Top 10 Percent Rule Threatened
William McKenzie, in The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, reports that the Texas Senate passed Plano Republican Florence Shapiro's change to the rule granting automatic admission to a Texas university of their choice to high school students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class.
The need for the change is driven by the gradually increasing percentage of incoming freshman classes made up of automatic admissions. It's 80 percent this year and, by some estimates, the entire freshman class could be automatic admissions as early as this fall.
My main concern is that the growth of automatic admissions not be used as an excuse to avoid achieving what the 10 percent rule was designed to achieve in the first place. The goal was to eliminate racial discrimination in admissions policy. Because there's a correlation between race and socio-economic background, the effect is also to eliminate discrimination based socio-economic background. Shapiro's bill appears to pass that test. It stipulates that "the institution must offer admission to all applicants with the same percentile rank."
Besides Shapiro's bill, there is another way to address the inability of universities to accomodate all the 10 percenters who apply. That is by increasing the capacity of Texas universities to accept more students of all ranks. For those who see college education as becoming more necessary for competitive advantage in today's economy, this solution is preferred. But, given the current economic constraints, some combination of tightening the 10 percent rule and expanding university enrollments seems like the fairest compromise.
McKenzie's own take on this matter is odd. He characterizes the position of those legislators who argue for keeping the current 10 percent rule as being equivalent to arguing that the University of Texas, for example, "should become a school that only serves elite students." McKenzie apparently measures "elite" by grade point average, instead of the more common socio-economic status. The 10 percent rule gives poor students (who more likely are also African-American or Hispanic) an equal opportunity for admission as students from affluent school districts. In other words, weakening the 10 percent rule would risk allowing admissions policy to be used to make UT an "elite" school, just the opposite of McKenzie's argument. Reader "Joe" explains it well:
"What the 10 percent rule does is make it more difficult for students graduating in the top 10-30% of their class from the 'elite' high schools to get in because those slots go to students in the 10% of less elite high schools. So, by way of example, a kid in the top 10% of his class at South Oak Cliff High gets a spot that otherwise would go to some kid in the top 20% of his class at Plano."
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