How Colleges Make Racial Disparities Worse

Affirmative action sets up unprepared students for failure. Yet schools ignore this ‘mismatch’ evidence

By Richard Sander, WSJ. Excerpts:

"The mismatch theory is not about race. It is about admissions preferences, full stop. Mismatch can affect students who receive preferential admission based on athletic prowess, low socioeconomic status, or alumni parents. An important finding of mismatch research is that when one controls for the effect of admissions preferences, racial differences in college performance largely disappear. Far from stigmatizing minorities, mismatch places the responsibility for otherwise hard-to-explain racial gaps not on the students, but on the administrators who put them in classrooms above their qualifications.

The size of the preferential treatment is all-important. Mismatch problems almost always result from very large preferences—ones that give applicants the equivalent of, say, a 200-point SAT boost. Some studies that claim to provide evidence against mismatch turn out to involve small preferences, perhaps the equivalent of a 50-point SAT boost. My own view is that relatively small preferences (based, for example, on socioeconomic disadvantage) are often a good thing. Giving a slight benefit of the doubt to ambitious students trying to rise out of poverty, and placing them with peers who are slightly better prepared, can push them to greater achievement.

Much of the controversy about mismatch arises because scholars or pundits talk past one another. After sidestepping the noise, there is a surprising level of consensus in the literature. There are now five unrebutted peer-reviewed studies—for instance, one by Frederick Smyth and John McArdle, published in 2004 by Research in Higher Education—concluding that aspiring scientists who receive large admissions preferences drop off the STEM track at up to twice the usual rate. A study by three labor economists, to be published next year in the American Economic Review, finds that large preferences substantially depressed the rate at which minorities achieved science degrees at the University of California before racial preferences were banned in 1996.

Law schools are another case: I estimate that only one in three African-Americans entering law school graduates and passes the bar on the first try, compared with two in three whites. All four of the peer-reviewed articles on the subject—such as Doug Williams’s 2013 study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies—find strong evidence that mismatch helps explain this gap. None of the critics of law-school mismatch have managed to publish their rebuttals in a peer-reviewed journal, and their claims have not stood up well to scrutiny.

When we turn to “second-order” effects, such as whether a student granted preferences ultimately graduates, the evidence of mismatch is weaker. This is partly because Ivy League schools now have graduation rates of close to 100%, so a mismatched student who struggles at Brown or Yale, perhaps switching out of a difficult curriculum and ending with mediocre grades, will still almost certainly wind up with a degree."

"Scholars who find evidence of mismatch almost always phrase their findings cautiously and do not claim to have “proven” that preferences are invariably harmful. Defenders of affirmative action, on the other hand, almost universally claim that mismatch never exists."