necessarily a valuable phenomenon. In fact, at the schools they studied, the better the institution a student entered, whatever his academic credentials, the more likely he was to graduate, go on to further education, and earn a good income (Bowen and Bok 1998, 63, 114,  144).