Innovative Texas Admissions Program Being Scaled Back
Texas had been running an interesting experiment in an alternative to old fashioned affirmation action. The way it worked was that instead of using an explicitly race-conscious admissions formula, instead the University of Texas just guaranteed that the top ten percent of performers from any high school in Texas could gain admission to a UT campus of their choice. I think that struck a lot of people as a reasonable-sounding alternative to race-based formulae that a lot of folks are uncomfortable with. And above all, it accomplished the goal of ensuring that talented students who simply had the misfortune to grow up in a community with a low performing high school didn’t suffer additional penalties for their bad luck over and above the intrinsic disadvantages caused by attending a low performing school.
But now it seems Texas is going to curb this program, too leaving the state with little in the way of remedial admissions efforts.
This, in turn, highlights the extent to which college admissions in this country is often thought about in a backwards way. Our general understanding is that the most resources ought to flow to the “best” schools and the “best” schools ought to serve the “best” students who “deserve” to be able to go there. Under this framework, any departure from a strict scheme of “merit” looks suspicious. But another way to look at things would be to say that of course relatively able students from relatively privileged backgrounds deserve a higher education, but a larger amount of resources ought to flow to the students with more problems. After all, it’s the worse-prepared kids—typically from less privileged backgrounds—who have the most in the way of educational needs. The marginal dollar of either the taxpayer or the charitable donor will do a lot more for society when spent on people who aren’t already the best students.
47 Responses to “Innovative Texas Admissions Program Being Scaled Back”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
May 31st, 2009 at 11:39 am
The law given final approval by the Senate on Saturday caps the number of students let in under the rule at three-quarters of the class, giving university officials discretion over the makeup of the last quarter.
That doesn’t sound particularly unreasonable.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:43 am
… The marginal dollar of either the taxpayer or the charitable donor will do a lot more for society when spent on people who aren’t already the best students.
This might be fairer but I am pretty sure the best return will be from the best students. As a former governor of Colorado argued teaching retards to roll over doesn’t provide much return to society.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:49 am
Why?
May 31st, 2009 at 11:51 am
The real problem in Texas is that there simply aren’t enough decent universities to keep up with the population growth. Right now rich suburban kids are forced to go out of state to find good schools. With the proposed change, some of them would gain admittance to UT or A&M, most likely at the expense of less affluent (but not necessarily minority) kids from rural and urban areas.
The answer is to EXPAND educational opportunity in Texas, not find another way to ration it. The state should be pouring money into places like UT-San Antonio, Texas State in San Marcos, and UT-Arlington to turn those places into Tier 1 universities. Texas has dozens of public universities. It shouldn’t have to be the case that only UT and A&M degrees are coveted.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:51 am
The marginal dollar of either the taxpayer or the charitable donor will do a lot more for society when spent on people who aren’t already the best students.
Yeah, but the marginal dollar will do even more if spent on primary or secondary education. The idea that the tertiary system is the place to rectify the injustice of unequal childhoods is really wrong: for one thing, tertiary education is necessarily inefficient in that respect, as it should be. The point of higher education is to create knowledge, not solve society’s problems.
It’s always going to be more expensive to teach remedial courses in community colleges and state teaching universities than to teach it right the first time in public high schools. A sound high school degree is what most people need to do the work of life: the insistence by employers on college-level qualifications is just screening out the undesirables, i.e. those without the time or money to waste on a useless degree. Which of course exerts an enormous tax on anyone who wants to make a decent living.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:53 am
Far be it for Texas to fund it’s universities better. Apparently there is demand.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:55 am
What Kent from Waco said. And please ignore the it’s/its problem in #6!
May 31st, 2009 at 11:58 am
“It’s always going to be more expensive to teach remedial courses in community colleges and state teaching universities than to teach it right the first time in public high schools. A sound high school degree is what most people need to do the work of life: the insistence by employers on college-level qualifications is just screening out the undesirables…”
Great post.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Well, the other point is that “school choice” is one of those things that middle-middle-class (i.e. the ones with mobility, time and disposable income) have learned to game par excellence.
