The Far Reach of the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan: Consideration of Professional School Degrees

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to document the indirect effects of the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan on professional school degrees awarded and to propose the far reach of the law as an alternative argument in support of race-conscious admissions policies challenged under the strict scrutiny standard. Designed around the two tests of strict scrutiny, this study first highlights the essential need for a diverse constituency of professionals to enable societal advancement as a compelling state interest established by the courts and then provides empirical evidence to support additional narrowly tailored race-conscious admissions policies. Complementary interrupted time series analysis and logistic regression find that current admissions policies fail to improve diversity in professional school degrees awarded.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• admissions policies
• affirmative action
• graduate school
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Hopwood v. Texas (1996) ruled that race-based admissions were not a compelling state interest, but the ruling was contradicted by subsequent court cases (Deo, 2014).

2. Given the historical and contemporary ways that racism is implicated in the systems and structures that undergird postsecondary education, the framing of policy as race-neutral is fallacious. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg highlighted in the Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2013) dissent, race-neutral alternatives (e.g., the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan, or TTTPP) are not “race unconscious.” Citing how the plan was adopted within the context of racially segregated neighborhoods in Texas high schools, Ginsburg argued that the TTTPP is essentially a race-conscious policy implemented under the guise of race neutrality, subsequently reproducing educational inequalities seen as a result from redlining and other discriminatory housing practices. Despite this understanding, the language of race neutrality is still used to describe policies that attempt to provide non-race-based alternatives, such as the TTTPP. For this reason, “race neutrality” is used in this research to describe the intended notion behind Texas’s percent plan policy.

3. The TTTPP subsequently experienced several revisions, mainly attributed to the University of Texas’s expressed need for increased flexibility regarding its admissions process (Maramba et al., 2015).

4. We have intentionally chosen not to capitalize white, as it does not reference a specific cultural group (Crenshaw, 1991).

5. For the purpose of this study, the term “historically marginalized” refers to students from racial and ethnic backgrounds (e.g., Black, Hispanic, Latinx, or Indigenous) that, due to the legacy of discrimination in higher education, have been relegated to the margins of and/or systematically excluded from full participation in graduate studies (Anderson, 2002; Espino, 2014; Evans, 2007; Jones Brayboy, 2004).

6. The available data reported in the financial aid data set were used to determine if a student was 1) ever reported as having received a Pell Grant, 2) reported in the financial aid data set but without a Pell Grant, or 3) not reported in the financial aid data set.

7. See, Figure A1 in Appendix A.