Justice Antonin Scalia lit up the Internet on Wednesday after oral arguments in the Supreme Court’s reconsideration of a closely watched affirmative-action case, by raising the idea that African-American students might fare better at a “slower-track school.”
Here’s what Justice Scalia had to say in the arguments over the case, Abigail Noel Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin:
Justice Scalia: There are — there are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well. One of — one of the briefs pointed out that — that most of the — most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas.
Mr. Garre: So this court —
Justice Scalia: They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re — that they’re being pushed ahead in — in classes that are too — too fast for them.
Reaction online was swift and fierce. Here are a few examples:
If I listened to #Scalia I never would have applied to and graduated from 2 Ivy League schools. This level of ignorance is dangerous.
— Vanessa K. De Luca (@Vanessa_KDeLuca) December 9, 2015
What was the justice referring to, anyhow? Let’s break his comments into two parts. We’ll start with this question of whether students would “do well” at the University of Texas at Austin or someplace “less advanced.”
Here Justice Scalia appears to be referring to the idea of “mismatch,” which argues that students who are admitted to a college under a preference, despite having weaker academic credentials than the college’s typical student, are less likely to succeed there.
It’s an idea that’s been studied and debated for years. Richard H. Sander, an economist and law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, released a controversial study over a decade ago arguing that there would be more black lawyers if law schools got rid of racial preferences.
In a blog post published on Wednesday for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a conservative think tank, Mr. Sander laid out his take on where research on mismatch currently stands. “Only demagogues (of which there is, unfortunately, no shortage),” he wrote, “or people who haven’t read the relevant literature can still claim that mismatch is not a genuine problem.”
In an interview with The Chronicle, he noted that “mismatch has been really controversial,” but said “there’s an emerging consensus that this is a real thing.” The evidence is most compelling, Mr. Sander said, in two contexts. One is law school; the other, he said, is the sciences: Students who receive large preferences and who plan to study science have high attrition out of those majors. The preferences need not be based on race, Mr. Sander added — they could also be for athletes or legacies, for instance. And Mr. Sander lamented that the issue remained difficult to study because colleges kept their practices opaque.
Another scholar who’s studied mismatch had a decidedly different take, which he broadcast on Twitter:
Matthew M. Chingos, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, was one of the authors of Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities, a scholarly book based on research that found whatever students’ grades and test scores, they were more likely to graduate if they attended a more-selective college.
Mismatch is “not crazy-sounding in theory,” Mr. Chingos said in an interview. And there are circumstances under which it would happen: “If we took someone who couldn’t read, they’d be unlikely to succeed at Harvard.”
Harvard, of course, has an admissions process, in part for that reason.
The serious question, Mr. Chingos said, is whether colleges’ affirmative-action policies admit students who are not likely to succeed there. “There is no high-quality empirical evidence in support of that hypothesis,” he said.
The basis for the second part of Justice Scalia’s comment, that “most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas,” was not immediately clear. But he may have been referencing research showing that historically black colleges play an outsize role in producing African-American graduates who go on to earn doctorates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
That point doesn’t quite connect to the mismatch one, Mr. Chingos said. He offered an analogy: Most Pell Grant recipients who earn bachelor’s degrees don’t get them from top colleges. That’s a question of enrollment patterns and volume. But a particular Pell-eligible student would still have a higher chance of graduating if he or she went to a more-selective college.
Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
