After reading my post on the mismatch hypothesis, a friend of a friend wrote the following comment: “Great. Now opponents of affirmative action can be as patronizing as supporters.” I found this pretty amusing, and also pretty insightful. Yet I still think it’s fully appropriate for selective schools to put the long-term interests of students ahead of other institutional imperatives, like boosting faculty morale.

Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at UCLA, emailed to suggest that the mismatch phenomenon might not be as powerful for undergraduates as it is for law students:

Regarding your recent post, it’s probably worth noting that while Sander has good evidence for “mismatch” in law school, the attached Fischer and Massey article shows that in undergrad any mismatch effect is probably swamped by the basic effect that selectivity is highly correlated with completion (net of individual student qualifications).I’m convinced that it’s a treatment effect not an (unobserved heterogeneity) selection effect because it’s consistent with my own pedagogical experiences. When I was in grad school at Princeton there were a couple times when my students flaked off or had a bad quarter or whatever and their residential college master would step in and work things out. In contrast, here at UCLA we don’t have residential college masters, my department has one academic counselor for over 500 majors, and there’s such a shortage of classes that it’s basically impossible for students to register for a full course load. as such, it’s entirely possible even for a reasonably diligent student to drop out at UCLA. Hence I find it eminently plausible that if you took the same student and moved them up a couple hundred SAT points worth of selectivity (which is basically what AA does), that student would be more likely to finish school even if we accept that as a corollary we’re moving them from the local median to the local bottom decile. That is, you’re more likely to succeed as the dumbest kid at Princeton than a typical kid at UCLA.

I can’t find an ungated copy of the paper, but here is a link for those of you with an institutional affiliation that allows you to access very expensive scholarly journals.

Suffice it to say, the Fischer and Massey research doesn’t represent the final word on the mismatch hypothesis for undergraduate students. As I noted earlier, Sander and his colleagues have new findings on the subject.

On a tangential note, Sander and Jane Yakowitz have just published a new paper on how law school prestige and performance impact legal careers that might be of interest:

The consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law school – as measured by law school grades – is the most important predictor of career success. It is decisively more important than law school “eliteness.” Socioeconomic factors play a critical role in shaping the pool from which law students are drawn, but little or no discernible role in shaping post-graduate careers. Since the dominant conventional wisdom says that law school prestige is all-important, and since students who “trade-up” in school prestige generally take a hit to their school performance, we think prospective students are getting the wrong message.

It would be very valuable to know if something similar is at work in undergraduate education.