Opinion: Does Affirmative Action Do What It Should?

WHAT'S more important to how your life turns out: the prestige of the school you attend or how much you learn while you're there? Does the answer to this question change if you are the recipient of affirmative action?

From school admissions to hiring, affirmative action policies attempt to compensate for this country's brutal history of racial discrimination by giving some minority applicants a leg up. This spring the Supreme Court will decide the latest affirmative action case, weighing in on the issue for the first time in 10 years.

The last time around, in 2003, the court upheld the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action plan. A divided court ruled, 5 to 4, that "student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify the use of race in university admissions." Writing for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said, "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

In the intervening period, scholars have been looking more closely at how affirmative action works in practice. Based on how they interpret the data that have been collected, some of these scholars have come to believe that affirmative action doesn't always help the students it's supposed to. Why? Because some minority students who get into a top school with the help of affirmative action might actually be better served by attending a less elite institution to which they could gain admission with less of a boost or no boost at all.

The idea that affirmative action might harm its intended beneficiaries was suggested as early as the 1960s, when affirmative action, a phrase introduced by the Kennedy administration, began to take hold as government and corporate policy. One long-simmering objection to affirmative action was articulated publicly by Clarence Thomas years before he joined the Supreme Court in 1991. Mr. Thomas, who has opposed affirmative action even while conceding that he benefited from it, told a reporter for The New York Times in 1982 that affirmative action placed students in programs above their abilities. Mr. Thomas, who was then the 34-year-old chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, didn't deny the crisis in minority employment. But he blamed a failed education system rather than discrimination in admissions. "I watched the operation of such affirmative action policies when I was in college," he said, "and I watched the destruction of many kids as a result."

Scholars began referring to this theory as "mismatch." It's the idea that affirmative action can harm those it's supposed to help by placing them at schools in which they fall below the median level of ability and therefore have a tough time. As a consequence, the argument goes, these students suffer learningwise and, later, careerwise. To be clear, mismatch theory does not allege that minority students should not attend elite universities. Far from it. But it does say that students — minority or otherwise — do not automatically benefit from attending a school that they enter with academic qualifications well below the median level of their classmates.

The mismatch theory, if true, would affect many kids. According to a 2009 book, "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life," by Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, a black student with an otherwise similar application to a white student receives the equivalent of a 310-point bump in SAT scores.

Mismatch theory attracted little attention until 2005, when a law professor at U.C.L.A., Richard H. Sander, published a provocative article in the Stanford Law Review, which focused on how affirmative action affected law students. Mr. Sander claimed that "a student who gains special admission to a more elite school on partly nonacademic grounds is likely to struggle more" and contended that "if the struggling leads to lower grades and less learning, then a variety of bad outcomes may result: higher attrition rates, lower pass rates on the bar, problems in the job market. The question is how large these effects are, and whether their consequences outweigh the benefits of greater prestige."

Dan Slater is a lawyer and the author of "Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating."