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The Hidden Campus Crisis

Placing unprepared students in challenging academic environments derails their lives and careers.

Few issues at the crossroads of constitutional law and policy are quite as fraught with cultural and racial tension as affirmative action, which is why it is important to stress that "Mismatch" isn't about intelligence or IQ or even, in a sense, academic ability; it is about academic preparation, the Achilles' heel of American education.

The problem is the simple math that results from a deficient K-12 educational system for minorities: There just aren't enough academically prepared black and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Hispanic students to fill America's top colleges at the median level of academic preparation, a level that is determined mostly by Asian and white applicants. To remedy this problem, administrators add the equivalent of 100 points or more to the SAT scores of many minority applicants. Administrators tend to call this policy affirmative action, because surveys show that Americans of all races approve of affirmative action. But it is actually a system of racial preferences, which surveys show that Americans of all races overwhelmingly reject.

In the view of Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr.—respectively, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles and a distinguished legal journalist—the current system of preferences does discriminate against Asian and white students. But that isn't what most disturbs the authors. The real cost, they say, is that years of "happy talk" about the educational value of diversity have obscured a terrible fact: If you place students who are less academically prepared in classes where most of the students are more academically prepared, the gap will be punishing and possibly humiliating to the less prepared students. Professors will teach to the middle of the class. Those toward the bottom—particularly in the sciences—will struggle to keep up.

The ordeal of mismatch first became apparent in the mid-1990s, with data from students pursuing majors in science, technology, engineering or math—so-called STEM majors. Blacks at Ivy League colleges, it turned out, aspired to pursue STEM subjects slightly more than whites, but they ended being half as likely to finish with a STEM degree. Research by Dartmouth psychologists Rogers Elliott and A. C. Strenta, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, concluded that the underlying feature of the dropout rate wasn't race but academic preparation. If a student entered an Ivy with an SAT score under 550 in math, he was only a fifth as likely to graduate with a STEM degree as a student whose SAT score was over 700.

The key to understanding this disparity wasn't absolute academic preparation but relative preparation. "A freshman physics class at Dartmouth," Messrs. Sander and Taylor write, "would presume that students were comfortable with calculus and fairly complex, realistic models of natural phenomena; a freshman physics class at Fisk—or at the University of Tennessee—would probably start with algebraic approaches." Historically black colleges, in fact, were producing far greater numbers of black STEM graduates than the Ivies.



By Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr.
(Basic, 348 pages, $28.99)

In short, a system of racial preferences was placing students with the strongest scientific ability at the institutions where they were least likely to achieve their goals. As one black Dartmouth graduate told Messrs. Sander and Taylor about her experience in biochemistry, "It is not until you meet the best that you realize that you are in a whole other playing field. At first I thought I could handle it, but then as freshman year rolled along, I got hammered academically. People in my class had had science since grammar school, but I wasn't even introduced to science until my sophomore year of high school. . . . I had never developed the skills I needed to achieve." Like many others in her position, she switched to a humanities major.

The Elliott-Strenta research, published in 1996, met with silence from the academic establishment, as did research in succeeding years that deepened their theory. But this all changed when Mr. Sander analyzed the troubling performance of many black law-school students at UCLA in the late 1990s. About half of them, he found, ended up in the bottom 10th of the class and achieved only a 50% pass rate in bar exams, compared with 90% for whites. The reason? Many had been admitted with large racial preferences. Though a mismatched undergraduate might switch to an easier major without punishing anything more than his dreams, failing the bar exam could ruin a career.

"Orwellian" is one word that "Mismatch" uses to describe the energetic—and frequently unedifying—attempts to refute Mr. Sander's research after it was published in 2005. A troubling legacy of the assault, given that colleges are supposed to exist to increase our sum of knowledge, is that administrators have become increasingly reluctant to release the core data by which their admissions policies can be judged. Nevertheless, Messrs. Sander and Taylor have marshaled a formidable amount of evidence to substantiate the mismatch theory, and while this makes the narrative dense at times, the payoff is persuasiveness.

The authors also take in the bigger picture, by looking at "the breadth of mismatch" in the larger university culture. They describe the psychological effects of preferences ("mismatch can derail lives"), the echo chamber of "happy talk" in the media, the complicated judicial reasoning surrounding affirmative action, and the results of Proposition 209 in California, where universities ignored what they described as positive academic results and began implementing "holistic" policies to keep up minority enrollment. Such shifts play a role in the current Supreme Court case involving the University of Texas. For all its academic analysis and argument, "Mismatch" is very much in the tradition of the muckraking that Lincoln Steffens did a century ago when he took on the corruption in American cities; indeed, the book could be titled "The Shame of the Colleges."


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