Parents who have have the means and the information to seek out the best school districts and get their kids into the most helpful extra-curricular activities for college admission may, frankly, have problems with the idea of looking out for kids who do pretty well out of less-than-ideal schooling. This isn’t just an American thing, either.
Since the Ivies are hamstrung by cost and legacies (and alumni), then the big state universities like Texas or UGA ought to step in, but it’s a hard political sell, because the same parents who’ll do a 90-minute commute to live in a particular school district are also likely to be the ones with the capacity to raise hell with elected officials.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:03 pm
IMHO, the biggest bang for your marginal education dollar is found at community colleges.
You know what happens at community colleges? Nurse’s aides who didn’t take the college-track courses in high school take those last couple of math and science classes so they can get into a nursing program. Immigrants working in metal fabrication shops take a geometry class so they can get a promotion to a position that requires a little math. People who didn’t take school very seriously in high school earn a few credits because they’ve gotten serious and want to transfer to a state university.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Thomas Ash: a number of reasons come to mind, but don’t discount the importance of peer groups. If you’re the valedictorian from Booker T. Washington High and only a few of your classmates accompany you to college, that’s not ideal. If you’re a junior at that high school and there’s a long-established history of only a handful of students getting into Big State University, that’s not ideal either.
But Marshall’s right: the marginal dollar works best, earliest. Tweaking with university admissions isn’t going to address the structural deficiencies in primary and secondary education.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:37 pm
There was a negative associated with the former Texas policy of guaranteeing the top 10 percent admission in UT Austin, Rice or Texas A&M. Which was that very few students from out of state could gain admittance there. So no intellectual interaction with people from the Northeast or California or Washington State or Illnois.
The Texan mindset is inbred enough already.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:38 pm
It’s absolutely necessary unless the state starts paying more. Back in the boom times, the Texas Legislature thought that cutting funding and deregulating tuition increases was the way to get universities off the balance sheet. Now that tuition has risen astronomically, there are calls to cut it, but the money “isn’t there” to make up for the hit to the universities.
UT-Austin suffers badly from overcrowding. I’ve heard horror stories about classes where there were more students enrolled than the room has seats for, how it’s impossible to get into some “freshman” courses because the upperclassmen get registration priority and those upperclassmen weren’t able to take the courses when they were freshmen.
I went to an excellent school in Austin and graduated in the top quartile of my class but outside the top ten percent. I chose not to apply to UT because of the horror stories I’d heard, but even if I had applied, I wouldn’t have expected to get in. For pretty much the entire life of the rule, it has been virtually impossible to get in from within the State of Texas unless you qualify for top-10% admission.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:48 pm
My son was a National Merit Finalist, had 790 SATs and was seriously interested in UT Austin. His grandmother and uncle live nearby in Barton Creek and we like the area.
But a little investigation suggested it was easier to get into Stanford or MIT than to get into UT Austin if you are from out of state. Plus the housing situation looked impossible –even if you own a car and can commute from 10 miles out.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:48 pm
DL Says:
May 31st, 2009 at 12:38 pm
It’s absolutely necessary unless the state starts paying more. Back in the boom times, the Texas Legislature thought that cutting funding and deregulating tuition increases was the way to get universities off the balance sheet. Now that tuition has risen astronomically, there are calls to cut it, but the money “isn’t there” to make up for the hit to the universities.
UT-Austin suffers badly from overcrowding. I’ve heard horror stories about classes where there were more students enrolled than the room has seats for, how it’s impossible to get into some “freshman” courses because the upperclassmen get registration priority and those upperclassmen weren’t able to take the courses when they were freshmen.
I went to an excellent school in Austin and graduated in the top quartile of my class but outside the top ten percent. I chose not to apply to UT because of the horror stories I’d heard, but even if I had applied, I wouldn’t have expected to get in. For pretty much the entire life of the rule, it has been virtually impossible to get in from within the State of Texas unless you qualify for top-10% admission.
