“Race-Neutral” College Admissions Plans Are Failing to Achieve Equity
New research shows that after 20 years, Texas’s “Top 10 Percent” plan is a poor substitute for affirmative action.
For about the last 20 years, after a federal court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions, the state of Texas has relied on the “race-neutral” strategy of automatic admission for every high school senior graduating in the top 10 percent of their class.
This so-called “Top Ten Percent Plan” is intended to mimic affirmative action by broadening the pool of high schools sending students to the state’s colleges and universities — including especially the flagship campuses of the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and Texas A&M University in College Station (Texas A&M). Given the marked segregation of Texas high schools, so the theory goes, the plan gives a leg up to top applicants coming from schools with predominantly minority student populations.
Recent research, however, shows the effort hasn’t worked. In fact, the Texas 10 Percent Plan is a failure, with “ultimately little to no equity-producing effects” on minority college access, according to a recent analysis examining nearly 20 years’ of admissions and enrollment data. As researchers Kalena Cortes and Daniel Klasik conclude in a December 2020 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “the Top 10% Plan was not very successful in making the flagship campuses more accessible to all Texan high schools.”
White, affluent “feeder” schools still predominate college admissions
Cortes and Klasik examined whether the Top Ten Percent Plan in fact diversified the swath of schools sending students to UT and Texas A&M. They found that it did not. While there was marginal improvement in the share of rural schools sending students to these colleges, students from the mostly affluent, largely white “feeder” schools that historically send the most students to UT & Texas and A&M still make up 90 percent of the public high school students enrolled. What Cortes and Klasik call the “never-sending” schools — high schools that have not sent a single student to a flagship campus in the last two years — have generally stayed that way, while only a tiny number of “occasional” senders became “always sending” schools.
These results reinforce earlier studies finding that the Top Ten Percent Plan hasn’t compensated for significant declines in Black and Latinx college enrollment after affirmative action ended in Texas in 1996. At Texas A&M, for instance, Black and Latinx enrollment fell by 1.4 percentage points and 3.6 percentage points respectively from 1996 to 2000, while admissions rates dropped from 74.9 percent to 57.5 percent for Black applicants and from 79.9 percent to 68.3 percent for Hispanic students.
Percent plans have failed in other states, too.
Percent plans adopted in California and Texas have had similarly lackluster results. California, for instance, guarantees admission to the top 9 percent of high school graduates (though students don’t have a choice in which school to attend), while Florida’s “Talented Twenty” program offers the same to the top 20 percent of the state’s seniors. Studies conclude that Florida’s program has had little impact — one analysis estimated that only about 150 Black and Hispanic students stood to benefit from the program its first year, principally because the overwhelming majority of high-performing students would have gotten into college anyway, without the program’s help.
Similarly, in California, a study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project found that the University of California system hasn’t recovered the diversity it had before the passage of Proposition 209 in 1998, which banned affirmative action in college admissions, financial aid and state hiring. After Proposition 209, Black student enrollment at the University of California-Berkeley and at UCLA plummeted by as much as 55 percent. The state’s guaranteed admission policy has been unable to make up that gap. “[C]lass-based admission and financial aid policies are not a sufficient substitute for race-conscious policies,” the researchers concluded.
Why “race-neutral” college admissions plan fall short
A few reasons explain why these percentage-based plans are a poor substitute for affirmative action in achieving racial diversity in higher education. For one thing, their effectiveness is premised on a fundamentally flawed assumption: That colleges are drawing from a large pool of highly segregated high schools with predominantly minority or all-minority student populations. Aside from the irony inherent in making a supposedly equity-inducing policy dependent on the prolongation of another inequity — K-12 segregation — “few states have high school segregation extreme enough to suggest that Top X% Plans will be successful at generating racial and ethnic diversity,” as researchers Kalena Cortes and Daniel Klasik put it.
More importantly, the failure of percentage-based college admissions plans shows that ensuring broader minority access to higher education means more than simply opening the door. The fact that so many “never sending” high schools in Cortes’ and Klasik’s analysis stayed that way indicates that too many schools aren’t encouraging their top minority students to take advantage of opportunities available to them.
One 2014 study found that Hispanic students at Texas high schools were significantly less likely to say they knew “a lot” about the Top Ten Percent Plan and that high-performing Black and Latinx students were less likely than whites to choose a selective college as their preferred school. Numerous studies in fact have documented the phenomenon of “undermatching” — where talented minority students opt out of selective colleges they are otherwise qualified to attend. In addition to the lack of adequate counseling and support, financial considerations may also discourage some minority students from stretching their college aspirations.
The bottom line is that well-tailored race-conscious admissions policies are still the most effective way to broaden college access to minority students. So-called “race-neutral” policies are not, in fact, neutral at all and may in fact perpetuate the very inequities they are ostensibly intended to fix.
