Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The Top 10% Plan admissions policy has now been in place for nearly 20 years in Texas. This admissions policy was established as a “race-neutral” alternative to affirmative action admissions in postsecondary education after these policies were struck down by the 5^th Circuit Court’s decision in Hopwood v. University of Texas Law School (1996). The Top 10% Plan guarantees all Texas students’ admission to any four-year public Texas institution of their choice provided they graduate in the top 10% of their senior high school class. This admissions policy sought to exploit the existing racial and ethnic segregation between high schools in the state to increase the racial/ethnic diversity of students admitted to four-year public institutions without explicitly incorporating a student’s race and ethnicity into admissions decisions. However, the best estimates of the Top 10% Plan effects suggests that it is only able to recover about one-third of the racial and ethnic diversity that was lost when affirmative action was banned (Long, 2007).

Given the continued legal challenges to race-conscious admissions policies in higher education, and new threats that may emerge from changes to the composition of the Supreme Court, we examine 17 years of post-Top 10% Plan data to look for evidence of increased access to the flagships campuses by all high schools in Texas. We first begin describing the changes in the sending patterns of high schools to the flagship campuses after the enactment of the Top 10% Plan based on the pre-policy sending patterns of high schools to the flagship campuses. Next, we describe the characteristics of these high schools, as well as the characteristics of high schools who were new to send students to the flagships campuses after the Top 10% Plan went into place, and the extent to which the share of seats at the flagships campuses has shifted in favor of high schools that did not send many students prior to the implementation of the Top 10% Plan.

Our results offer a clear picture of educational haves and have nots. First, though many hypothesized that a potential benefit of Texas’s percent plan, even in the absence of promoting racial diversity, was that it made the flagship campuses more accessible to students from different high schools, our results demonstrate that two decades on this is not the case. In fact, their representation on the flagship campuses continued to be dwarfed by students from feeder schools with a history of regularly enrolling students at Texas’s flagship institutions. Second, the schools who were new senders were less racially diverse than other previously never-sending schools—resulting in a shrinking pool of never-sending schools enrolling an increasingly disproportionate share of the state’s racially-diverse students. Third, our findings are relevant to ongoing debates about the value of race-conscious admission and the potential benefits of its race-neutral alternatives because they illustrate that not only are these policies hamstrung in their ability to generate racial diversity, they are also limited in the ability to open access to new high schools.