 "Photo: Sara Young/ The Daily Texan")
When UT President William Powers testified before the House Higher Education Committee on Wednesday, he assured legislators that proposed changes to the top 10 percent admissions rule would not impact UT’s commitment to diversity on campus.
Critics of a proposed bill that would cap top 10 percent admissions at 50 percent of incoming freshmen at Texas public colleges and universities fear that a more holistic approach to admissions will eliminate the moderate gains UT has made in increasing racial diversity since the law’s implementation in 1997.
UT has used race as a factor in admissions decisions since the U.S. Supreme Court re-legalized its use in 2003.
Under holistic review, students are given one score based on their class rank and GPA and another based on personal attributes like leadership skills, extracurricular activities and ethnic and regional background. Admissions decisions are made using a metric that considers both of these scores.
Associate admissions director Kedra Ishop said that currently, students are not compared directly, and either all or none of the students with an equal overall score are admitted to UT. A more holistic approach to admissions may actually increase diversity on campus, Ishop said.
“The goal is that if we are able to have 50 to 40 percent of the class reviewed holistically then we can apply all elements and then we can increase the diversity,” Ishop said.
“We certainly hope [diversity] will continue to increase as it has been, but we’re not clairvoyant.”
Opponents of the bill, including state Sen. Royce West, say those statements can’t be taken at face value and propose placing a time limit on the bill to test its effect on diversity.
“[West] believes if this should pass that it should be sunseted after six years to make sure UT is doing what it said it could do as far as not losing any diversity,” said Kelvin Bass, an aide to West.
Powers maintains that UT’s diversity outreach programs, like the Longhorn Scholars Program, which provides financial aid and mentorship services to students from traditionally underrepresented high schools, will help compensate for any racial or geographic diversity lost in capping top 10 percent admissions.
About 350 students from the program enter UT’s 7,200-student freshman class each year. Longhorn Scholars Program Coordinator J.P. Regalado said roughly 60 percent of the program’s students are Hispanic and 25 percent are African-American.
However, Regalado said that most students in the Longhorn Scholars Program are top 10 percent admittees.
“A majority of our students are admitted under the top 10 percent law,” Regalado said. “I’d say easily over 90 percent.”
Regalado said he doesn’t anticipate that the program will lose many students if the law is changed.
“I don’t know if it’ll change our program much as far as the numbers or makeup of our students, because these students would be the top students whether it’s class rank or just overall attractiveness,” Regalado said.
Ishop said administration officials have been discussing expanding programs like Longhorn Scholars to encourage more diversity in the wake of automatic admissions reforms, but no definite plans have been made yet.
LBJ School of Public Affairs professor Lodis Rhodes said he questions the idea of diversity college administrators seek to achieve.
“The issue about ethnic groups — black folks, brown folks, so on — what we’ve done is distorted the idea of diversity,” Rhodes said. “We should be arguing in terms of diversity in an educational environment is the diversity of experience.”
Rhodes said controversy over the law was essentially a product of scarcity.
“Why is it that essentially when people challenge the top 10 percent rule, it’s always an Anglo challenging with the argument that some colored kid took their seat? Why couldn’t it have been another white student who took their seat?” Rhodes said. “The fact is that you don’t have enough seats. We’ve turned it into an issue of a scarce commodity and the scarcer the commodity the more valuable it is. We end up coming up with gimmicks and techniques to induce scarcity and then we allow only a limited few access to that commodity.”
What schools are doing is lowering the value of a college degree by letting in underqualified applicants in the name of diversity."so true, a student making 3.9+ gpa and isn't in top 10% because of the competitiveness of that school does not get in, while because someones race and how African American or Hispanic American need the help of 10% to get in ex 3.4 gpa is within 10% at their school, so this is reducing high tier college's quality based on accepting the best of the best. African American or Hispanic American should deserve what efforts they put in, being of a school of lower competition shouldn't hinder the fact that they cannot get 3.9 gpa if they at least tried.
What schools are doing is lowering the value of a college degree by letting in underqualified applicants in the name of diversity.