Large universities ought to be transitioning to online feeds for these large lecture courses, and allow students to sign up for online only. In my experience attending these classes at a large state university, I got almost nothing out of actually sitting in lecture that I would not have gotten watching it on TV except that I guess it might have been more difficult to force myself to watch it. But it would also provide flexibility, cut down costs as professors wouldn’t have to teach 10 sections of Econ 101, and allow students more flexibility. These courses are usually accompanied by a smaller seminar once per week, usually taught by a graduate student, which could be maintained to provide a forum for questions and the like.
I’m usually not a huge believer in all kinds of technology to improve education, as it is so oversold just so administrators can point to something they did, but this seems like an easy, obvious choice. Going to lecture halls filled with 400 kids provided nothing that watching it on my computer wouldn’t have.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:52 pm
When I do alumnae interviewing for my alma mater, they have made it very clear to me that they do admissions “in context”. They care about how well the student has made do with the resources at hand. The best student a poor school has ever seen is much more likely to get in than a merely good student from a wealthy school, even if the latter has more accomplishments.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:07 pm
It’s true that top 10% was one way to work on creating opportunities for students from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds and thereby to increase diversity of the student body. But only up to a point. You end up with a freshman class of students who are obsessed with grades and know how to get A’s, which isn’t the same thing as caring about learning. Furthermore, people who spend hours of their adolescence in practice rooms or art studios may not have ended up with a GPA that put them in their school’s top 10%. So the program was gutting the majors from art, music, drama, dance. And that’s not desirable. UT also could not admit many students from out of state, and within the next few years wouldn’t be able to admit a single one. So by scaling back the percentage of the freshman class to 75% – which is still a lot – it makes it possible to increase several different kinds of diversity on the campus. Furthermore, since the rule was enacted, the Supreme Court has cleared the way for considerations of diversity among other things in college admissions. So this way of getting it isn’t the only way to raise the quality of the freshman population through diversity.
It’s true that the NYTimes made it sound like a big anti-diversity win for the suburban parents, and that is probably how a segment of the legislative coalition that passed this worked. But it wouldn’t have passed without the officials of the university asking for it, and they wanted it because of the ways it would add to the diversity on campus. The Times story doesn’t really have it right, because it spends too many inches on suburban parents’ complaints.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:09 pm
One way UT Austin has traditionally addressed its overcrowding problem is by a rather hardcore policy of failing kids who can’t cut it. This is done through “weed-out” classes required of freshmen and sophomores. But in my experience, this tends, on balance, to weed out more privileged kids from “good” high schools than to weed out underprivileged kids from lower rated high schools. Probably because the underprivileged kids work harder, while the privileged kids’ work ethic is more characteristic of, well, privilege.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I don’t know that either is necessarily reasonable. If we are to value meritocracy, entrance should be based on performance through High School. One’s race, nor the general quality of one’s school, should not factor in. Thus, good school or bad, high performers will be accepted and low performers will be denied. Will that mean more people from good schools get accepted? Sure, but based on performance, that is the only fair way.
You talk about people being held back because they go to a poor school. This is a good reason to improve that school system; it is not a good reason to tinker with admission standards to pick a relatively poorer performer over a relatively higher performer unless we are throwing meritocracy out of the window.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:13 pm
1) I think public universities, especially in the Sun Belt, are going to find funding hard to obtain in the next 10 years. But an offsetting factor to tight budgets is that there is supposed to be a demographic slump in students as the wave of baby boomer kids declines.
2) Here’s an article re how boom times for the Sun Belt may be past:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090531/ap_on_re_us/us_stress_map_sun_belt_sunset_4
3) If i might introduce some off-topic trivialities, another article suggests that all that Sun Belt real estate that Bernanke is holding as collateral for $TRILLIONS of loans from the taxpayer may be at risk as hurricane season approaches — no one boards up the windows on foreclosed homes. See
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090531/ap_on_re_us/us_hurricane_season_foreclosures_1
Money quote (YOUR money): “His simple answer: “A lot of these places will get destroyed.”
