Mismatch

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal writes about the affirmative action controversy stirred up last week by Harry Reid and the New York Daily News. He writes,...

h Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA, elaborated yesterday in an essay published by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy:

Scholars began empirically studying the mismatch issue in the 1990s, but in the past five years the field has matured. There are now dozens of careful, peer-reviewed studies that find strong evidence of mismatch. None of the authors of these studies claim that mismatch is a universal or inevitable consequence of affirmative action. But in my view, only demagogues (of which there is, unfortunately, no shortage) or people who haven’t read the relevant literature can still claim that mismatch is not a genuine problem.

Sander identifies three kinds of mismatch. “Learning mismatch” is the one to which Justice Scalia alluded: “Sally learns less than she would at a less competitive school, because the pace is too fast or her professors are pitching their material at a level that’s not ideal for her.” Sander continues:

A second form of mismatch — “competition” mismatch — occurs when students abandon particular fields, or college itself, because of the practical and psychological effects of competing with better-prepared students. . . .

The third type of mismatch — “social mismatch” — is in some ways the most intriguing.

Several studies have now found that college students are much more likely to form friendships with students who have similar levels of academic preparation or performance at college. The phenomenon operates even within racial groups, but when a college’s preferences are highly correlated with race (as they are at many elite schools), social mismatch can lead to self-segregation by blacks and/or Hispanics.

...It has occurred to this columnist that the recent unrest on campuses across the country—including demands for censorship in the name of creating “safe spaces” for minorities—calls into question the educational-benefits-of-diversity premise, which has never been clearly defined.

...Chief Justice John Roberts asked Gregory Garre, the lawyer representing UT, how the university measures “whether the plan is working.” His response:

We looked . . . to student body enrollment. We do look to classroom diversity. We look at feedback from students; from faculty—after all, this is an academic judgment, as the Court said in the [2003] Fisher case, and certainly said in the Grutter and the Bakke case[s]—we look to the racial climate, including incidents.

That’s rather unclear, but it seems to suggest that “incidents” reflecting a hostile “racial climate” themselves provide justification for preferences aimed at increasing minority enrollment. On its face, that logic seems plausible. But if that is how universities decide the matter, it also creates a perverse incentive that militates in favor of more such incidents.