Mismatch Theory And Affirmative Action

From TIME, "How Affirmative Action Backfires at Universities: The policy of placing students with better-prepared peers ultimately makes classrooms less diverse. Here's why" by Heather Mac Donald:

a body of empirical research has emerged showing that racial preferences can hurt their purported beneficiaries by catapulting them into schools for which they are inadequately prepared. Placed in classrooms pitched above their current level of knowledge, they learn less than they would if they were among peers whose academic skills more closely mirror their own. This “mismatch” effect is particularly relevant to the University of Texas case, Fisher v. University of Texas [the case that is before the US Supreme Court], because the university claims that it needs to admit students according to race in order to achieve “classroom diversity.” Mismatch theory predicts — correctly — that using racial preferences will have the opposite effect.

Mismatch theory, as applied to racial preferences, has its share of critics. It is not a scientific theory. It is a social science theory that is subject to much debate about the methods for determining the existence of a mismatch and about the policy recommendations if a mismatch is found.

For example, if a large group of the top minority students that apply to a college list engineering as their preferred major but during their college years switch out of the engineering major because they are inadequately prepared to do the mathematics work to graduate with an engineering degree, is the proper school policy response to be more strict in its admission policy in assessing the ability to complete an engineering major and admit fewer minorities, or is the correct policy to provide additional encouragement and assistance to minorities so they can obtain an engineering degree? What if the college is like a MIT, where the students who do not get preferential admission are in the top 1% of the US, if not the world, and can learn advanced mathematics and science at an accelerated rate? What about law schools and medical schools, which are more skill and experience based professions than engineering?