4) But what is a few more $TRILLION in taxpayer money shot to hell?
News reports on Friday not that the US Taxpayer is already in hock for $63.8 TRILLION in federal debt and unfunded obligations — about $547,000 per HOUSEHOLD.
Given that 50 percent of US household don’t have shit for net worth, that leaves Middle-class and wealthy households with a Federal debt of about $1 MILLION per household.
But Geithner says he’ll take checks. Er..so long as they are insured by the FDIC.
Oh LOOK! Obama has nominated a Latina for the Supreme Court!
May 31st, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Bondo Says:
May 31st, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I don’t know that either is necessarily reasonable. If we are to value meritocracy, entrance should be based on performance through High School. One’s race, nor the general quality of one’s school, should not factor in. Thus, good school or bad, high performers will be accepted and low performers will be denied. Will that mean more people from good schools get accepted? Sure, but based on performance, that is the only fair way.
You talk about people being held back because they go to a poor school. This is a good reason to improve that school system; it is not a good reason to tinker with admission standards to pick a relatively poorer performer over a relatively higher performer unless we are throwing meritocracy out of the window.
Are you dense? You cannot separate merit from privilege?
I guess we ought to tell all those kids who were stupid enough to be born to poor parents that they can’t go to a good college, but don’t worry because as soon as we bring up the quality of your schools you will. What’s that? Oh, you’ll already have graduated and be stuck as a janitor? Oh, and there is no reason to think those schools are going to become equals of the good schools anytime soon? Too bad.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:42 pm
I live in Austin and have 3 college age kids. My youngest is a National Merit Finalist and is going out of state. Her scholarship gets us to break even with UT which is now over 20k per year for Texas residents. One child attends UT despite not having been in the top 10% and another attends ACC.
College is brutally expensive for the middle class. Comment #10 above about community colleges is spot on and deserves a bit of expanding.
My wife has attended 2 high school counseling sessions given by UT representatives. In each the rep recommended against attending the local community college and indicated the chances of transferring from ACC to UT as being small since it is below the rest of the UT system in the pecking order.
However, it turns out that ACC is far and away the #1 source for students transferring to UT. For example: Austin’s LBJ high school is one of the finest and most competitive in the country and often kids who do not make it into the to 10% attend ACC then transfer to UT. Evidently UT finds it necessary to actively promote their system at the expense of community colleges and this is seriously wrong.
Texas is messed up top to bottom with regards to educational funding. Our local districts are funded via the Robin Hood plan that funnels property tax money from wealthy districts to poorer districts. And the two flagship universities have traditionally received the lions share of the funding, although that is changing. Texas State in San Marcos seems to be getting more attention these days. But by far the best bang for the buck educationally is found in local community colleges like ACC. These need to be approached as much more than remedial high school since they are the last bastion of an affordable college education.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:45 pm
“Will that mean more people from good schools get accepted? Sure, but based on performance, that is the only fair way.”
I love this. Step one: posit that achievement, completely removed from personal or school context, should be the only criterion. Step two: acknowledge that equal achievement is not available to all students. Step three: claim that that doesn’t matter, because judging by achievement alone is “fair”! Yes, letting in one student over another because of her AP classes and participation in the orchestra, even though the other student’s school lacked both, is the very definition of fairness.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Re: Money quote (YOUR money): “His simple answer: “A lot of these places will get destroyed.”
Assuming of course that a really strong hurricane hits a populated area. Which may not happen this year, or next, or the year after. And when it does happen, even the biggest hurricane affects only a limited area.
