As colleges in Texas tabulate their final enrollment figures for the fall, it appears that dire predictions that a federal court’s 1996 ruling would smother minority enrollments throughout the state have not come to pass.
Instead, the case known as Hopwood v. Texas seems, at this stage, to have created one set of winning institutions and another of losers. Some have continued to recruit minority students successfully, while others have seen significant declines in the number of black and Hispanic students they enroll.
The Hopwood ruling has inflicted the greatest damage on the state’s most-selective institutions, especially professional schools. The number of new black and Hispanic students is down sharply at most medical and law schools in Texas.
Many universities in the state, however, seem to have avoided major declines in the number of minority undergraduates they enroll, even though they are now barred from taking race into account in decisions about admissions or financial aid.
The number of black and Hispanic freshmen enrolling as undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin, for example, actually rose slightly this fall, pleasantly surprising officials there. That increase was achieved in part, however, through a significant increase in the size of the freshman class.
But at the university’s law school, which was at the center of the Hopwood controversy, the number of black and Hispanic first-year students dropped to 4 and 26, respectively, from 31 and 48 last fall.
Similar declines were reported at other law schools, and enrollment of underrepresented minority students at the University of Texas’s four medical schools also fell by about 25 per cent. At Texas A&M University, another selective public institution, enrollment of black freshmen fell by 23 per cent, from 230 to 178, and the number of Hispanic freshmen dropped by 15 per cent, from 713 to 607.
Other colleges in Texas appear not just to have survived Hopwood but to have thrived from it.
The University of Houston, which had stepped up its recruitment of minority students before the Hopwood ruling, without considering race in admissions, saw its enrollment of black and Hispanic freshmen soar by 15 per cent and 31 per cent, respectively.
“I was and still am very much against the ruling,” said Ed Apodaca, the associate vice-president for enrollment management at Houston. “But it has not stopped me from achieving the goals I had before Hopwood.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued its controversial Hopwood ruling in March 1996, barring the University of Texas law school from considering race in admitting students. In February 1997, Texas Attorney General Dan Morales interpreted the ruling to bar public colleges in the state from using race in financial-aid decisions, too. Most private colleges also stopped considering race, since many legal experts concluded that the Hopwood ruling also applied to them.
Advocates for minority students predicted that curtailing the use of affirmative action in admissions and financial aid would lock black students out of Texas colleges. Robert M. Berdahl, then-president of the University of Texas at Austin, predicted the week of the Hopwood ruling that it would lead to the “virtual resegregation of higher education.”
Fully gauging the impact of Hopwood may take months or even years. But a review of fall enrollment data -- some preliminary -- from about 20 institutions offers early signs that the major realignment that Dr. Berdahl foresaw has largely been averted, at least among undergraduates.
Several selective colleges, including Baylor and Rice Universities, saw the number of minority freshmen they are enrolling this year decline. Baylor will have 143 black and 158 Hispanic students in its freshman class this fall, compared with 161 black and 184 Hispanic students a year ago. Rice’s 704-member freshman class this fall contains 28 black and 59 Hispanic students, down from 52 and 76 a year ago.
Other private colleges -- including Trinity and Southern Methodist Universities -- attracted about the same number of black students in 1997 as in 1996. Both suffered declines in the number of Hispanic students they enrolled this year.
The state’s most-selective public institution, the University of Texas at Austin, avoided a drop in minority enrollment. The number of black freshmen rose by one, to 163, while the number of Hispanic first-year students climbed from 772 to 807.
Advocates for minority students quickly put those small increases in context, noting that the size of the class as a whole grew by 20 per cent. As a result, black students will make up just 2.5 per cent of the total class, compared with 2.9 in 1996, while the proportion of students who are Hispanic fell from 14.0 to 12.1.
“It’s not a sign of progress when the percentage of minority students attending the University of Texas declined at a time when the percentage and actual number of minority students in the state is rising fast,” said Michael A. Olivas, a University of Houston law professor who closely follows minority issues in the state.
Steve Monti, the interim provost of the Austin campus, said the increase in the size of the class was unrelated to the Hopwood ruling. The university instituted a new admissions process this year that required applicants to write three essays. Because it was uncertain how the change would affect enrollment, the university admitted 400 students more than it usually does, and many more students accepted the university’s offers of admission than it had anticipated, Dr. Monti said.
He said Texas was pleased to have enrolled as many minority students this year as last year, regardless of the reasons.
“The way I look at it, we’re in the business of educating individual students, and we’ve seen an increase,” he said.
At many other Texas universities -- particularly those that admit most or all of the students who apply -- the number of minority students who enrolled grew. The number of Hispanic freshmen at the University of Texas at San Antonio, for example, rose from 760 to 866, and the number of black freshman grew from 71 to 95.
As of last week, Texas Tech University did not have figures for the number of students it enrolled this fall. But it had accepted at least 25 per cent fewer black and Hispanic students for admission after abandoning a policy that automatically admitted minority students who graduated in the top half of their high-school classes, according to Gene W. Medley, director of admissions and records.
R. Gerald Turner, president of Southern Methodist, said that his university had succeeded in keeping the number of undergraduate minority students roughly level in part by de-emphasizing standardized-test scores and grade-point averages.
Southern Methodist could not afford to take such a step in the more-competitive sphere of law-school admissions, he said, forcing it to depend more on test scores and other objective criteria.
As a result, minority enrollment declined at S.M.U.'s law school. Its first-year class will have 6 black students, down from 22 in 1996, and 13 Hispanic students, half as many as in 1996.
S.M.U.'s law school admitted 15 black and 41 Hispanic students, Dr. Turner said, but many of them accepted minority scholarships at schools in other states -- awards Texas colleges are barred from providing.
Predictions that the “sky would fall” did not come true in undergraduate admissions, Dr. Turner said. But, he added, “at the medical and law level, the sky did fall.”
Each of the University of Texas’s four medical schools will have fewer minority students in their classes this year than they did last year. But W. Budge Mabry, who oversees the application process for the university’s medical and dental schools, said all seven medical schools in the state had agreed to lower the academic cutoff each will use to decide which students to interview for admission next fall.
Lowering that standard will expand the pool of students -- including minority students -- who get a thorough admissions review, Mr. Mabry said, which may mean that next year’s minority-enrollment numbers will not be as bleak as this year’s.
This article was prepared by Douglas Lederman, Michael Crissey, and Bryan Mealer.
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