To the Editor:

“Does Affirmative Action Do What It Should?,” by Dan Slater (Sunday Review, March 17), wrongly portrays the evidence as evenly divided on “mismatch” — the theory that affirmative action can harm the minority students it’s designed to help by admitting them to schools for which they are unqualified.

At the law school level, many respected scholars have detailed the methodological flaws in Richard H. Sander’s 2005 article in The Stanford Law Review, which put forth the mismatch theory.

In the Fisher v. University of Texas affirmative action case before the Supreme Court, amicus briefs by a group of leading researchers and by the American Educational Research Association show that research over all undermines the mismatch hypothesis.

At the undergraduate level, a large body of evidence shows that attending a more selective university is associated with net gains in African-Americans’ and Latinos’ graduation rates.