SCOTUS: Fisher II oral arguments

[coase]

I am no fan of Scalia, but he was reciting the CC mantra that fit is important, albeit doing so in a very crude fashion. Anyway, Peter Arcidiacono and a co-author have a review article entitled, “Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Tradeoff,” which is forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Literature. One snippet makes clear his argument for how mismatch could arise.

At first blush, economists should be very skeptical of the mismatch hypothesis. After all, affirmative action just expands the choice set. If an individual believes a particular school would be too difficult, then the individual could simply attend another school. By revealed preference, the individual must be better off. Yet, even in the context of rational expectations, where student beliefs are right on average given their information sets, there are cases where under-represented groups could be made better off in the absence of affirmative action. This comes about because schools may have private information about match quality but are letting in lower match quality students in order to satisfy diversity goals. Thus, the information sets of both schools and students are the critical components in driving mismatch.

http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/aa.pdf
So, his argument is that schools, which have better information about students’ likelihood of success, are cynically enrolling some students with lower likelihood of success.