Geography, Race, and College Admissions
While other states had struggled, sometimes all the way to the Supreme Court, with racial preferences in public college admissions, I thought that the Texas plan was a good one. In brief, it enforced geographic diversity in admissions and worked to create racial and other forms of diversity in a race-neutral manner because many characteristics related to socio-economic disadvantage vary geographically. The plan allows any student who finishes in the top 10 percent of his/her high school class to attend one of the public colleges in the state. This most affects the flagship school, University of Texas, which would otherwise have the freedom to be very selective in its admissions. Read about the details of the plan and the state legislature's recent decisions about scaling it back, in this post at Inside Higher Education.
So many commentable items, so little time
The good leaders at UT are right that there are more kinds of diversity than geographic, and that in order to remain a flagship university, they need geographic diversity outside of Texas. Reserving a quarter of the class for quirky non-traditional students (ha ha, I really mean incredibly stupid but talented ath-a-letes) is critically important to the only entity that matters to UT or any other "Top 50" school: the Endowment.
C'mon. The real reason UT wants to change this policy is that they're seeing that, while the success rates of the students are similar (no surprise there...there was probably little innate difference in talent in the first place and the pressure on professors to give B's and A's in order to get tenure is immense) the donation rates are too low. When the markets and speculative investments were going up like crazy, the endowment could live with this situation; but in the changed world the endowment needs donors. The non-traditional students, especially first generation students, have no established donation practices and many go back to their geographically less-rich homes and make less money. The endowment is hungry and cannot live with this. Thus, the change.
The Endowment Is Hungry
Great phrase -- perhaps a la Dawkins, "The Selfish Endowment."
The 10% solution
There's the problem of the athletes, who aren't, typically, in the upper 10% of their high school class academically.
The biggie reason, I think, is this:
"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."
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/01/texas