News & Notes: Study finds TX top-10 rule hurts Hispanics

In 1997, Texas passed a law requiring that all Texas high school students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their graduating class are offered admission to all state-funded universities to which they apply.

Many in the state have praised the law for supposedly improving diversity on state university campuses. However, according to an April 9 article in United Press International, Tienda and Harris found that Hispanic applicants have lost out to white applicants because the law has abandoned prior affirmative action policies.

“Our results have profound implications that transcend admission regimes,” Harris and Tienda said in a press release according to the UPI article. “Our results indicate that it is more helpful to direct attention away from the seemingly irresolvable differences about race or class-rank preferences, and instead encourage greater numbers of students to actually apply for admission. Cultivating college-going cultures at under-resourced high schools is a potential high-impact, relatively low-cost, short-term strategy to raise Hispanic college application rates.”