Affirmative Action and the Texas Top-Ten-Percent Admission Law: Balancing Equity and Access to Higher Education

In Texas, the removal of affirmative action programs in consecutive public higher education institutions in Hopwood 1996 led the university authorities to seek alternatives capable of producing a minimum of ethno-racial diversity in the student population. One of them is the text passed by the legislature of the State in 1997, under which students ranked in the top ten on the scale of their business are guaranteed admission to all universities Texas public, regardless of their test scores in force. The device was designed to increase the number of black and Hispanic students, given the degree of school segregation of schools in question. This article seeks to determine whether and to what extent this goal has been achieved, as well as the continued parallel of increasing the number of schools whose students are from the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University. The conclusion is that in both cases 'programs by percentage' (percentage shots) are less effective than positive discrimination, because they can only indirectly influence the initial decision to submit an application and do not reflect difficulties may lead minority students admitted to still not registering. Adapted from the source document.