Mismatch in Law School

Jesse Rothstein and Albert Yoon

No 14275, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: An important criticism of race-based higher education admission preferences is that they may hurt minority students who attend more selective schools than they would in the absence of such preferences. We categorize the non-experimental research designs available for the study of so-called "mismatch" effects and evaluate the likely biases in each. We select two comparisons and use them to examine mismatch effects in law school. We find no evidence of mismatch effects on any students' employment outcomes or on the graduation or bar passage rates of black students with moderate or strong entering credentials. What evidence there is for mismatch comes from less-qualified black students who typically attend second- or third-tier schools. Many of these students would not have been admitted to any law school without preferences, however, and the resulting sample selection prevents strong conclusions.

JEL-codes: I21 J15 K30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-law
Note: CH ED LE LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14275.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Mismatch in Law School (2006)
Working Paper: Mismatch in Law School (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14275

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14275

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).