Re: News reports on Friday not that the US Taxpayer is already in hock for $63.8 TRILLION in federal
Those rightwing fright-numbers are cooked like a well done whopper– they basically count everything for decades into the future to make them look scary. But it you amortize them over the next 90 years (which is how those obligations will actually be paid out), that comes to aound 700 billion a year– a big number, but hardly horrific in the scale of such things.
May 31st, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Re JonF at 24: “Assuming of course that a really strong hurricane hits a populated area. Which may not happen this year, or next, or the year after. And when it does happen, even the biggest hurricane affects only a limited area.”
————
We’re not talking tornedos, we’re talking about hurricanes –which have high winds and heavy rains across a large front.
And we are not talking about houses being blown away — we’re talking about them being condemmed for black mold a few months after the interior is soaked from heavy rain through broken windows.
A few areas of Florida or the Gulf Coast are sparsely populated any more.
PLus there are multiple hurricanes during the summer season.
And 10 or so rotting eyesores in a subdivision pulls down property values for everyone.
May 31st, 2009 at 5:04 pm
How do you propose to measure merit aside from performance? We can debate about the most effective ways of measuring performance, I think there are concerns about how fair those measures are, but in the abstract, performance=merit. What you are talking about is punishing people for privilege much more than what I am talking about is rewarding them for it.
And if good schools are defined as those with higher average performance, it is tautological that they will produce a greater number of qualified individuals, I hardly think that is a controversial point.
Ultimately, this is the problem with affirmative action, it relies on perpetuating legal injustices to remedy past injustices. I’d rather tolerate continued social injustice than find new ways to provide legal injustice.
May 31st, 2009 at 5:56 pm
UT is my alma mater. Twenty years ago it was enormous. There is a dorm that has its own zip code. Freshman classes are huge. I’m with the community college plan. People can transfer when they get their grades up and get a handle on academic life.
May 31st, 2009 at 6:44 pm
“It’s true that top 10% was one way to work on creating opportunities for students from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds and thereby to increase diversity of the student body. But only up to a point. You end up with a freshman class of students who are obsessed with grades and know how to get A’s, which isn’t the same thing as caring about learning. ”
We have something like this in California, and there is a huge shock for many students from really poor high schools around my university. They received good grades in high school, and they expect that continue. But they can’t write, and they don’t know how to study or take notes. And they get angry, and understandably so, when things are so tough in college.
That said, some of them learn to write and think; this happens only because the top n% of each school is guaranteed admission.
May 31st, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Probably the first time I’ve disagreed with Matt on such policy.
There’s no problem with capping it at 3/4. I’m a native Texan and know quite a few kids who had extremely high SAT scores and other academic accomplishments, but graduated in the top top 12-15% of their schools and were therefore rejected from UT-Austin. Many wanted to stay in state, and since UT-Austin’s the only really good Texas public school, they were forced to take out big ass loans for in-state private colleges.
Now, these were all middle class kids who all ended up getting into good colleges. But it seems like you still want to attract the smart kids who may have gone to competitive high schools (or taken lots of AP classes in a school that did not add sufficient GPA weight to said classes) and thus suffered in class rankings.
I spoke about this with a UT-Austin prof, very liberal dude who backed the policy, but wanted a pretty strict cap on top-10% admissions. He honestly felt that it had lowered the quality of education at UT-Austin.
The biggest problem is that the policy only works if there are numerous desirable “UT’s” to attend, like the California university system. But that’s not the case in Texas. UT-Arlington and UT-San Antonio are coming into their own, as well as Texas State, but UT-Austin is still the biggest draw and for good reason (A&M has good-to-great engineering and sciences but tends to alienate lots of prospective students with their intense ‘wingerism).
May 31st, 2009 at 7:11 pm
#27 lies. UT may be big, but the dorm he speaks of does not have its own zipcode.
May 31st, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Having been a white Texan suburbanite high schooler, I can tell you that the intention of the program is great but that this scaling back is necessary. Scaling back automatic admissions to 75% is still a ridiculous rate.
