Jason Fletcher is associate professor of health policy at Yale University and one of the report’s authors.
That is one of the key findings of a new study released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER.
The study, titled Tracing the Effects of Guaranteed Admission Through the College Process: Evidence from a Policy Discontinuity in the Texas 10% Plan, also found little evidence that the law leads to “mismatched” students from relatively weak high schools crowding out more “deserving” students from higher quality high schools.
“The policy may increase diversity — versus having no policy — and does not seem to be bringing students to campus who then struggle and fail out of school,” one of the study’s authors, Jason Fletcher, associate professor of health policy at Yale University, told Diverse.
Fletcher noted that the purpose of the study was not to evaluate the Ten Percent Plan as policy, but rather to compare the decisions, behavior and various outcomes, such as GPA and four-year graduation rates, for students who were barely eligible for the Top Ten Percent plan versus those who were barely ineligible. The study relied upon data from the two flagship universities, UT Austin and Texas A&M University.
“We find some weak evidence that the 10 percent rule increases minority enrollment at UT, otherwise we cannot detect differences in the characteristics between enrolled students who graduated just inside or just outside the top high school decile,” the study states. “At A&M there is no evidence that students with a prior admissions guarantee perform worse than similar students without guaranteed admission.
“At UT we find mixed evidence,” the study says. “Students from the top high school decile tend to choose easier majors and are slightly less likely to stay enrolled for more than three years, but we find no evidence of an effect on GPA.”
