Panel Paper:
Earning Your CAP: A Comprehensive Analysis of the University of Texas System’s Coordinated Admissions Program
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Picasso (Hyatt Regency Chicago)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
The University of Texas at Austin is at the epicenter of the complex and contentious issue of determining who is admitted to oversubscribed public universities in the United States. Indeed, The University of Texas at Austin’s experience with undergraduate admissions is representative of the difficulty that the nation faces in producing policies that determine who gains admission to the most desirable post-secondary opportunities. What is peculiar, both at The University of Texas at Austin and nationally, is that the legal Arguments – for example, Fisher v. Texas – and the policy responses – for example, Texas’s Top Ten Percent Rule – that address access and admission focus almost entirely on first-time freshman admissions, the traditional path to oversubscribed institutions, with little consideration of alternative paths that offer access to elite public universities. This paper addresses this gap in our knowledge by examining the ramifications of providing a clearly articulated alternative path to The University of Texas at Austin.
Established in 2000 by The University of Texas’s Board of Regents as a response to the enrollment pressures that followed the passage of the Top Ten Percent Rule, the Coordinated Admissions Program (CAP) offers a path to The University of Texas at Austin for Texas residents who were not offered fall freshman admissions or summer freshman admission. Texas residents not admitted to The University of Texas at Austin are offered the opportunity to enter into a contract with The University of Texas System that states that if students attend a participating University of Texas System campus, complete 30 hours of prescribed courses, and maintain a minimum 3.2 grade point average, then a student has the option of transferring to The University of Texas at Austin the following fall. Students who transfer are guaranteed admission into the college of liberal arts and must compete for admissions to other majors.
We examine the impact of the CAP on transfer patterns to The University of Texas at Austin, and make use of the fuzzy regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal impact of taking an alternative path to The University of Texas at Austin on academic and labor market outcomes.
