As Heather MacDonald points out in the National Review Online, an L.A. Times story from Aug. 16, 2013 is a good case study illustrating my colleague Rick Sander’s mismatch effect thesis. The article is about Kashawn Campbell, who sounds like an immensely appealing and studious young man who has been failed by the system, most […]
Tag Archives | Mismatch
Rational Discourse and Affirmative Action
On Friday I discussed a body of research – all of it uncontroverted – that documents a serious flaw in affirmative action programs pursued by elite colleges. Students who receive large preferences and arrive on campus hoping to major in STEM fields (e.g., Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) tend to migrate out of those fields […]
The Problem of “Science Mismatch”
Some of the most significant recent work on affirmative action concerns a phenomenon called “science mismatch”. The idea behind science mismatch is very intuitive: if you are a high school senior interested in becoming, for example, a chemist, you may seriously harm your chances of success by attending a school where most of the other […]
Whatever Happened to the Mismatch Effect?
As some readers will recall, a little more than seven years ago I published an analysis of law school affirmative action in the Stanford Law Review. The article was the first to present detailed data on the operation and effects of racial preferences in law schools (focusing on blacks). I also laid out evidence suggesting […]