Refusing To Address The Real Problem

Refusing To Address The Real Problem

Texas for a number of years has used a 10% admissions policy for the University of Texas, by which the top 10% of each graduating high school class was guaranteed admission. They did this originally because of uncertainty as to whether the affirmative action program that they had previously used was constitutional, because it discriminated based on race. (The Supreme Court has since ruled that racial discrimination is just fine, as long as the right races are being discriminated against.)

June 1, 2009 Inside Higher Education reports that the Texas legislature has agreed to reduce use of the 10% rule:

The "10 percent" plan in Texas has been one of the most successful experiments ever tried to get more minority students into top public universities with race-neutral criteria. It spawned similar (if less ambitious) programs in California and Florida and prompted numerous debates about equity in higher education admissions. At the behest of the University of Texas at Austin and suburban politicians, and following several years of debate, the Texas Legislature on Saturday agreed to a plan that will limit the use of the system so that Austin is required to fill only 75 percent of its freshman slots for Texans under the program.

...

Even though the university attracts outstanding students through 10 percent admissions, Powers said, there are gaps. There are not enough students enrolling that way who want to major in key areas such as geosciences, computer engineering and education. Earlier this year, Powers also suggested (in an argument that received plenty of attention from non-academics in Texas) that 10 percent was making it difficult to recruit athletes in key sports, since many of the best athletes are not in the top 10 percent of their high school classes.
To those who question why there is any need to tinker with a system that has resulted in considerable diversity (45 percent this year are members of minority groups), Powers said that "there is a capacity problem." Texas has nearly 50,000 students in all. Without a change in the admissions law, "we'd have to become a 55,000 student university, or 60,000 or 65,000 and there are no resources to do that." (The original law applied statewide, but UT-Austin, the focus of the changes in the law, is the only university where admissions under 10 percent have become a major issue.)
While Powers stressed the educational and capacity issues, much of the controversy about changing 10 percent arose from the strong push for change from suburban legislators whose (generally white) constituents were frustrated by the law. Since the law was enacted, there have been steadily growing complaints from suburbs with well financed and academically rigorous high schools that their students below the top 10 percent but in the top 20 percent (or some other figure) were more qualified than some of those being admitted from other high schools, without the same academic resources. Parents and counselors talked about talented students in the top 11 percent who might have been accepted previously, but were now losing out.

There are a bunch of problems with the 10% program. Pretty clearly, there were high schools when students in the 80-89% group were far more qualified than students in the 90-99% group at other high schools. While no particular student in the former group was discriminated against because of his race, the net effect was a tremendously unfair situation, with highly qualified applicants being turned away in favor of less qualified applicants. I'm not surprised that some of the more demanding academic majors weren't getting filled.

Now, a logical person who wasn't driven by racial guilt would say, "Instead of affirmative action or proxies for it like the 10% program, why not improve the quality of the largely black and Hispanic school districts that otherwise can't send their high school graduates to the University of Texas?" There has been a lot of agitation in Texas to have their courts impose something like California's Serrano decision, and require equal levels of school district funding throughout the state. There are two serious problems with this:

1. It didn't work in California. There are still some disparities in school district funding in California, but nothing like there was before--and yet the disparity in results is still enormous.

2. The core problem in performance of graduating high school seniors isn't about funding, but about the parental cultural values concerning education. And that's something that no one on the left wants to admit. In many urban black school districts, kids who pursue an education and take it seriously are "acting white," and are subject to substantial social pressure to conform to a culture of ignorance, intoxication, and early pregnancy. This, by the way, as much as the 10% program bothers me, it doesn't bother me as much as straightforward racial discrimination in admissions. The 10% program is attempting to reward those kids attending minority schools who are refusing to go along with this madness.