Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions, the question on everyone’s mind is what will administrators do to achieve their desired levels of diversity. Based on the wide variation among colleges in the admission of minority applicants, it would be easy to conclude that at least some colleges are cheating — that is, they are continuing to use race as a factor but are using it in subtle ways so they will not get caught.
But there are other strategies colleges can use to get their ideal mix of students while also passing constitutional muster. All eyes, right now, are on Texas, which, at its flagship campus anyway, seems to have achieved racial diversity while also becoming more selective. New York is starting a similar policy this year, and Tennessee has already instituted its own program.
But can Texas’s decade-plus experiment in admissions be copied elsewhere? And should it be?
In 1997, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Hopwood decision, Texas implemented a law whereby the top 10% of students in every high school graduating class in the state are automatically granted admission to the state university. For the flagship, the University of Texas at Austin, it is restricted to the top 6%. Using this method, the university could be assured that students from the state’s poorest areas and/or areas that were heavily black or Hispanic would be well represented in every freshman class.
In some ways, the policy has been a smashing success. In oral arguments for a 2003 Supreme Court case about affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School, Justice Antonin Scalia asked lawyers for the school why, if racial diversity was so important, they just don’t lower their standards for everyone. “You don’t have to be the great college you are. You can be a lesser college if that value is important enough to you.” Scalia challenged the schools to choose between two standards: student excellence on the one hand and diversity on the other. Many schools have had difficulty squaring that circle. But Texas seems to have succeeded in having it both ways.
UT Austin’s student body is a third white, a quarter Hispanic, 22% Asian, and 4.5% black. These numbers do not perfectly reflect the racial makeup of the state, but they come closer than many schools that have used explicitly racial or ethnic criteria. Nor did those numbers budge after the Harvard decision in 2023. Meanwhile, the school has become ever more competitive: Next year, UT Austin plans to admit just the top 5% of the state’s high school graduating classes. Last fall, the school received 90,000 applications, which included a 48% rise in students applying from out of state. If you are one of those students, your chances of admission are small. But, of course, Texas has no obligation to serve out-of-state students.
For in-state students, however, who don’t make the cutoff, the frustration is growing. Analysis from the website Inside Higher Ed based on 2022 data found that “if the proportions are roughly the same this fall, that would leave just 1,200 spots for Texans who are ineligible for automatic admission.” Given that Texas graduates about 400,000 high school students per year, the prospects are bleak for many high-performing students who do not make it into the top 5% of their graduating classes. There are high school graduates from Texas who win admission into Ivy League schools but are rejected from UT Austin.
And this is where things are starting to get dicey. As one college counselor told the website, “I’ve had to tell a lot of angry parents that they’re just going to have to get real with going to A&M, UT Dallas, or University of Houston. … I would say I’m having those conversations a lot more in the last couple of years than ever before.” And not surprisingly, some of those conversations have a racial overtone. “There’s a lot of ‘Oh, these black and brown students are taking a spot away from our own (usually white or Asian) children,’” he said.
The truth, though, is that despite the fact that such a plan withstands constitutional challenges, it is still producing many of the same problems as other race-based affirmative action policies. There is still a significant gap in graduation rates by race at UT Austin. Almost 90% of Asian and white men graduated within six years, compared to a little more than three-quarters of black and Hispanic men. The school has made large strides in improving graduation rates across the board, but it is no surprise to find these gaps persist, given the variation in the quality of high schools across the state.
The variation in preparedness for college among students of different races is apparent from the state-provided data. Among eighth graders in Texas, only 45% of black students and 48% of Hispanic students met grade-level expectations in reading compared with 70% of white students. But presumably, the students who are getting into UT Austin would have had to perform even better than that. More than three times as many white eighth graders in Texas had “mastered” grade-level expectations in math as black eighth graders. No wonder parents feel that spots are being taken away from their high-performing children.
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But the problem is not just the resentment of white parents. It’s also that students on campus will get the impression that the black and brown students they encounter are probably not going to perform as well. And for the supposed beneficiaries of this policy, there is still the “mismatch problem.” Many would have had a better chance of graduating at a less selective school. And many have also moved out of more rigorous majors into less rigorous ones so that they can graduate. For less advantaged students, this could mean the difference between a well-paying job in engineering and a less useful degree in sociology.
So, while states may decide to pursue policies such as those in Texas to get the racial makeup they want, they will have to face the fact that this may not do much for the students they claim to be helping.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum. James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
