At the country’s top universities, there is no racial “mismatch.”

And why would these universities sabotage their own narrative by allowing these students to fail? Affirmative action in admission, why not affirmative action in assessment?

Many schools have been caught doing this. Failing students look bad for the institution, so they push a few through to graduation. Not just in universities, it's done in primary education as well.

I've met college graduates who could barely read.

https://nypost.com/2015/08/09/teachers-say-they-feel-pressure-to-meet-citys-pass-quota/

That's a good point, and "grade inflation" is a real problem. If I recall correctly, Harvard and maybe some other elite schools have actually done away with grades. Probably as a response to articles like this that criticized them heavily for grade inflation. https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/06/opinion/trachtenberg-grade-inflation/index.html

Which is pretty ridiculous if you think about it -- basically telling their students they can coast on the name and the name alone. I'm sure most of these very highly gifted students don't let the lack of accountability slow them down, but surely some do coast. And the institutions would much rather pass them on in an effort to make the institution look good than let them fail and suffer the hit to their graduation rates.

That said, the college academic scandals I've heard of have all been focused on athletes. Which are absolutely beneficiaries of their own form of "affirmative action" (as are legacy admits and children of wealthy donors).

This article is just about a student-athlete scandal at UNC, but the problem is rampant. https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2019/12/decadeinreview-ncaa-decade

Here's another one against Missouri. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/02/01/ncaa-punishes-missouri-blatant-case-academic-fraud

This one is a more general article about athletics and also other "side-doors" to admission. https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-admissions-scandal-sports-20190313-story.html

No scandals to my knowledge that are about colleges unfairly helping minority students specifically.

So there are definitely problems in higher education, but minorities failing out of elite schools because they are "mismatched" just isn't one of them.

I knew all this already and alluded to it below (“There are all sorts of reasons for this perhaps surprising result”)

I knew the comments would roll in and we’d have the chance to clarify this a bit

Should I have made my OP meme even longer?

https://www.staugustine.com/article/20151216/opinion/312169950

In this article criticizing affirmative action, Sowell discusses minorities failing out of Cornell and MIT. I haven't yet looked at the graduation rate data broken down by race from either of those places... but nor does Sowell cite them in the article. So I'm unable to verify Sowell's assertions just based on what he wrote.

So to help answer that I did my own research and dug up the graduation statistics from MIT and Cornell.

MIT: http://ir.mit.edu/more-student-data
Cornell: https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/edu/190415/cornell-university/graduation/

The first thing to note is both these institutions' graduation rates are lower overall: About 95% as opposed to the 97-98% of Harvard and Yale. These statistics also show minorities flunking out a bit more often than whites than was the case at Harvard and Yale. Cornell: 87% graduation rate for blacks. MIT: between 80-89%. This particular data fits Sowell's theory better, but the effect is not overwhelming. Some of these minority students may be "mismatched," but the vast majority are not. I'd hardly call it a slam-dunk for the "mismatch" theory.

And anyway, if I'm "cherry-picking" in my selection of my two elite institutions, Harvard and Yale, then Sowell is "cherry-picking" to an equal degree in selecting two other elite institutions, Cornell and MIT.

Sowell also very briefly discusses the authors of the book "Mismatch" and their analysis of the University of California system's experiment with banning affirmative action. That's a whole topic for a different tl;dr comment.

There are all sorts of reasons for this perhaps surprising result. For now, here is the source data from Yale which seems to be unusually transparent about this issue.

About midway down this page, you’ll find an interactive chart that you can play around with, with data from 2012-2017. Regardless of the settings you choose, graduation rates are consistently high among all race groups. https://datausa.io/profile/university/yale-university

Here are equivalent graduation rates from Harvard, which has been famously in the national news for litigation over race-based affirmative action.

This chart is not quite as detailed as the Yale chart, but it is the one I found quickly. These graduation rates are also from 2017, I believe.

https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/edu/166027/harvard-university/graduation/

Lefties not only can't meme, they can't think

Feel free to make the opposite case using whatever supports you want.

Heck: I gave you a head start with the other chart I posted! It should be easy now!

See chart above. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/26/college-completion-rates-vary-race-and-ethnicity-report-finds

As you move down the elite-status ladder, graduation rates do get lower. When you look at the entire picture of U.S. college graduation rates, there is a discrepancy between graduation rates among the races that calls for an explanation.

But: those lower-ranked schools aren't nearly as selective, and they don't place such a high institutional value on diversity. So I don't think you can automatically conclude race-based affirmative action is the issue here.

The issues with the lower graduation rates at non-elite schools are: (1) Lack of adequate public K-12 education that prepares students for college; (2) Lack of adequate scholarships which means many students drop out because they can't afford tuition, or they're working too hard at their side-jobs to have the time for coursework.

Example: A hypothetical black student who drops out of community college because they are too busy working -- or even because they can't hack the classwork -- is not "mismatched" in an affirmative-action sense. Since community colleges accept basically everyone.

He definitely means to include universities. He’s written plenty about A.A. in the university context

Sowell “cherry-picked” the universities of Cornell and MIT in an anti-affirmative action article he wrote, and didn’t even provide the data (which is not a slam dunk in his favor), which I discuss in a comment below