This post is the third in a series on Prof. Richard Sander and the reaction to his Mismatch theory. You can read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4 of this series at the links.

As I noted in Part 2 of this series, a slew of pro-affirmative-action law scholars wrote critiques of Sander’s work on Mismatch, the theory that if students are less prepared for a particular level of instruction—which occurs almost by design with affirmative action—then, not only do they make worse grades than their peers, they actually learn less than they would have learned if they had attended a less challenging school. All of these critiques, I believe, realized that the first and second regularities that Sander documented were solid. None even attempted to show contradictory data that could overturn them.