Texas already has a “Robin Hood” law that transfers property taxes from rich districts to poor districts so the resources are there for the rural and urban schools. I realize there is more to equality than funding but spending per student is roughly equal.
I can also tell you from experience that the kids from the urban and rural districts are just as smart but nowhere near prepared for a top school. I knew several kids that never wrote a single paper in high school and were completely lost when they started their first semesters.
If I remember right, there is also a SAT score level, like 1250, that grants you automatic admission to state schools. That helps the suburbanite kids get in automatically as well.
If you are only providing enough top educational opportunities for automatic admissions, then you are not educating a large enough proportion of your kids. The program is just a band-aid for poor-performing schools and lack of funding for state universities. This will cause distortions that will sink any affirmative action program.
May 31st, 2009 at 7:14 pm
One of the problems with Texas is that over 50% of the legislature is made up of UT-Austin and A%M graduates. They are going to let the second tier universities in Texas (Texas Tech, Houston, North Texas, etc) improve.
Also, UT-Austin and Texas A&M along with Rice are three of the whitest universities in Texas along with Byalor, TCU, and SMU. The suburban white kids are fighting to get into UT-Austin and Texas A&M because most of the other state universities are seen as schools for minorities, non-traditional students, or rednecks.
Considering that the second most common major at UT-Austin is Business (it is the third most common at Texas A&M), I would guess that many of those students could take exactly the same classes and get exactly the same degree from other in-state universities.
May 31st, 2009 at 7:16 pm
I always heard that Jester had it’s own zip code. If you want to call me a liar—well you have, haven’t you?—go ahead.
May 31st, 2009 at 7:20 pm
link
Oh, well I guess I’m lying after all, because I haven’t kept up with the skuttlebutt. Never mind the spirit of the post—everything’s bigger in Texas.
May 31st, 2009 at 7:27 pm
“The marginal dollar of either the taxpayer or the charitable donor will do a lot more for society when spent on people who aren’t already the best students.”
Depends on what educational level. At the graduate level, no. At the elementary level, yes. In between, maybe.
May 31st, 2009 at 8:26 pm
“If I remember right, there is also a SAT score level, like 1250, that grants you automatic admission to state schools.”
There for-sure wasn’t when my class was applying to colleges.
May 31st, 2009 at 8:38 pm
The schools not only have different SAT scores for admission standards, but they can change them. When I got out of high school, my SAT score was high enough to get into U.T. When I got out of the military, I had to retake it because they had raised the score.
May 31st, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Connor,
I double checked and UT does not have a SAT automatic admission, but A&M does. It’s 1300 plus being in the top quarter of your high school.
June 1st, 2009 at 12:55 am
Then state schools should stop trying to compete on excellence and just shoot for a color scheme that Matt likes.
June 1st, 2009 at 9:07 am
[...] I see NYT was on this story a couple days earlier and that Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum wrote about it. Not surprisingly, they have somewhat different takes. Matt [...]
June 1st, 2009 at 11:00 am
[...] Matt Y: Our general understanding is that the most resources ought to flow to the “best” schools and the “best” schools ought to serve the “best” students who “deserve” to be able to go there. Under this framework, any departure from a strict scheme of “merit” looks suspicious. But another way to look at things would be to say that of course relatively able students from relatively privileged backgrounds deserve a higher education, but a larger amount of resources ought to flow to the students with more problems. After all, it’s the worse-prepared kids—typically from less privileged backgrounds—who have the most in the way of educational needs. The marginal dollar of either the taxpayer or the charitable donor will do a lot more for society when spent on people who aren’t already the best students. [...]
June 1st, 2009 at 11:14 am
People are badly missing the point here. The 10% rule has several highly undesirable consequences:
1) Eliminates out-of-state enrollment, which really does remove a key form of diversity;
2) Harms programs, like art and music, which rely on metrics not captured in grades;
3) Discriminates against students whose grades don’t accurately capture their potential. This is especially a problem if the grade distribution is artificially skewed to the high end, so that not taking AP classes/getting a single B/ etc. drops you out of the top 10%.
