Texas Colleges' Diversity Plan May Be New
Model
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
washingtonpost.com
Monday, November 4, 2002; Page A01
AUSTIN -- Jazmin Padron arrived in Texas three years ago, a bright-eyed Mexican teenager with little English and no thought of attending college. A top high school student, she's now all but assured admission to the University of Texas at Austin. Davin Hunt always assumed he'd go to college, and no wonder -- his parents and 20 of his cousins attended UT-Austin, and virtually all the students at his rich, almost uniformly white high school near Dallas go on to higher education, many of them to top colleges.
But Hunt, whose grades don't quite make the top 10 percent of his class, may not be joining the family's Longhorn tradition. Beyond their Texas residency and sunny dispositions, Padron and Hunt have little in common. But both are busy adapting their calculations about the future to accommodate a five-year-old state law under which the top 10 percent of every high school's graduating seniors are automatically eligible for admission to public universities in Texas.
Now, as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether to rule on the constitutionality of affirmative action in college admissions, Texas's law is being scrutinized as a model that could replace the explicitly race-based admissions criteria that have been a feature of public education for decades.
Following the Texas law, which first applied to high school seniors graduating in 1998, Florida and California adopted percentage plans for admission to state-funded colleges, and other states are watching Texas's experience closely. It came after a federal appeals court in 1996 threw out the University of Texas Law School's affirmative action program, saying admission officers could no longer consider race when picking students.
African American and Hispanic student enrollments plummeted. State lawmakers swiftly enacted the 10 percent law, intending to ensure continued diversity at public universities without inviting further constitutional challenges. As long as neighborhoods and the state's 1,800 or so high schools remained largely segregated by race, significant numbers of African American and Hispanic students would be guaranteed places at public universities.
Conservatives who never liked explicitly race-based admissions criteria found little to object to in the meritocratic gloss of the new law. To university officials, who openly regret the death of affirmative action, the 10 percent law is a way to achieve its goals without adopting the means -- "You're doing it without doing it," said Mark Yudof, chancellor of the University of Texas's 180,000-student system.
"It's a benign effort to achieve a certain sort of social justice. . . . We don't want a permanent underclass in America." For Padron, the Mexican immigrant who is now a senior at a middle-class high school in Austin, the 10 percent rule has removed most of the anxiety associated with college applications. A top student and promising dancer, she found out a few weeks ago that she was guaranteed admission to any state-funded university she liked, including the flagship campus of UT-Austin. "I couldn't believe it," she said, grinning.
She plans to go, and would be the first in her family to attend college. For Hunt, a senior at the ultra-competitive Highland Park High School in suburban Dallas, the Texas law has clouded his prospects. Although he is a good student, active in student government and sports, his grades are not in the very top tier.
That may have harmed his chances at getting into his first choice, UT-Austin's business program, which is largely filled with top 10 percenters -- some of them students with lower SAT scores from less competitive schools. Although his overall strong record may yet win him a spot in some other program at UT-Austin, he's thinking about leaving the state for college.
He said he didn't begrudge minority students such as Padron their guaranteed admission to state-funded universities, even though he faces much tougher academic challenges and may score far higher on standardized tests such as the SAT. Many minority high-achievers are "doing it on their own, independently," he said. The 10 percent law is "still fair, though it's reverse discrimination. So it's a kind of oxymoron."
At Highland Park, considered among the best, richest and most competitive public high schools in the nation, the 10 percent law has intensified what students and faculty describe as an already unhealthy tendency toward grade-grubbing, cheating, standardized-test coaching and choosing classes known for dispensing easy A's. Choir has become an inordinately popular course selection. "Everything is just GPA, GPA, GPA," said Natalie Fogiel, a Highland Park senior just outside the top 10 percent of her class. "The focus is on grades rather than experience."
The law's effect on the student body makeup at UT-Austin has been subtle. Overall, the proportion of top 10 percent students in the freshman class has edged up to 53 percent in the current first-year class, from 46 percent in 1997, just before the law took effect. After the initial, sharp drop in minority enrollment following the appeals court's decision, the 10 percent law has helped the numbers of African American and Hispanic freshmen recover approximately to their previous levels. More than 14 percent of this year's entering class is Hispanic; about 3.5 percent is black. Still, those numbers fall well short of the overall minority population in Texas, which is about 30 percent Hispanic and 12 percent black.
The primary beneficiary of the new rule has been Asian Americans, who are enrolling at UT-Austin and other state-supported schools at levels disproportionate to their numbers in the state. Of this year's freshman class at UT-Austin, nearly 15 percent are Asian Americans, although they constitute scarcely 2.7 percent of the state's population. University officials acknowledge they have failed to attract anything approaching representative numbers of blacks and other groups that have traditionally not produced college-bound students. About 700 high schools across the state, many of them predominantly minority, are still not sending any graduating seniors to UT-Austin.
And many black graduates, including those at the top of their class and automatically eligible for admission, don't even apply to state-funded universities in Texas. At L.G. Pinkston High School in Dallas, split almost evenly between African Americans and Hispanics, nearly a third of the graduates go on to college, but very few of the blacks go to state-supported colleges and virtually none go to the best of them, UT-Austin.
The principal, J. Leonard Wright, has nudged the best students toward higher education by introducing advanced placement classes and free college test preparation courses. But he said he urges the cream of the crop to go to traditionally black colleges, where he believes they will feel more comfortable than at the predominantly white University of Texas. Undric Hamilton, a black senior at Pinkston near the top of his class, picked up on that theme. He plans to go to college, but not UT. Black students "feel more comfortable" at traditionally black schools, he said.
"I'd rather be a name than a number." "We haven't solved that," said Bruce Walker, admissions director for UT-Austin, which received about 22,000 applications last year for its freshman class of nearly 8,000. He said one group excluded in many instances by the law is blacks from middle-class and suburban high schools ranked just below the highest 10 percent of their class. Before the federal appellate court decision, the university's affirmative action policy allowed for those students to be admitted. Now, Walker said, "that's the group we're missing."
In some cases, top minority students never consider going to college. In other cases, tuition and fees -- even the $40 application fee -- are just too high. To sweep in promising minority students, the university has taken steps that seem a lot like affirmative action, albeit under a different name. The full scholarship Longhorn Scholars program targets 70 low-income high schools whose graduates have not attended UT-Austin in the past; about 85 percent of the Longhorn Scholars are black or Hispanic. All 300 Longhorn Scholars in this year's freshman class are top 10 percenters, but their average combined SAT scores are around 900, about 200 points below the average of other freshmen.
Yet with extensive help from the university -- special counseling and mentoring programs, classes with top professors, interdisciplinary courses -- Longhorn students are performing as well as and in many cases better than their classmates. "These kids are in very rough classes, but they're getting lots of guidance and support," said Lucia Gilbert, vice provost in charge of the program. Other university officials have pronounced themselves more or less satisfied with the new system, while continuing to rue the passing of affirmative action. "There's no perfect admissions system," said Yudof, the chancellor. "But 10 percent is pretty good."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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