A Resolution To Eliminate Texas Top 10% Admittance Rule

I will begin my one and only round in this debate by welcoming my opponent to the site, and by thanking him for allowing me to debate this. I must admit, I hadn't heard of the "Top 10% rule" in Texas, but I have done a bit of research and I do believe it should be eliminated, for reasons I will provide in this debate. My opponent has provided four arguments to support his position in this debate, and I will rebut each in turn. I will then provide a few of my own arguments to show why the Top 10% plan should be eliminated from Texas high schools. CON: "1. students admitted under the rule get better grades then other students and graduate at higher rates." REBUTTAL: Is it any surprise that those students who get better grades in high school generally get better grades at university? Frankly, I would be surprised by anything else. This statistic, while undeniable and indeed obvious, says nothing of the unfair nature of the Top 10% rule, which I will expand upon later. The same, I'm certain, could be said of schools in any state or country, but no other states have the exclusionary and unfair 10% rule in practice. CON: "Racial diversity has improved in some colleges" REBUTTAL: What my opponent has failed to mention is that in 2004, the Supreme Court overturned the affirmative action ruling which prompted the Top 10% rule in the first place. [1] According to state Senator Jeff Wentworth, the 10% rule came to be because in the 90's, a ruling was made that race could under no circumstances be used as a deciding factor for admissions. The 10% rule was proposed as a way of allowing a guaranteed number of non-white students admission to the college of their choice, as there are many high schools in Texas with predominantly non-white students and the 10% rule applies to all high schools. With the 2004 repeal of the affirmative action ruling, to quote Sen. Wentworth: "You may use race on a voluntary, limited basis [for admissions], so that gives us the option of using it or not. So we don't need the top 10 percent rule anymore." So while my opponent is correct in stating that the 10% rule has allowed for greater racial diversity in the past, the same racial diversity has been possible since 2004 without the 10% rule. This fact, coupled with the unfair nature of the 10% rule (as I will soon show), is enough to warrant its repeal. CON: "3. Economic and geographic diversity have improved as well." REBUTTAL: I concede this point to my opponent, but I will show later that this fact is the inevitable result of an unfair system which takes a student's hometown into account over their performance. CON: "The rule is also positive because it gives students at school something to strive for and therefore encourages them to try better." REBUTTAL: If a child wishes to get into the university of their choice, they will strive for the best grades they can possibly get regardless whether the 10% rule is in place. An unfair rule such as this should not be, and thankfully is not (as evidenced by the performance of students in states other than Texas), necessary to ensure high school students try their hardest and acheive good grades. Indeed, even with the 10% rule, there are 26 states whose high schools out-perform those in Texas. [2] --------------------------- PRO ARGUMENT 1: The 10% rule, as I've harped on about for this entire round, is unfair in many respects. a) It doesn't take into account extra-curricular activities or effort on the part of the student. As Sen. Wentworth has said: "The current situation in Texas is that you can have a young man who is an Eagle Scout, who's president of his student council and captain of his football team. But because he's in the top 12 percent, he's not automatically admitted. But somebody else who's in the top 10 percent, who didn't even take the recommended curriculum for college work, who took the minimum curriculum, automatically goes to the University of Texas at Austin -- and that's not fair." b) It is entirely unfair to automatically allow the top 10% from an underperforming school into the college of their choice, but not students from a better school with higher average grades. A simple but typical example is provided in [1], as follows: "[A girl] had a 3.9 GPA, and she still didn't make the top 10 at her school. But 80 miles away in San Antonio, [another girl's] high school, Fox Tech, there were fewer challenging courses, less competition, and many kids from poor families. Torres had a 3.4-3.5 GPA, which put her in the top 10 percent of her high school. She didn't take any advanced placement classes." As the article correctly states, "If [the second girl] had gone to Westlake, she'd barely have made the top 50 percent. And if [the first girl] had gone to Fox Tech, she might have been the valedictorian. As for SAT scores, Aicklen also scored hundreds of points higher than Torres." In other words, the better a school a student is lucky enough to attend, the worse their chances of getting into the college of their choice in Texas. This is counter-productive to say the least. My opponent has stated that the 10% rule is likely to encourage students to try harder, but with statistics like those I've just presented, the only thing it is likely to encourage students to do is change schools to those less challenging. PRO ARGUMENT 2: The 10% rule, with its forced admissions, has overrun certain universities almost beyond capacity, which affects all students who attend those universities adversely. When asked "if every student entitled to come to the University of Texas actually came, would the university be able to handle it?", UT president Larry Faulkner said "no, we couldn't come close to handling it. And in fact, that's where we are now." [1] ------------ I will leave it there for this debate, because I have successfully rebutted my opponent's arguments, and have successfully shown the unfair nature and impracticability of the rule. Based in part on the arguments I've provided in this debate, the rule should be, and thankfully has been, repealed. Thanks very much to my opponent, and once again, welcome to the site. REFERENCES [1] - http://www.cbsnews.com... [2] - http://www.usnews.com...