Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to
Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It
By Richard H. Sanders and Stuart Taylor, Jr.
(Basic Books, 347 pages, $28.99)
IF GEORGE WILL WERE WITH US TODAY, he’d probably coin the terms
Smother Love and Unthink to describe the age in which we live.
Smother Love would describe the special politically correct
entitlements we shower on splinter groups after dividing society
into as many different categories of aggrieved victims as possible.
Unthink would describe the standard response of the forces of
political correctness whenever they are faced with unpleasant
facts. They don’t refute the facts, usually because they can’t.
Factual findings at odds with politically correct assumptions are
not false: They’re “unthinkable.” Hence the Age of Unthink.
This paradigm fits well with race-based affirmative action,
which—coincidentally, is being reexamined by the Supreme Court in
its upcoming term. While many grievances have a basis in history,
such entitlements often punish innocent third parties without
helping—and sometimes even injuring—the intended beneficiaries.
This is particularly true of affirmative action in higher
education, which tends to penalize genuine merit in the overall
population and—just as bad—stifle the potential for real progress
in the victim group: a clear case of Smother Love.
The quotation from Leo Tolstoy that precedes the preface to
Mismatch, Richard Sander’s and Stuart Taylor’s sober,
reasoned, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger critique of affirmative
action sums up the underlying problem:
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of
the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and
most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the
falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to
colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which
they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their
lives.
For more than a generation now, leaders of many of the nation’s
most prestigious universities have, in the name of fairness,
practiced a policy of deliberate inequality: applying different
standards for admission to different groups of students.
Predictably, this deliberate double standard has caused anger and
frustration among qualified white and Asian students denied
admission because of their race. Justifiable as this anger is, it
could be argued that if affirmative action worked—if it really
achieved its professed goal of helping black Americans to realize
their potential and better their lives—the social trade-off, while
painful, would be an acceptable price to pay for righting old
wrongs: No pain, no gain.
Alas, the evidence, as meticulously set forth by Messrs. Sander
and Taylor, indicates that, in the realm of higher education,
race-based affirmative action has produced all too much pain and
all too little gain. It also reveals how the academic and political
architects of this failed experiment live true to Tolstoy’s
dictum.
The authors’ purpose is not to score political points but to
“explain the outpouring of scholarly research in recent years
showing how large racial preferences backfire against many and,
perhaps, most recipients, to the point that they learn less and are
likely to be less self-confident than had they gone to less
competitive but still quite good schools.” This is the mismatch
between schools and students referred to in the book’s title:
Mismatch largely explains why, even though blacks are more
likely to enter college than are whites with similar backgrounds,
they will usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of
the class, and far more often drop out; why there are so few blacks
and Hispanics with science and engineering degrees or with
doctorates in any field; and why black law graduates fail bar exams
at four times the white rate….
It is not lack of talent or innate ability that drives these
students to drop out of school, flee rigorous courses, or abandon
aspirations to be scientists or scholars; it is, rather, an
unintended side effect of large racial preferences, which
systematically put minority students in academic environments where
they feel overwhelmed.
Because of the mismatch effect as well as the related role of
racial preferences in fueling pernicious stereotypes of black
intellectual inferiority, the authors argue that “the biggest
problem for minorities in higher education is no longer race but
rather racial preferences.” It’s as if—my analogy, not the
authors’—university bureaucrats decided that Asians were
underrepresented in the athletic program and therefore granted
athletic scholarships to large numbers of Asian students regardless
of their physical fitness, size, weight, and past athletic
performance…and then decided that they needed more, not less,
affirmative action when the kids bombed on the playing field.
One of the virtues of this book is that it is based on a
rigorous, dispassionate examination of the facts. It is packed with
easy-to-follow graphics and statistical analysis, as well as
extensive case evidence based on interviews; the authors have even
set up a website for readers interested in further detailed
background data. After reading an advance copy of
Mismatch, prominent African American journalist Clarence
Page, a longtime advocate of affirmative action, concluded: “We
don’t do future generations of students any favors by trying to
ignore this issue or pretend it doesn’t exist. If common-sense
moderates don’t step up and engage this debate, we only allow
extremists to take control of it.” Mismatch offers a solid
foundation on which to build such a dialogue.
An interesting sub-theme of the book is how a relatively small
number of affluent, middle-class blacks benefit disproportionately
from programs that were originally intended to help underprivileged
minority kids find a way out of the ghetto. Readers familiar with
abuses of affirmative action programs involving government
contracts will notice a similarity here to the way a handful of
relatively wealthy minority contractors with political connections
game the system to add to their personal wealth, while the black
community as a whole benefits little.
Unfortunately, the underprivileged students most in need of real
affirmative action are beyond the scope of this book. They are the
millions of kindergarten through 12th-graders in poor neighborhoods
who will never see the inside of a decent classroom, will never
reach the level of literacy and numeracy needed to get a good job
(much less a prestigious college degree), and will face a grueling
uphill battle for the rest of their lives—whatever their skin
color—due to the miserable failure of the urban public education
system. Trying to save kids like this by using quotas in higher
education is like signing up as fighter pilots raw recruits who
haven’t been through basic training. It’s bad for the institution,
bad for society, and, most of all, bad for the alleged
beneficiaries.
