UT’s 10 Percent Admissions Plan Causing Capacity Problems
Dilemmas, dilemmas! It seems that Texas’s practice of automatically admitting any student who graduates in the top 10 percent of his high school class is having unintended but reasonably expected consequences. A little background…
In 1996, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in Hopwood v. Texas that using race preferences in college admissions to achieve “diversity” was unconstitutional. Consequently, the second largest state in the Union adopted the so-called Ten Percent Plan to admit a certain percentage of black and Hispanic students in a race-neutral way. Regardless of a high school’s academic standards, if a student graduates in the top 10 percent of his class, he’s guaranteed admission to any government college or university in the state.
In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal that Texas schools should be allowed to admit students based on skin color.
Earlier this week, University of Texas (UT) President William Powers discussed one unintended consequence of the Ten Percent Plan. Eighty-one percent of Texas freshmen were admitted through the 10 percent rule. If lawmakers don’t change the policy for 2009, says Powers, UT will run out of room for students who are not admitted under the policy. (Source)
“We’ve lost control of our entering class because we don’t have any discretion on the admissions,” Powers said. (Would using race to admit students fall under his definition of discretion?)
Powers says allowing students to transfer from community colleges may remedy the problem.
The Ten Percent Plan has achieved the goal of increasing the number of black and Hispanic students, but what about qualifications? Are relatively under-qualified 10-percenters being admitted over non-10-percenters who nevertheless have superior qualifications? Without any statistical backing whatsoever – just a good dose of common sense – I’d say the answer is OF COURSE. The plan obviously is being used as a proxy for race.
