Legislation that will limit automatic admissions to the University of Texas’ flagship campus here received final approval over the weekend in the chaotic closing days of the legislative session when the Texas Senate voted, 27 to 4, to go along with a less-restrictive version approved by the State House of Representatives.
Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, is expected to sign the measure, which will restrict the number of students automatically admitted under the state’s top-10-percent rule to 75 percent of the freshman class. The limits will apply only at the university’s main campus and will begin with the class that enters in 2011. A Senate version of the legislation would have capped automatic admissions at 60 percent of the freshman classes at all of the state’s public universities.
William C. Powers Jr., president of the flagship campus, called the legislation’s passage “a very positive development for the university,” even though the university had been pushing for a cap of 50 percent.
The top-10-percent plan was enacted in 1997 as a way to increase diversity at the state’s public universities after a federal court ruled against using racial preferences in college admissions in Texas. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision, allowing universities to use race as one of many factors in admissions decisions.
The top-10-percent law, which entitled all Texas high-school students graduating in the top 10 percent of their classes to enroll at any state university, remained on the books.
In 1998, those students filled 42 percent of the freshman seats at the flagship campus. By the fall of 2008, the proportion had jumped to 81 percent, and this fall it is expected to reach 86 percent.
“At the rate we were galloping along, the university risked being completely overwhelmed by automatically admitted students,” Rep. Dan Branch, a Republican from Dallas who sponsored the House version of the legislation, said in an interview on Sunday. “This bill will restore some balance to the admissions process and allow the university to admit multitalented students who aren’t fortunate enough to graduate in the top 10 percent.”
An Alternative to Growth
Mr. Powers said he would have preferred the Senate version, with its 60-percent cap at all of the state’s public universities. “The critical thing was to get a cap in place,” he said during an interview on Sunday. “This will give us more discretion in admissions and will not require us to grow the university beyond its current size.”
With 39,000 undergraduates and 11,000 graduate students, the flagship is one of the nation’s largest public-university campuses.
Already, with this year’s entering class, nearly all of the slots the university still had discretion over had to be reserved for students in a handful of programs, including music, education, and architecture, that were not being filled with automatically admitted students, Mr. Powers said.
If the cap had not been approved, automatically admitted students would have made up 100 percent of the campus’s freshmen within the next few years, he added. If that had happened, the only way to continue programs like music and education would have been to increase the size of the campus. Without an infusion of money for new professors, classrooms, and laboratories, that expansion would have stretched the university’s resources and increased its student-faculty ratio, which has been creeping up in recent years, he said.
The sponsor of the Senate bill, Sen. Florence Shapiro, a Republican from Plano, urged her colleagues to concur with the House version just to get some form of the legislation passed. Mr. Branch said that similar bills attempting to restrict the automatic-admissions program died in 2003, 2005, and 2007 when lawmakers were unable to reach compromises.
Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, a Democrat from El Paso, cast one of the few no votes. Of the 137 students from his heavily Hispanic border city who enrolled at the Austin campus in 2008, 128 were accepted under the 10-percent plan, a rule that he has described as ensuring “that all Texas students have an equal opportunity of attending the Texas college of their choice.”
The legislation approved on Saturday evening also limits the combined proportion of out-of-state and foreign students in the incoming class to 10 percent. Together, such students now make up 7.5 percent of the flagship’s freshmen, said a university spokesman, Donald A. Hale.
Mr. Branch, the House sponsor, said he understood that some people, especially in the Senate, were disappointed that a lower cap wasn’t approved. “They didn’t go through all of the near-death experiences we did as amendments were fought over” and the clock was ticking, he said.
A five-day stalling tactic by House lawmakers opposed to a voter-identification bill threatened to sink the 10-percent bill, along with hundreds of others. But instead, the talkathon gave lawmakers who were desperate to keep the 10-percent legislation alive time to find middle ground.
“We were able to pull off a compromise that included African Americans, Hispanics, and representatives of both urban and rural schools,” said Mr. Branch. “If we hadn’t made some changes, we would have once again walked away with nothing.”
