Politics
Imperfect 10
Your kid may be smart, but if she isn't in the top tenth of her class, she may not get into UT or A&M. Don't despair. Try Harvard.
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UT officials defend the top 10 percent law. "There is a lot of evidence that this is the right group of kids to be admitting," says Bruce Walker, UT's director of admissions. He also credits the law for attracting students from 135 Texas high schools who had not been represented in recent freshman classes. "We are one of the flagship universities of the entire state of Texas. We have an obligation to serve broadly."
The students who are aided by the new law are excelling at UT (something that wasn't always true for students who were admitted under affirmative action). An admissions office study tracking the performance of students admitted under the top 10 percent law shows that they are achieving better grades than their peers and staying in school, even though their SAT scores have been lower than those of the top 10 percent of students admitted in 1996.
Minority enrollment is climbing at UT and A&M, but slowly. The flagship schools have had to overcome a long history of noninvolvement with African Americans, dating back to the days of segregation. "What we discovered was that simply making students eligible to come here was not enough," Walker says. "We had to add incentives. If you are going to change that socially embedded behavior, you are going to have to do something drastic. And frankly, money talks."
UT officials designated 39 high schools for a newly created Longhorn Opportunity Scholarship to be awarded to top 10 percent seniors. UT president Larry Faulkner visited most of the schools personally and told the assembled seniors that he was guaranteeing $4,000 a year to a certain number of top students in the room. "That's what made the difference," Walker says. "He was able to say, 'Your competition is sitting in this room.' That gave these kids a lot of hope."
Walker faces irate parents constantly. A mother whose son attended a prestigious private school told him that she heard the university had sponsored an essay-writing workshop one Saturday morning at an inner-city school. "She said, 'This is so unfair. You're giving those kids an advantage that our kids don't have,'" Walker says. "I realized then that there are families who are not satisfied with having some of the advantages. They want all of the advantages."
Another parent asked Walker a question he hears frequently: "Should I take my kid out of this good school and put him in a less-competitive school?" Walker gave his standard response: "You are educating your son for his whole life, not for the next event in his life."
If families are behaving strangely, let's at least acknowledge that the law's nuances can be frustrating. First, there is the difficult question of magnet high schools, where elite students are recruited from all over a school district to study an intense curriculum. Should the regular students at those schools have to compete against the magnet kids, or should there be two top-10 lists, one for magnet students and one for the regular students? In Austin a court threw out an effort by the school district to create separate lists.
Another problem is that the method of calculating class rank is not uniform across Texas. The differences may cause school shopping and class shopping. Some schools give extra points for taking advanced-placement and honors courses, while others do not. At schools that do not offer the extra points, the new law may provide a disincentive for students to take the more demanding courses. Walker says he hears of efforts to maximize class rank "all the time." Strategies range from switching schools to fulfilling difficult math requirements in an easy summer-school course and dodging honors or advanced-placement courses.
At Woodlands High School near Conroe, juniors and seniors can earn college credits in 28 advanced-placement courses. But Woodlands' principal, Don Stockton, says parents often discourage their children from taking higher-level courses, ironically, because they believe it will hurt their offspring's college careers. Better to take the easy A in a regular course, they believe, than risk a B in a more demanding course. "Students learn where they can get a GPA gain. The way we do it, a grade in a higher-level course counts the same as a regular course. So some kids question the advantage of taking higher-level courses," says Stockton. "We have that conversation all the time with parents, and it's frustrating." The school board recently voted to change the way its schools calculate GPA, to reward students who take more-demanding courses, but the new method won't take effect until this year's ninth graders have completed high school.
The unrelenting stress is taking its toll on high school seniors. "Kids come in all the time and say to me, 'I thought senior year was supposed to be a fun year,'" says Sherry Sunderman, the lead counselor for Woodlands High. "Some just completely shut down. I can't get them to fill out an application. They are too overwhelmed. We see kids in treatment for depression, eating disorders& all because of the stress."
Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas counselor, David Oglesby, has been preaching the message that students should consider plan B. "There are thousands of colleges in this country," he says, "and a place for everybody. Is UT really the best place for you? Do you want to be down there with seven thousand other freshmen when it takes five years to get out?"
The competition is only going to get worse& not just for UT and A&M, but for all state universities. The sponsor of the 10 percent law, state representative Irma Rangel of Kingsville, says the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board warned the Legislature five years ago that "within ten years we were going to have at least two hundred thousand new students" vying for spots in Texas' colleges. Many of these will be B and C students with a desire to go to college but neither the grades nor the test scores to get accepted¬ just at UT or A&M but perhaps anywhere.
Their plight is little comfort to the current crop of high school students, who must work every angle for something my friends and I took for granted& admission to a state university that was prestigious, cheap, and accessible. I recently told my niece, a high school junior, that I didn't even have to write an essay to get into UT. She smiled faintly, as if I was describing some quaint but irrelevant sepia-tinted memory of yesteryear. And of course, I was.
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