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BRIEF: As the Supreme Court wrestled with the issue of affirmative action in higher education this week, educators and policy makers were evaluating the Texas 10 percent plan and its aftereffects. The 10 percent plan followed the 1996 Hopwood court decision decision in which the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals forbade the use of race as a factor in admissions policies to Texas' 35 public universities and colleges. In response to this decision, the state legislature passed the 10 percent plan which provides that high school students graduating in the top 10 percent of their high school class gained automatic admission to the Texas public university of their choice. The 10 percent program has been touted as an alternative to raced-based admissions policies and President Bush, who was Governor of the State, when the 10 percent plan was adopted, enthusiastically supports the idea. However, some observers believe the results are mixed at best and don't believe the idea can be used nationally. Marta Tienda, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, and researchers from other institutions concluded that without a strong outreach to students of color the 10 percent plan "will not diversify campuses of selective universities". She attributes the plan's limited success on the "persistent segregation in Texas' high schools." Tienda also found that in states with a smaller non-white population and ones in which the population is concentrated geographically, percentage plans could not match affirmative action's success. The 10 percent plan in her words "cannot work in other places." The plan's biggest failure in Texas, critics charge, is that it has not kept up with the increase in college-age Hispanic students. Berkeley professor David Montejano who helped draft the 10 percent plan while at UT-Austin recently joined several of the original authors of the plan in filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the University of Michigan case. Montejano and his contemporaries argue that percentage models are "not effective alternatives" to race-based admissions. Robert Cardenas, KPFT News, Houston.
E-mail Robert Cardenas at robertc@amerion.com .
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