The University of Texas at Austin administration is urging state legislators to place a limit on the number of Texas high-school seniors at the tops of their graduating classes who are admitted each year.
Presently, public universities in Texas must follow a state-wide law that guarantees students who rank in the top 10 percent of their graduating class automatic admission.
University officials want state laws to peel back the current law and limit automatic admission privileges to only the top 5 percent of graduating classes.
Texas enacted the 10 percent law in 1998, when automatic admissions to the university accounted for about 45 to 48 percent of the admitted freshman class, according to Gary Lavergne, program manager at the UT office of admissions. Lavergne said the top 10 percent rule awarded automatic admissions to more than 70 percent of the university’s incoming freshman class last year.
“What’s happening is [Texas University at Austin] is reaching a point where a large number of our admits are being admitted based on only one thing, and that is class rank,” Lavergne said. “In the science of admissions it’s seldom, if ever, good to admit a large number of an entire class based upon only one thing ?–that thing right now is the top 10 percent [law].”
Lavergne said Texas University found the law actually worked well when it determined only about a half of the university’s admission pool, because it freed up admission officials to admit the other half of incoming freshmen based on many different aspects.
“It would be okay to admit people based on one thing if you found the perfect one thing, but there is so such thing as that in admissions,” Lavergne said.
Lavergne said university officials are also lobbying to shrink the law’s power because of its effect on automatically admitted students. He said as the years went by, high school students began to understand the top 10 percent law in greater numbers.
“[Students] understood that if they were in the top 10 percent of their class, they could come to UT-Austin, period,” Lavergne said. “More and more students began to exercise that entitlement, and we want a little relief from that.”
Shrinking the law would promote further competition between Texas high schools for a bid from state universities, Lavergne said.
“In Texas, if you’re in the top 10 [percent], you really don’t have to compete if you want to go to a public institution because you are automatically in — this way, we’ll have more students competing for the slots,” he said.
But Lavergne said any modifications of the top 10 percent law would not change the number of freshmen in the university’s incoming class or the number of invitations sent out to students to enroll; the changes would only affect the caliber of the students who are offered a spot at the school.
“When it comes to choosing the best students and who is most likely to do well in their freshman year at UT-Austin, instead of 70 percent of [the freshman class] being automatically admitted, [the proposal] would bring it back down to about 50 percent,” Lavergne said. “If 70 percent of our incoming class [is mandated by the law], it limits our ability to make the best decisions we can for our university.”
UT-Austin extends roughly 11,500 offers to potential freshmen and enrolls about 6,600 college freshmen each year.
Kent Barrett, news manager at University of Wisconsin Communications, said UW does not operate under a similar law.
“[UW] doesn’t have one factor that gets you in automatically,” Barrett said. “[Admissions] takes in a million different factors; that’s what is going to get you in [to UW].”
However, Barrett noted that a student in the top 5 percent of his or her class is an excellent candidate for UW admissions, but that UW looks at the whole student.
“You can’t get a certain [grade point average] or ACT score and be guaranteed that you’ll get in [to UW],” Barrett said. “[UW] ties all those factors together in admissions.”
