On the front page of its Metro section today, the Washington Post has a story headlined, “Racial disparity in degree selection.” It reports on a new study that has found that blacks and Latinos are more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees in low-paying majors rather than the better-paying STEM disciplines.

The story cites “centuries of racial discrimination, uneven budgetary support for K-12 education and poor academic advising and student support” as possible reasons for all this; it talks about students who do well in high school but lose interest in science fields because suddenly in college they are struggling; and cheerfully notes a recent “$18 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to increase diversity in biomedical research” at a nearby university.

My posted response:

Too bad there’s no mention here of the “mismatch” problem: If a university has “affirmative action” admissions, this means that they will be admitting black and Latino students with lower academic qualifications than the rest of the student body, and so they will do worse than the other, better qualified students. In STEM studies, in particular, they are more likely to become discouraged and switch majors than had they gone to a school where their academic qualifications were on par with everyone else’s. This is a well-documented phenomenon, but it’s politically incorrect so I guess the Post did not want to discuss it. See, e.g, this study.