Minority Talent Loss and the Texas Top 10 Percent Law

In a climate of continued opposition to the use of race preferences in college admissions, administrators have sought alternatives to diversify their campuses while complying with the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment. Following judicial and legislative bans on affirmative action in college admissions, public universities in California, Florida, Washington and Texas have used various strategies to increase minority representation. Of the three states that implemented percent plans, that of Texas is most generous because it guarantees automatic admission to any public Texas university to students who graduate in the top 10% of their high school class; because high schools are given autonomy in computing class rank; and because test scores and other achievement criteria are not considered for rank-qualified applicants. Lauded as a race-neutral alternative to affirmative action, the Texas law initially gained wide support because admission would be based on merit rather than ascriptions, and because its provisions apply uniformly to all Texas high schools. At both the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and Texas A&M University (TAMU), the two public flagships, minority enrollment fell in the wake of the 1996 Hopwood decision, but began to rebound after the uniform admission law was fully in force. Yet whether and in what ways the new law contributed to this outcome is unclear because an admission guarantee can not, ipso facto, ensure enrollment of rank-eligible students. This is particularly so for black and Hispanic students, who are more likely than whites to attend high schools with low college-going traditions (Tienda and Niu, 2006a). Failure of top 10% graduates to pursue post-secondary schooling constitutes loss of valuable talent in the context of an admission regime that guarantees admission to rank-eligible students. Prior studies emphasize different aspects of talent loss, such as the percent of graduates who do not enroll in college within a designated time period (Plank and Jordan, 2001) or discrepancies between educational aspirations, expectations, and enrollment behavior (Hanson, 1994). Prior studies of talent loss concur that inadequate information about college opportunities (Hanson, 1994; Plank and Jordan, 2001; Hamrick and Hossler, 1996), poor guidance counseling (Bellessa-Frost, 2006; Long, 2004), and/or misinformation about the cost of college and availability of financial aid (Long, 2007; Avery and Kane, 2004; Vargas, 2004; Ikenberry and Hartle, 1998) are contributing factors. Family socioeconomic status, but parental education in particular, is a powerful correlate of postsecondary enrollment. That parents who most need information about college opportunities are least likely to receive it compounds the extent of talent loss at the postsecondary level (Vargas, 2004). According to Tornatzky, and associates (2002), Hispanic parents who are not proficient in English are especially disadvantaged in their acquisition of college information because they have limited access to teaching and guidance staff and often need help deciphering written information from post-secondary institutions. Under the top 10% admission regime, two critical selection processes influence the likelihood that black and Hispanic high school students will attend college. The first depends on achieving a grade point average that places them in the top decile of their senior class. High levels of school segregation in Texas ensure that some Hispanic and African-American students qualify for the admission guarantee, but they are less likely than white or Asian students to graduate in the top decile of their class even if they attend minority dominated schools (Tienda and Niu, 2006b). A second selection mechanism results because minority and nonminority students attend schools with unequal college-going traditions, which implies different levels of knowledge about the top 10% law. Because many more students qualify for automatic admission than actually apply and enroll, top 10% graduates who know their class rank are better positioned to take advantage of the admission guarantee, assuming that they also know about the law’s provisions. Presumably, high-achieving students who know about the top 10% law are more inclined to apply and enroll in a competitive, public four-year institution than their rank counterparts with more limited knowledge about the admission guarantee. We evaluate this proposition by examining the college destinations of rank-eligible Texas graduates. By focusing on rank-eligible students who stated their intentions to attend college following graduation, we show that parents’ lack of fluency in English is a significant college barrier for high-achieving students who graduate from predominantly minority high schools, and that rank-eligible minority students with college aspirations are less likely than whites both to know about the law and to enroll in a post secondary institutions. This finding adds to the talent loss perspective by highlighting the joint influence of school segregation and parental English fluency in compounding information barriers that limit college access. The next section describes the data, defines core variables and outlines the analytic strategy. After evaluating the consistency of self-reported and transcript-verified class rank, we evaluate the magnitude of minority talent loss by examining college enrollment among rank eligible students who know their class rank and who know a lot about the law. The concluding section discusses the implications of the results for the success of the top 10% admissions policy.