AUSTIN, Texas – A powerful advocate of the state’s top 10 percent university admissions law signaled on Thursday that he may be willing to consider lifting the requirement for a few years to give schools the chance to prove they can build a diverse student body without it.
State Sen. Royce West said a two- to three-year moratorium on the law could give its top critic, the University of Texas at Austin, the flexibility it says it needs in its admissions process.
Preliminary data shows 71 percent of this year’s UT-Austin freshmen who are from Texas were admitted under the law, university president William Powers told the Senate subcommittee on higher education. That ties the hands of admissions officials who’d like to consider students who aren’t at the top of their class but have special talents or unique personalities, he said.
“I know we have good people over there, good intentions,” West said of UT-Austin. “I don’t want to go as far as doing away with top 10 percent, but I want to address your issues with capacity and flexibility.”
Under West’s proposal, the moratorium would be extended if university officials can show they’ve made a good faith effort to improve the racial, socio-economic and geographic diversity of their student bodies. If they can’t, the top 10 percent law would go back into effect. Universities would be evaluated individually, he said.
The idea is a big departure from West’s usually unwavering support of the law that guarantees all students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class admission to the public university of their choice. He and other supporters have championed it as a means of increasing minority enrollment at state universities.
In 2003, West and another senator filibustered a bill that would have capped top 10 admissions. The Democrat from Dallas fought off a similar bill last year and proposed a compromise 7 percent admissions plan, but that idea was coolly received by university officials.
At the end of last year’s session, West said he was willing to negotiate changes in the future but pledged to “protect the integrity” of the rule. He said Thursday that a moratorium would still protect that integrity because it could be revoked.
“If they didn’t demonstrate good faith, the law would basically go back into effect,” he said.
The top 10 percent law was adopted after a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision made affirmative action illegal in Texas college admissions. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision, allowing universities to use race as one of many decision-making factors.
The current law primarily affects UT-Austin and, to a lesser degree, Texas A&M University in College Station. In recent years, just under half of Texas A&M freshmen were admitted under the law.
Powers said West’s moratorium idea was “intriguing” but he hesitated to back it. Instead, he suggested a complicated procedure in which universities would calculate each year how many students they would have to automatically accept to fill about half the class. Officials would then estimate what percent of the top graduates they could take to reach that number and would let high school juniors know how highly ranked they’ll have to be to make the cut.
“The suggestion sometimes is made ‘Why shouldn’t the Legislature just make it a top 6 percent rule or top 7 percent rule,”’ Powers said. “That would help us, of course, but then we’ll grow out of that and we’ll be coming back to the Legislature.”