University Times

Has a radically different approach to higher education admissions in Texas succeeded in broadening access to the state’s two flagship public institutions for economically disadvantaged students?

The answer is a qualified no, according to Marta Tienda, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton, who spoke here Jan. 14 on “Diversity and Its Discontents: Lessons From Higher Education.”

Marta Tienda

The lecture was sponsored by Pitt’s Center on Race and Social Problems.

Tienda was referring specifically to the state law, known informally as the Texas 10 percent law, that grew out of legal challenges to affirmative action. The state law went into effect in 1998, following a ruling by the Texas Supreme Court in the Hopwood v. Texas case that let stand a lower court ruling proclaiming a University of Texas law school admissions policy illegal on the grounds that it preferred minority applicants over better-qualified white applicants.

Taking a completely different tack, the 10 percent law now guarantees admission to any Texas public college or university for all Texas high school seniors who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class.

One of the goals of the law was to try to increase access to the University of Texas-Austin (UT) and the Texas Agriculture and Mining University (Texas A&M), the two higher education public institutions with the most selective admissions, while simultaneously increasing diversity in the student population, Tienda explained.

At the time of the Hopwood ruling, students from 28 high schools in Texas made up 25 percent of the freshman class at UT, and 20 percent at Texas A&M.

“Why use class rank? Because it is a strong predictor of college success,” Tienda maintained. “Texas was trying to level the playing field by saying all schools, small and big, rich and poor, concentrated minority, concentrated white, if they rank their students and if they have at least 10 seniors, their top 10 percent are guaranteed admission to any public institution,” she said.

“But, of course, this means you’re changing the definition of merit and the criteria for preference. The appeal is: It does rely on merit, and no one will argue that you shouldn’t admit your most meritorious students, whatever merit is.”

The law also equalizes the status of all high schools regardless of their racial or socioeconomic profile, Tienda said.

In addition, the policy eliminates SAT scores as a factor in admitting the top-ranked students, which she views as a good thing because comparatively lower SAT scores traditionally have worked against talented poor and minority students in the admissions process.

“We have institutionalized the SAT test as a measure of merit, and yet we know it doesn’t predict success beyond freshman grades, and it only predicts at the tail ends of the distribution pool, which is not where the majority of students who are admitted are,” Tienda pointed out.

The rationale behind the 10 percent law is that it is race-neutral, “and the way we are going to get our diverse college classes is from the highly segregated high schools’ applicant pool,” she said.

What the law does not do is affect admissions policies that are based on non-racial or non-ethnic diversity, Tienda said. “Everybody needs a quarterback and everybody needs a tuba player, so we make those [admissions] decisions for athletics and other specialty talents, but somehow when it comes to race or ethnicity, we can’t have it. It’s the one attribute that we simply cannot base admissions on,” she said.

While the rationale for the 10 percent law appears sound on the face of it, the results fall short of the goal of diversifying the student bodies at the two flagship public universities, Tienda maintained.

Citing a 2008 research study that used a classification scheme to sort public high schools by student socioeconomics status into the categories affluent, average and poor, Tienda concluded that graduates from affluent high schools were twice as likely to seek admission to one of the public flagships compared with those who graduated from high schools that served students of low socioeconomic status.

In addition, Tienda’s data show that admission guarantee had highly uneven impacts at the two public flagships. The increase in rank-eligible applicants to UT, while significant, largely was driven by students from affluent high schools.

“In other words, socioeconomic diversity was not significantly increased,” she said.

Texas A&M actually witnessed a drop in application rates from top 10 percent graduates, particularly those who attended poor-resource schools.

These results are troubling, despite the law’s best intentions, Tienda said. The reasons that the law fell short of its goals are numerous. She said one reason is that economically disadvantaged students believe they cannot afford to attend a flagship public university.

“Students need to know that scholarships are there,” and colleges should make more need-based scholarships available, she said.

“There were many high schools that did not send a single graduate to one of the flagship universities,” Tienda said. “The ‘idea’ of going to college should be institutionalized, not only for the local community college, but for the more selective schools.”

High schools are at fault, she said, when many disadvantaged students don’t bother to apply because they believe they can’t succeed in college and are not told otherwise by their guidance counselors.

“Even principals don’t make that connection sometimes. They’re focused instead on drop-out rates and graduation rates so they can show it’s not a failing school. There is something wrong with this picture. College orientation has to be stressed in high school, even middle school. Just because your parents don’t have money doesn’t mean you can’t go to the best schools, or that you can’t succeed at the best schools,” Tienda said.

In a survey of Texas high school seniors who were asked at what point in their lives did they first believe they would attend college — with answers ranging from “always” to “in elementary school” to “in high school” — 68 percent of whites and 71 percent of Asians said either in elementary school or always, compared to 27 percent of Hispanics, the largest minority group in the state.

Students who know earlier that they will go to college make informed decisions about taking college preparatory courses and thus increase their chance of success in college, Tienda noted.

The biggest lesson to be learned from the Texas system is that changes in admissions criteria, such as the guaranteed admission of ranked students, do little to alter the overall socioeconomic profile of the application pool, she said. The corollary is that changes in admission criteria designed to broaden access for low-income students will not alter the socioeconomic composition of college campuses unless the applicant pool also is changed.

“The challenge, then, is raising application rates among the low-income students,” Tienda said.

On the premise that there are many more low-income students who can succeed at selective public institutions than are enrolled currently, Tienda recommended more aggressive recruitment efforts aimed at talented students from resource-poor schools; guaranteeing financial aid to increase enrollment probabilities, and shifting aid packages away from loans to need-based grants.

“These measures are all the more important in light of demographic trends that show rapid growth in the number of students attending poor schools,” she concluded.

—Peter Hart