I have a time/task mismatch myself but I do want to zip through this NY Times article on Scalia's poorly articulated question about academic mismatch and affirmative action. There will be homework assigned, so get ready, and full speed ahead:
In an awkward exchange in Wednesday’s potentially game-changing Supreme Court arguments on affirmative action, Justice Antonin Scalia hesitantly asked whether it might be better for black students to go to “a slower-track school where they do well” than to go to a highly selective college, like the University of Texas, through some form of racial preference.
“I don’t think,” Mr. Scalia said, “it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.” He was addressing Gregory G. Garre, the lawyer defending the University of Texas at Austin’s affirmative action policy, which supplements the automatic admission of top-ranking students from all high schools across the state with the use of race as one factor in a “holistic” approach to admissions.
In asking such a pointed question, Mr. Scalia was stepping into a long debate over what has been called the mismatch theory of college admissions.
OK, it is interesting that Scalia was not a much more adept speaker (and the transcript does not bail him out; p. 66 ff). Anyone familiar with the argument knows he meant "some" black students, not all. (For simplicity I will operate in a black/white world, marginalizing Asians and Hispanics, but not for the first time). But Scalia surely knows the haters gonna hate. Of course, he also knows he has a lifetime appointment, so who's laughing now?
As to the theory:
The proponents of the “mismatch effect” say that large allowances based on a student’s race are harmful to those who receive them, that they learn less than they would if they attended a college more closely matched to their level of academic preparation, receive lower grades, become academically discouraged and socially segregated. Critics say that the “mismatch” research is based on flawed assumptions that cannot be validated by other researchers, and that the evidence is more likely to show that all students, regardless of race, benefit from enrolling at the most challenging college that will accept them.
We can work with that.
In layman’s terms, some see it as another form of the argument over whether getting a gentleman’s C at Harvard is better for one’s future than getting straight A’s at a lower-ranked university.
Ah, well. A second issue is whether discouraged students in over their heads drop to an easier major. So, a prospective scientist enters the STEM program at Harvard, is in over his head, and graduates with an Art Appreciation degree. His counterpart at Ohio State is in STEM classes that meet his background and abilities and graduates with a degree in computer science.
So is a Harvard art appreciation degree with a B average better or worse than a computer science degree with a b+ average fro OSU? And what does "better or worse" mean, anyway - earnings, life satisfaction, social network? Good luck answering that, let alone finding data.
But one issue is this - if (I say IF) students respond to academic mismatch by moving to an easier major, studies that looks exclusively at graduation rates are looking in the wrong place. We will revert to that.
Mr. Scalia’s comments drew a sharp response from Mr. Garre, the university’s lawyer. He said students admitted using their race as one of many criteria “fare better” academically over time than those admitted from the top 10 percent of every high school class, without regard to race.
And in remarks that seemed to allude to the now discredited “separate but equal” doctrine of education, Mr. Garre continued, “And frankly I don’t think the solution to the problems with student body diversity can be to set up a system in which not only are minorities going to separate schools, they’re going to inferior schools.”
Well, invoking "separate but equal" is just being inflammatory - colleges do sort their applicants in a way that local public schools do not.
As to the claim that the students admitted under ther Top Ten Percent program fare less well than their 'holistic' counterparts, I am surprised. From the transcript:
If you look at the academic performance of holistic minority admits versus the top 10 percent admits, over time, they fare better.
OK, he said it. If he is comparing holistic minority admits versus Top Ten minority admits, I can rationalize it. The Top Ten program provides diversity because Texas public schools tend to be racially segregated by neighborhood. Its easy to imagine that a ten-percenter in an inner-city mostly black school could move to a wealthier lily-white suburban school and drop into the second quartile. Conversely, there might be in that mostly-white school a black kid in the 11-15th percentile who would be a much stronger college candidate than the inner-city kid.
So if both of them end up at UT, one by virtue of being a Ten Percenter and the second holistically, it would not be a surprise if the holistic minority admit outperformed his inner-city counterpart.
But is it likely that the group that missed the Ten percent cutoff outperforms everyone who passed that line? That would depend on who uses the Texas public schools:
During the 2014-15 school year, well over half of the state’s 5.2 million public school students were Hispanic. That’s up from 15 years ago, when about 40 percent of the state’s 4 million public school students were Hispanic. At the same time, the Asian student population doubled, but kids of Asian descent still make up a tiny portion — 4 percent — of the statewide student population.
Since the turn of the century, the white student population has plummeted by about a third — down from 43 percent of all students in 2000 to less than 29 percent during the last school year. Meanwhile, the black student population has remained largely the same, declining slightly in the past five years to less than 13 percent of the student population in the 2014-15 school year.
Well, ignoring Hispanics is ludicrous. part of the public school issue is 'white flight':
According to the voluntarily reported NCES data, about 57 percent of students enrolled in Texas private schools are white, 23 percent are Hispanic and six percent are black.
Well, OK - it may be that the public school system in Texas is so creaky that the holistic kids from the better schools outperform most of the kids from the majority of public schools. I'd like to dig up the numbers, and hope to soon.
