New Study Fuels Debate Over ‘Mismatch’ Theory in Race-Conscious Admissions

A new study based on University of California data lends support to an argument that the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia caused a furor in raising last week: that affirmative action can hinder some black students’ prospects of becoming scientists by channeling them into top colleges where their poor academic preparation causes them to struggle.

Like Justice Scalia, the new study explains gaps between races in graduation rates by invoking the controversial academic “mismatch” theory, which holds that race-conscious admissions policies place many minority students in highly selective academic environments where they end up over their heads academically.

In contrast with Justice Scalia, however, the researchers behind the new peer-reviewed study treat the subject as complex. Although they have reputations as critics of race-conscious admissions, they did not find such policies to be harmful to all students, only those who ended up pursuing science-related careers at highly selective campuses for which they were academically unprepared.

Their analysis of University of California data from the mid-1990s concludes that the system’s past consideration of applicants’ race actually harmed many minority students’ prospects of earning degrees in the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Those who gained admission to its top campuses, at Berkeley and Los Angeles, through race-conscious admissions would have stood a better chance of earning STEM degrees had they instead enrolled at a campus better matched to their level of academic preparation.

Well-prepared black, Hispanic, or Native American students, by contrast, had higher graduation rates in the STEM fields at the more-selective campuses than the less-selective ones, says an article on the study’s findings that is slated for publication in The American Economic Review.

In the STEM fields, it says, during the period studied, “more-selective UC campuses have an advantage over the less-selective UC campuses in graduating better-prepared students” while “the less-selective campuses have an advantage at graduating less-prepared students.”

As for students who did not pursue degrees in STEM fields, the study echoes a common assertion of researchers who strongly support race-conscious admissions, concluding that, regardless of the students’ academic preparation, the most-selective institutions had more success in getting them to graduate.

Despite offering support for some limited use of race-conscious admissions, the study has already come under fire from advocates of such policies. Among those who reviewed it this week, Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, said it betrays an incomplete understanding of why minority students abandon STEM majors, failing to account for other research showing that black and Hispanic students are more likely than white students to drop a STEM major in response to a low grade.

In addition, Mr. Carnevale said, the study’s results conflict with national studies showing that even less-prepared students are better off enrolling in highly selective colleges when it comes to graduation prospects and long-term earnings. At such institutions, he said, “You are going to meet the right people.”

Injudicious Language

The new California-based study comes during a period of rancorous public debate over the mismatch theory as a result of Justice Scalia’s remarks during oral arguments last week in a case challenging race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas at Austin.

In an exchange with a lawyer for the university, Justice Scalia said some contend that most of the nation’s black scientists “come from lesser schools” than Texas, and were better off at “a slower-track school where they do well.” Along with missing that most of the nation’s scientists — regardless of race — come from colleges not regarded as highly selective, Justice Scalia seemed to lump black scientists together as academically challenged, opening himself up to charges of racism.

“Certainly, the way he put it didn’t help,” said Peter Arcidiacono, a professor of economics at Duke University and a co-author of the new study. “What kills me about the whole debate is this complete lack of nuance.”

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Arcidiacono argued that race-conscious admissions policies are controversial only because they go too far. “Some affirmative action would be good for minorities regardless of what outcome we are talking about,” he said. The key, he said, is not giving so much weight to applicants’ race that they unknowingly enroll at an institution where they are less likely to achieve their educational goals.

No Strangers to Controversy

The controversy surrounding mismatch research represents familiar ground for Mr. Arcidiacono, who was joined in the California study by V. Joseph Hotz, also a Duke economics professor; and Esteban M. Aucejo, who earned his doctorate at that institution and now is a lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

About four years ago, Mr. Arcidiacono and Mr. Aucejo were among the co-authors of a controversial study of Duke undergraduates that concluded that many minority students’ academic troubles were obscured by their switching to academic majors with easier grading standards.

Mr. Arcidiacono and his co-authors based their study on data obtained from the University of California system through an open-records request. The data covered students who enrolled there from 1995 through 1997, before California’s voter-passed ban on the use of racial preferences by public colleges took effect.

As a result of the system’s efforts to protect students’ identities, the researchers lacked data such as individual students’ SAT scores. They did not have separate data for black, Hispanic, or Native American students, only for “underrepresented minorities” as a whole. Tameka Porter, an associate researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, on Wednesday described the study’s failure to break out data for specific minority groups as a major limitation precluding the researchers from fully accounting for such groups’ differences in academic preparation.

Dianne Klein, a spokeswoman for the University of California system, on Wednesday said, “The fact is that minority students admitted to UC both before and after the elimination of affirmative action have high graduation rates.”

The new study’s authors also argue that race-conscious admissions policies hurt many minority students’ future earnings, based on a separate analysis of data from the Education Department’s Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study. That analysis concluded that, in terms of their long-term financial prospects, those students who switched out of STEM majors at Berkeley or Los Angeles would have been better off earning degrees in such majors at a campus that was less selective.

“To me the key is if they have the right information,” Mr. Arcidiacono said. “If the students have full knowledge that their probability of success in the sciences is really low, and yet they make that choice anyway, that is their choice.”

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.