{"id":961,"date":"2016-06-24T10:35:56","date_gmt":"2016-06-24T15:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/?p=961"},"modified":"2016-09-14T09:39:29","modified_gmt":"2016-09-14T14:39:29","slug":"scotus-affirmative-action-and-mismatch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/2016\/06\/24\/scotus-affirmative-action-and-mismatch\/","title":{"rendered":"Affirmative Action, College Admissions, and the Debunked \u201cMismatch\u201d Hypothesis"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans\u2026 to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less\u00ad advanced school\u2026 a slower-track school where they do well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>During oral arguments for <em>Fisher v. University of Texas-Austin <\/em>(in which the Supreme Court<a href=\"http:\/\/www.scotusblog.com\/case-files\/cases\/fisher-v-university-of-texas-at-austin-2\/?wpmp_switcher=desktop\"> just upheld<\/a> UT Austin\u2019s use of race in their admissions policies), Justice Antonin Scalia\u2019s comments caused quite an uproar. Did a member of the Supreme Court <em>actually<\/em> say that African Americans aren\u2019t capable of success at competitive colleges? He was drawing from the so-called \u201cmismatch hypothesis,\u201d which suggests that affirmative action places people into positions they can\u2019t handle\u2014that is, that affirmative action could <em>hurt<\/em> African Americans by placing them in schools where they may not succeed or from which they may not graduate.<\/p>\n<p>A significant amount of academic work debunks \u201cmismatch theory,\u201d deeming it both wrong and \u201cpaternalistic.\u201d<\/p>\n<h5>Fischer and Massey use the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshman to analyze college outcomes and test the mismatch hypothesis; they find no evidence in its favor. Alon and Tienda use two different longitudinal datasets to run similar analyses, again finding no proof that ethnic minority students fare badly in advanced institutions. Replication results have been consistent over time; Kurlaender and Grodsky piece, for instance, find that students placed in programs considered \u201cout of their league\u201d performed just as well as those in less demanding programs.<\/h5>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/sociology.uconn.edu\/fischer\/\">Mary J. Fischer <\/a>and <a href=\"https:\/\/sociology.princeton.edu\/faculty\/doug-massey\">Douglas S. Massey<\/a>. 2007. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0049089X06000226\">The Effects of Affirmative Action in Higher Education<\/a>,\u201d <em>Social Science Research<\/em>\u00a036(2):531-549.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/salon\/\">Sigal Alon<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/wws.princeton.edu\/faculty-research\/faculty\/tienda\">Marta Tienda<\/a>. 2005. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/soe.sagepub.com\/content\/78\/4\/294.short\">Assessing the \u2018Mismatch\u2019 Hypothesis: Differences in College Graduation Rates by Institutional Selectivity<\/a>,\u201d <em>Sociology of Education<\/em> 78(4):294-315.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/education.ucdavis.edu\/faculty-profile\/michal-kurlaender\">Michal Kurlaender<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/ssc.wisc.edu\/soc\/faculty\/show-person.php?person_id=859\">Eric Grodsky<\/a>. 2013. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/soe.sagepub.com\/content\/86\/4\/294\">Mismatch and the Paternalistic Justification for Selective College Admissions<\/a>,\u201d <em>Sociology of Education<\/em> 86(4):294-310.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h5>In a twist, scholars find that affirmative action may place a <em>different <\/em>group of people in schools for which they are not equipped. In many schools, particularly prestigious ones, \u201clegacy\u201d students&#8212;whose family members graduated from the same school&#8212;benefit from affirmative action in admissions. Bowen and Bok show this has disproportionately affected\u00a0<em>white <\/em>students, and Massey and Mooney show that legacy students earn lower grades than their peers and have lower graduation rates. If affirmative action is doing a disservice to some students, it is not in the way Justice Scalia suggested.<\/h5>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.princeton.edu\/pub\/presidents\/bowen\/\">William G. Bowen<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hks.harvard.edu\/about\/faculty-staff-directory\/derek-bok\">Derek Bok<\/a>. 1998, 2000. <em><a href=\"http:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/titles\/6374.html\">The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions<\/a>.<\/em> Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.<\/li>\n<li>Douglas S. Massey and <a href=\"http:\/\/margaritamooney.com\/\">Margarita Mooney<\/a>. 2007. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/10.1525\/sp.2007.54.1.99\">The Effects of America&#8217;s Three Affirmative Action Programs on Academic Performance<\/a>,\u201d <em>Social Problems<\/em> 54(1):99-117<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans\u2026 to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less\u00ad advanced school\u2026 a slower-track school where they do well. During oral arguments for Fisher v. University of Texas-Austin (in which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2027,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,85,14],"tags":[83,31356,34,27091,1374,78,38541,321,371,38546,38542,82,19889,1430],"class_list":["post-961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inequality","category-politics","category-race","tag-affirmative-action","tag-college-admissions","tag-education","tag-education-gap","tag-educational-attainment","tag-higher-education","tag-inequality","tag-law","tag-policy","tag-politics","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-scotus","tag-supreme-court"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=961"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":963,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961\/revisions\/963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}