Content area
Full Text
Racial conservatives contend that black students admitted to the nation's top undergraduate and graduate programs under affirmative action policies are unable to compete with white students. Therefore, it is said that blacks at these schools are more likely to drop out.
In the past JBHE has presented evidence that refutes this so-called mismatch theory. Now a new study by researchers at Duke University offers further evidence dismissing the mismatch theory in college admissions.
Over recent years there have been a number of scholars, mostly ones holding conservative political views, who have proposed a so-called mismatch theory, aimed in most cases to undercut widespread affirmative action policies in college and graduate school admissions. The position is that black students admitted to these schools under racial preference programs are fundamentally ill equipped to compete with their white peers.
Here are examples of scholars who adhere to this mismatch theory that black college and graduate school students are destined for failure:
* Professor Thomas Sowell of Stanford's Hoover Institution, a leading advocate of the mismatch thesis, speculates that "instead of becoming University of Texas graduates, black students become Harvard dropouts."
* In their book America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible, Race in Modern America, two widely admired scholars, Abigail and Stephan Themstrom, write: "When students are given a preference in admissions because of their race or some other extraneous characteristic, it means that they are jumping into a competition for which their academic achievements do not qualify them and many find it hard to keep...