At least 1 in 4 Blacks and Hispanics at Texas public universities who received automatic admissions in recent years were at institutions where the undergraduates’ level of college preparedness was significantly less than that of their non-minority peers.
This is one of the findings of a recent study examining academic mismatch resulting from the Top 10 Percent Plan in Texas, which lawmakers implemented in the late 1990s. Affirmative action was dropped from admissions decisions in response to reverse discrimination lawsuits from Whites, so lawmakers at the time were trying to find a proxy for race.
Authors of the study stopped short of criticizing the automatic admissions policy. Nor did they suggest that minorities who were overmatched were doomed to fail. Instead, they attributed the mismatch to consumers lacking adequate, reliable information about the admissions process, the academic competitiveness of each campus and which ones were best-suited for them.
“Racial and ethnic differences in college mismatch can derive from different levels of college preparation and high school quality or from different sources of information about college, different expectations from families and teachers, or different expectations about future success,” the authors wrote. “In particular, low-income and minority students whose parents did not attend college might lack information about their prospects for acceptance, compared to more affluent Whites with college-educated parents.”
The study is titled “Can Admissions Percent Plans Lead to Better Collegiate Fit for Minority Students?” It is published in this month’s issue of The American Economic Review. The issue is composed of more than 100 papers that were among those presented at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in January. The selection of 100-plus papers spanned topics as wide-ranging as gender differences in educational attainment, the effectiveness of blended learning, classroom experiments and other educational methods, U.S. economic outlooks, and this country’s economic impact on health outcomes.
The Texas percent plan study was undertaken by Dr. Kalena Cortes, an associate professor at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, and Dr. Jane Arnold Lincove, a research assistant professor of economics at Tulane University.
Texas was an early adopter of an admissions “percent plan” but is the only state that grants automatic admissions solely based on high school class rank, and furthermore, lets consumers choose which institution to attend. In other states with percent plans, universitywide system officials assign freshmen to specific campuses.
