While she was a George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government PhD in Public Policy student, Tameka Porter conducted research in 2015 that uncovered a statistic that seemed counterintuitive at the time: Students with low academic qualifications who enrolled at selective colleges showed positive graduation outcomes.
This ran counter to those who considered the opposite to be true, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, that students with low academic qualifications—particularly students of color—would be mismatched at elite universities.
In other words, Porter confirmed that affirmative action in academic admissions policies was not a misguided notion. This got the attention of education policy makers.
Porter, now working with the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, presented an update on her research at the annual American Education Research Association annual meeting in Toronto, Canada.
“I wanted to use statistical methods to derive a definition of affirmative action that was based on academic qualifications and institutional selectivity and then determine the extent to which mismatch occurs and if affirmative action at elite colleges benefits its intended recipients through higher degree completion rates,” Porter said.
“The public policy program [at the Schar School] was of particular interest because it integrated theories of economics, statistics, and political science with thorough empirical evaluations of policy implementation in both the public and private sectors,” Porter added.