After reading her University of Texas at Austin rejection letter last spring, Emma Riggs immediately felt less valuable than the qualified students she knew at the university.
The freshman architecture major from Allen, Texas, said her plan was to join some of her friends at UT Austin, and she was confident her well-rounded resume would garner her a spot in the school.
“Everyone told me like, ‘Oh yeah. You’re gonna get in. You’re gonna get in. Can’t wait to see you at U.T. next year,’” Riggs said.
She said her extracurricular involvements and academic success proved her friends were telling the truth. Attending a competitive 5A high school all four years, Riggs said she had always maintained a spot in the top 10 to 11 percent of her class.
Riggs said her final class rank was 151 out of more than 1300 students, which placed her in the top 11 percent of her class and out of the Texas public higher education automatic admission classification.
The 1997 Texas Education Code 51.801 displayed on the Texas Constitution and Statutes website requires all public higher education institutions in Texas to admit every Texas student graduating in the top 10 percent of their high school class.
Due to the overwhelming numbers of top 10 percent graduates who apply to UT Austin, according to a Nov. 2, 2012, article in The Alcalde, the official UT Austin alumni publication, legislative provisions enacted in 2011 put a cap on UT Austin automatic admissions. The Alcalde reported 75 percent of any UT Austin incoming class is filled by high school graduates representing the top 8 percent of their respective classes. UT Austin reserves the remaining 25 percent of its incoming classes for out-of-state, international and remaining Texas students.
Mandy Taylor, a freshman pre-medical student from Prosper, Texas, said she did not bother applying to UT Austin because she assumed she would not get in. Like Riggs, Taylor said she went to a competitive high school and graduated in the top 17 to 18 percent of her class because she challenged herself to take more advanced classes than some students who graduated above her.
“I worked extremely hard in high school,” Taylor said. “I know exactly how to study. I am more prepared. I know for a fact that I was smarter than half the top 10 percent of my high school just because they kind of coasted by.”
Taylor said she thinks Texas Tech University receives good students because every aspect of applicants is considered rather than just their class ranking.
Texas Tech Executive Director for Undergraduate Admissions Ethan Logan said Tech has more room to admit quality students because the school is trying to grow, unlike UT Austin. Tech’s institutional strategic vision is to retain a 40,000-student enrollment by 2020.
Logan said the Tech admissions staff has the flexibility to make decisions about underprepared students who may not meet the quantitative criteria, such as class rank and SAT score, but are well-rounded, quality students. Tech probably benefits from UT Austin’s capacity limits, he said, but it is hard to say if the top 10 percent rule has affected any of the recent student population changes.
The Tech admissions office works in a race-neutral environment, Logan said, but there has been diversity growth and development at Texas Tech.
“Have we met the rate of growth and change that we need to? That’s arguable,” he said, “but I think we have been very good about where we have gone in terms of the diversity of our class.”
Tech’s class diversity has altered in various ways since 1996.
A year before the Texas automatic admissions rule became law, a federal appellate court ruled against universities using race as factor in admissions in Hopwood v. Texas, which the Supreme Court reversed in 2003.
Logan said the Supreme Court ruled that universities cannot set a race-based number quota to determine student admittance, so state legislators designed the Texas automatic admission law to legally provide equal access to higher education for underrepresented groups.
“The beauty of the top 10 percent rule is it allows people from all these geographic locations to have access,” he said, “and so, by definition, if you have equal access across the state, then you have a better opportunity for underrepresented groups to be represented.”
In 2008, researchers from Princeton University and the University of Washington released a joint study that found evidence Tech did not give preferential admissions to minority applicants before or after the Hopwood ruling. The same study found U.T. Austin and A&M University did give preferential admissions to minorities.
In fact, the study found that Tech’s admissions policy lowered minority applicants’ probability of acceptance after the Hopwood case. The study said Tech began placing more weight on SAT/ACT test scores and less weight on attending a private or feeder high school.
“Between 1998 and 2003, black, Hispanic, and Asian American applicants who did not qualify for automatic admission under the uniform admission law were significantly less likely to be accepted than comparable white applicants,” the study stated.
During this time period, the study found that black students who were not in the top 10 percent of their class were 9 to 12 percent more disadvantaged, and Asian-American applicants were 4 to 8 percent less likely to be accepted than comparable white students.
From 2000 to 2003, the study found that Hispanic applicants were 3 to 6 percent less likely to be accepted than comparable white students.
In 2000, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board adopted the Closing the Gaps by 2015 initiative to create more diversity in higher education.
Admissions Director Logan said the plan calls for higher education institutions to parallel the ethnic makeup of the community or geographic region they are in.
Read more about how Texas is Closing the Gaps.
Logan said Tech has been successful in advancing the top 10 percent rule’s racial diversity objective.
While most ethnic populations at Tech have had consistent enrollment distributions, Logan said the Hispanic population has been increasing because it is the fastest growing minority group.
“That’s reflective of our community in West Texas,” Logan said. “That’s reflective of the State of Texas as a whole.”
On Sept. 26, the Texas Education Agency published a news release online that stated 62 percent of students who took the 2013 SAT identified themselves as a minority, which mainly represented participation increases from Hispanic and Asian students.
The news release reported this year that for the first time in state history more Hispanic students than Caucasian students took the SAT in Texas public schools.
Two days earlier, on Sept. 24, Tech circulated a news release announcing an enrollment record of more than 33,000 students.
The news release also highlighted record enrollment numbers of first-time undergraduate students, transfer undergraduate students, African-American students, and Hispanic students at Tech.
The fall 2013 Tech fact book compiled and posted online by Tech’s institutional research department listed 6,303 Hispanic students enrolled.
This number showed nearly a 10 percent increase from the 5,734 Hispanic student enrollment recorded in last fall’s quick fact sheet publication, which is provided on the Tech institutional research website.
This fall’s increase of 569 Hispanic students almost triples the 203 students gained by the African-American population at Tech, which equals around 11 percent more than the 1,841 total recorded in the 2012 fact sheet.
However, the 20,582 Caucasian students recorded in this fall’s fact book still dominated the Tech enrollment numbers.
Unlike the Hispanic and African-American populations, though, Caucasian student enrollment at Tech has dropped almost 3.5 percent since fall 2011, according to numbers in last year’s fact sheet and the 2013 fact book.
Admissions Director Logan said the Hispanic population is not the only rapidly increasing population trend he has been noticing.
In the last three to four years, Logan said Tech’s Dallas/Fort Worth-area students like Emma Riggs, an Allen, Texas, native, have surpassed the students from West Texas as the predominant population.
According to last year’s fact sheet, four of the top six Texas counties where students originate from are in the Metroplex, including Tarrant County, Dallas County, Collin County and Denton County.
While these four counties saw slightly higher numbers of students at Tech this year, according to the 2013 fact book, there was a 195-student decrease in the number of students from Lubbock attending Tech.
Logan said he expects the trend to continue because the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex contains the largest percentage of the state’s high school graduates, and the sheer population volume will impact how many students come to Tech.
Freshman architecture major Emma Riggs said when she arrived at Tech, she still had a plan to make a 4.0 GPA and transfer to UT Austin, but now she is not so sure she wants to leave.
“It’s seeming less likely as I go on because I’m starting to fit in here,” Riggs said. “It’s only been two weeks, but it’s starting to seem less likely.”
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