Pressing on:
In the current case, Mr. Taylor is counsel on an amicus brief propounding the mismatch theory, on behalf of his co-author on that book, Richard Sander, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school. “Students who are admitted with far lower grades and test scores and other indicia of academic capability are almost certain to do badly academically, and we think, and this is more debatable, that they’re also likely to do worse in their careers and other departments of life than they would if they were getting good grades at some less prestigious school,” Mr. Taylor said.
He said the idea was not to reduce the number of black students going to college, but to admit them to schools where they would be more likely to succeed. “Martin Luther King didn’t go to a fancy college,” he said. “Thurgood Marshall didn’t go to a fancy college. Colin Powell didn’t go to a fancy college.”
OK.
Oren Sellstrom, one of the lawyers on a brief attacking the mismatch theory, said that “there is a vast body of social science evidence that shows exactly the opposite of what the mismatch theory purports to show, that actually minority students who benefit from affirmative action get higher grades at the institutions they attend, leave school at lower rates than others, and are generally more satisfied in higher education, and that attendance at a selective institution is associated with higher earnings and higher college completion rates.”
Hmm. The Journal of Economic Literature published a survey article on this very topic. It is described in the WaPo by Richard Sander himself, and it is inconclusive on this point:
JEL is one of the flagship journals published by the American Economics Association; it generally publishes articles that try to synthesize knowledge in a field, rather than those with new results. Two years ago, JEL’s editors decided to commission an article on the “mismatch” (or “peer effects”) debate. Recognizing that this was an unusually controversial issue, the article was to be written by two economists with differing starting positions: Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke economist who has published several important studies on mismatch, and Mike Lovenheim, a Cornell economist who was skeptical about mismatch. When the authors completed a draft, JEL sent it to seven diverse peer reviewers — an unusually large number — to ensure the draft was critically examined. All seven recommended publication. JEL has a queue, but the article will probably appear in the next issue.
Given this process, it should not be surprising that the resulting article — “Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Tradeoff” — does not take thundering positions on any of the outstanding issues. Indeed, it finds that on many of the most important questions raised by the mismatch hypothesis, the available data is too scattered and too poor in quality to reach clear conclusions. Moreover, since the authors find there are “positive average effects of college quality” on a host of outcomes, any mismatch effect has to be large enough to outweigh these advantages. Nonetheless, the authors find persuasive evidence that such mismatch effects occur, particularly in law school and in science education.
We are slowly building towards the interesting stuff. Back to mismatch critics:
Mr. Sellstrom called the mismatch theory “paternalistic,” and said that the concern Mr. Scalia’s remarks raised for him was that, “At root he does not believe that students of color belong at elite institutions. I hope that’s not the case, but the tenor of the remarks certainly suggests that that is underlying his thinking.”
Yeah, yeah, haters gonna hate. Setting aside the bulk of the inflammatory response the "paternalistic" comment is spot on. As the JEL article notes:
At fi rst blush, economists should be very skeptical of the mismatch hypothesis. After all, affi rmative action just expands the choice set. If an individual believes a particular school would be too difficult, then the individual could simply attend another school. By revealed preference, the individual must be better off .
Ahh, but do we know enough to make informed choices?
Yet, even in the context of rational expectations, where student beliefs are right on average given their information sets, there are cases where under-represented groups could be made better off in the absence of affirmative action. This comes about because schools may have private information about match quality but are letting in lower match quality students in order to satisfy diversity goals. Thus, the information sets of both schools and students are the critical components in driving mismatch.
They also note that students are never told they are under-qualified but were accepted on a preference. Athletes generally know this, and students with a certain self-awareness might accurately guess. But Harvard is under pressure to meet their numbers achieve certain diversity goals, so they won't be telling candidates they are pretty marginal.
Well. In the context of big ticket decisions such as buying a home, Elizabeth Warren Democrats throw consumer sovereignty right out the window. Odd that they seem to respect the notion here. One might argue that if the DoE required colleges to disgorge a lot more data on enrollments, preferential dmissions, departmental and major transfers, and the like - the grist for these economists mill, in other words - consumer sovereignty could be protected and enhanced.
The Feds got more collegiate assault expulsions when they asked for it - I bet they could get this data overnight, if Team Obama was not in a Don't Ask, Don't tell modality on this topic.
The Ties closes with a heart-warming but utterly atypical example:
Christle Nwora, 21, a senior at the University of Texas and a member of its Black Student Alliance, was admitted because she was in the top 10 percent of students at Plano East Senior High School. She is a humanities major, and in a program that will send her to medical school in the fall. She said prestige had been a factor in her decision to go there.
“I think it goes to the value of my degree,” she said. “It’s one of the most recognizable college brands. We have a strong alumni network, which ranges all across the world.”
More power to her. Plano East Senior High School is in roughly the top third of public schools in Texas; Plano itself is a prosperous mostly-white city outside of Dallas. Since you didn't ask, the Plano East Senior High racial makeup is:
White (35.4%), Hispanic (25.6%), Asian (23.1%)
Asians? Yes:
As of the 2000 U.S. Census, of the foreign-born residents, 17% were from China, 9% from India, and 4% from Vietnam
...
The reputation of the Plano Independent School District has attracted many Indian residents.
So the young lady in question is not a Ten Percenter at a troubled school - she'd be a rock star a lot of places. Including the NY Times, which has never quoted me, so there we are.
We also see she is a state semi-finalist speaking extemporaneously on foreign affairs. Can we get her number to Ben Carson?
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