Tricky Times for the Top 10 Percent Program
Both supporters and critics of Texas’ Top 10 Percent law have been surprised at its popularity, but some UT officials and legislators would like to see the program scaled back.
As a Texas state legislator, Jim McReynolds, D-Lufkin, knows a thing or two about influencing the voting positions of his colleagues. This past spring, when Texas House members sought to scale back the state’s Top 10 Percent program, McReynolds jumped to its defense. He provided other rural legislators with data showing how the program, which guarantees admission to the state’s public colleges and universities to the top 10 percent of Texas’ public high school students, had helped students from their legislative districts gain admission to the University of Texas at Austin.
“In my legislative district, which covers 19 independent school districts, out of 32 students admitted to UT-Austin in 2005, 29 of them were accepted through the Top 10 Percent program,” McReynolds says. “In the rural areas that my colleagues represent, many of them have similarly high rates.”
To the surprise of many political observers, McReynolds and others prevailed, as the House voted 75-64 against a bill that would have limited the number of automatically admitted students to half of a university’s incoming freshman class. A coalition of Black and Hispanic Democratic legislators, aligned with McReynolds and other rural White Democrats, convinced several conservative White Republicans to vote against the measure, which had already passed the state Senate.
Several higher education officials, including UT-Austin administrators, had lobbied for the legislation, arguing that the Top 10 Percent program should be capped.
Triumphant for now, McReynolds and others predict the issue will eventually come back to the Legislature, especially since more than 70 percent of incoming freshmen at UT-Austin in the fall of 2006 qualified for admission under the Top 10 Percent program. At Texas’ other flagship university, Texas A&M University, just less than 50 percent of its fall 2006 freshman class gained admission through the program. But TAMU officials say they are comfortable with the current 50 percent rate.
