Eligibility for automatic admission under Texas’ “top 10 percent” plan increases the likelihood that a student will enroll at one of the state’s flagship universities by about 60 percent, shifting eligible students away from selective private colleges, according to new research findings published in Education Next. Yet the effects of the “race-neutral” admissions program are most visible in high schools that already send many graduates to college.
Under the plan, which lies at the heart of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the major affirmative-action ruling the Supreme Court issued last year, students in the top 10 percent of their high-school class are automatically admitted to any of the state’s public universities. To see how the controversial plan has affected students over time, three researchers analyzed data on 17,057 graduates of a large urban school district in Texas from 2002 to 2008.
They found a gap. “The effects on flagship enrollment are concentrated in the district’s most-advantaged schools,” the authors write. “Our findings suggest that offering eligibility for automatic admission may not be effective at accomplishing even the narrow goal of increasing access to the top public universities for students in the most-disadvantaged settings.”
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