4) Discriminates against excellent schools where more than 10% of the students qualify for admission to a good university.
These are real problems.
June 1st, 2009 at 12:02 pm
My daughter graduated yesterday from an urban high performing Houston Public High School and will be attending the University of Texas at Austin in the fall. She did not graduate in the top ten percent. A student at her high school needed a 4.5 GPA (an A gets a 5 for an AP or IB class) or better to be in the top 10 percent. She did place in the top 25% and her GPA was better than 4.0 and her ACT was good but not perfect. It is noted above by several that the top 10 percent rule is harming the fine arts, but the reason my daughter was admitted to the UT was because she applied to the College of Fine Arts. It is the only college at UT where the students who are not top 10 percent are the majority of students. All other colleges are about 80 to 90 percent top 10 percent but fine arts is flipped and is only about 20 percent top ten. The College of Fine Arts reviews applications from fine arts students in addition to the admissions department and requires auditions for dance and music majors and portfolios for art majors. My daughter will be a theater major and was not required to audition but she did attend a High School with a good drama studies reputation, she had good recommendations, and she has won awards for acting and dancing. While the top ten percent rule might not have harmed the fine arts yet it would in the future with the number of top ten percent student admitted next year projected to top 95% of the freshman class (it was 86% of the freshman class this yeat). Also, some have commented above that Rice is subject to the top ten rule, but it only apples to Texas public universities so Rice is not affected. UT does not have a SAT automatic admit score, but all other Texas universities do. Texas A&M was 1300 math plus verbal last year and other Texas universities are around 1100.
June 1st, 2009 at 12:55 pm
tim @ 31,
If I remember correctly, the top 10% program came as part of response to the Hopwood case or fear that Hopwood would apply to undergrads as well as law school. The top 10% is great for urban and rural kids but it does miss a large part of the other smart kids. I agree that the real issue is the poor funding for schools. Even with Robin Hood, the schools in South Texas (where I grew up), were poorly funded and even though state spending is allegedly equalized, there are large disparities throughout the state.
Nat @22- “College is brutally expensive for the middle class.” Amen to that- sigh…
June 1st, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Crap, my plan was to just move my kids to a crappy Texas school their senior year. (J/K).
Seriously though, if the program had been instituted with the 75% limit, everyone would be raving about how fair and reasonable it was.
Now that it’s regressing to a 75% limit, people are complaining?
Seems pretty fair to me.
June 1st, 2009 at 4:08 pm
anon@45 You would need to move your kid before the second semester of his junior year, top ten status is determined then. And yes, I know several parents who have done it.
June 1st, 2009 at 10:03 pm
A couple of items.
1) Happily, someone finally pointed out that Rice is a private school. TCU is too, if you didn’t guess.
2) What does it say that Tech hasn’t been referenced this entire thread?
3) UT used to have automatic acceptance based on SAT, thank God, that’s how I got in. Bubble sheet, no essay, nada. Ah, the days of $100 per credit hour tuition.
4) This is, very simply, a numbers issue. I don’t know how many seniors graduate in Texas a year, but Texas’ enrollment is ~48,000. Given a Freshman class of 12,000, given increasing population trends, it would come as no surprise that UT would find itself in a position that it would be required by law to accept Top 10% qualifiers — even though there is no room in the Freshman class for them. UT and A&M have been pointing this out for years, actually.
5) The Top 10% law doesn’t take into account a kid who is an absolute stinking genius at, say, math, but can barely muster a C in, say, Spanish or P.E. Assuming schools still fund P.E.
6) While UT-Arlington is expanding, I believe it is UNT that is slated for much more; a South Dallas campus that would expand enrollment, including the Denton campus, to around 50,000. I think UT-Permian has been trying to beef up as well. Lord knows there ain’t many options out there.
7) Speaking of UNT, didn’t they have to change the call letters of their student radio station from KUNT? Seriously, I joke not.