@Gator88NE, even if an auto-admit is denied admission to Engineering or Business, UT must still offer them admission to the School of Undergraduate Studies (UGS) where many do accept those offers of admissions with hopes, (however dim), to get internal transfers to Engineering or Business.
According to US News latest rankings, UT’s undergraduate business program is ranked #7 in the nation and UT’s undergraduate engineering program is #11, demand for entrance into those programs will continue to grow. With a growing population base, kids who cannot get awarded their first-choice major initially in business and engineering will simply accept UGS where you can request an internal transfer to another UT college after only one year of completing the UT core curriculum. Of course, most of these kids will not be able to successfully transfer into the business or engineering schools because, just as freshman admissions, internal transfers are highly competitive, but that will not deter them from accepting admission to UT with hopes of successfully doing so. How many athletes playing college football think they will make it to the NFL despite the slim odds?
The fact is UT cannot continue to automatically grant admission to every top 10% graduate of a Texas high school. That’s a plan that is simply unsustainable in the long run.
I would think, many would be engineers, once they learn they are not selected for engineering, would fall back on TAMU or Texas Tech (or other engineering school), and avoid the risk of not being able to do an internal transfer…
Don’t understate how much anxiety some students (and parents) would feel about taking the “risk” of an internal transfer (or the options available to students who miss the cut for Cockrell).
@Gator88NE Many do that but many take their chances and try. There are many non- auto admits who are offered the CAP program which requires them to go to another UT school for a year, make a certain GPA and move to Austin as a sophomore undergraduate studies major. Then they spend a year in Austin getting hours required to transfer into Engineering as a junior. Some succeed and most believe they can be the one to defy the odds. And graduating in four years following that path is next to impossible - at least in Engineering.
The UT forum in February -April is filled with applicants trying to decide whether to roll the dice. My advice is always - go to a school where they will let you major in what you want to study. But some people want to go to the most selective school available to them. The Economics department is filled with kids who wanted business but could not get the 3.8 GPA needed to get in as sophomores. They can take business classes but they have to wait for business students to register first.
I wish I could find it but UT has quoted data that says something like 60 percent of applicants apply to five or six majors (with business counting as just one). UT can’t be the only school where that is an issue. Not sure how others handle that and keep graduation rates up.
The Department of Economics is probably where this practice is most prevalent. UT Engineering is highly ranked; however, the McCombs School of Business is even higher. Moreover, the differential between McCombs and it nearest in-state competitor at Texas A&M is much larger than the differential between UT Engineering and A&M’s Engineering program.
A large number of the UT applicants who desire to gain admission to McCombs will list it as their first choice major and then Economics,which is the College of Liberal Arts, as their second choice. Even the kids who don’t get into McCombs were academic all-stars at their own high school, many of whom have high standardized test scores. Thus, they optimistically forecast that they’ll continue to excel even at the collegiate level and will accept an offer of admission to Economics with their ultimate goal being admission to McCombs.
I don’t think UT is doing these kids any favor in how they are implementing the top 10% law. My son is a Texas high school senior who was holistically admitted to UT back in mid-November as he did not qualify for automatic admission as a top 7% applicant. After being admitted to his major, UT sent him a link to the admitted freshman website. My son has told me that there are a number of kids on that site who were automatically admitted to UT as early as in September who still have not been notified of whether UT is going to accept them into their preferred major. UT did a round of acceptance notifications back in November and a few days ago; however, many kids will not be notified about their major acceptances until at late as February 2016.
I imagine that some of these kids may not have taken measures such as applying to safety schools and alternatives because they may not have fully understood that guaranteed admission under the Top 10% law does not foreshadow whether you’ll get into the engineering or business programs. Under that type of scenario, those kids are pretty much going to be jammed into accepting whatever UT offers them because they may have missed the application deadline for a suitable alternative school that would have offered them admission to their major. Now it is true that many of the same kids apply to both UT and A&M. However, if they are pursuing business or engineering majors, they may find themselves the same situation.
I really dislike the 10% rule, and for that reason (and nothing to do with AA), I think losing the 25% holistic option would be a disappointment. The 10% rule (IMHO) disproportionate impacts high performing students that attend competitive/rigorous High Schools, in it’s effort to reach diversity goals. The holistic admission process, in my mind, allowed UT-Austin to address this issue to some degree.
Has anyone seen this interesting article in The Times, which was published with the UT case in mind? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/opinion/what-israel-tells-us-about-affirmative-action-and-race.html?ref=education
“What Israel tells us about affirmative action and race.” The author has studied, statistically, the effects of considering them separately and found the either/or approach not as effective in producing diversity as the both/and. I think the short article is well worth reading, relative to this discussion and similar others on CC. Here’s the “bottom line” quote:
That’s the problem. UC also looked at giving big boosts to low income folks after Prop 209 passed, but found, not surprisingly, that there are more low income whites (+ low income Asians) – in absolute numbers – then there are low income minorities. Thus, a class-based admissions system would not achieve the minority goal that the University seeks. Indeed, in Fisher I, UT specifically said it was looking for the kids of URM doctors, the opposite of class-based.
(UC does give small boosts to low income and first gen, but it also awards other boosts for ‘overcoming adversity’.)
btw: not sure that this took a ‘study’ to understand. Common sense would have figured that out.
Just a comment. When one says they’re looking for kids of URM doctors, my reactions is: did they say that is their goal or was that embedded as one example?
Something that should be mentioned is that to avoid the top 7% rule, more Texas HS are going unranked. In the past five years, three local schools have gone unranked. Two of them are smaller, urban specialty programs with small graduating classes. The kids absolutely have been helped by forcing UT to look at the transcript rather than just relying on rank. The third is one of those large, competitive suburban HS everyone is talking about. Its community also is really pleased with the results of going unranked. There’s another local HS looking to do the same. Of course, most of the privates already are unranked.
Page 43 has the relevant quote, that under the 7% plan, admitted URMs come from segregated schools. This is not surprising, because that’s where the URMs go to school. The majority of black and Hispanic students go to majority black or majority Hispanic schools.
And the issue behind the issue may in fact be the disparity in quality among the public hs. There are a lot of top kids coming from some of these under-resourced schools, some great teachers and proograms. Just not enough.
Probably no longer true in California. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html indicates that white (not Hispanic or Latino) people were slightly outnumbered in California in 2014 by Hispanic or Latino people.
yes, it is correct that whites are no longer a majority or even plurality in the State, but as you know, you need to parse the numbers (or end up with a Simpson’s paradox?). Don’t forget that Prop 209 passed ~20 years ago. But even while the demographic change was in process, ten years later in '06, a UC “spokesperson” reported:
“Only 6.5 percent of Latino public high-school graduates are eligible for UC, compared to 6.2 percent for African-Americans, 16.2 percent for whites and 31.4 percent for Asians.”
Perhaps high schools have gotten much better since then, but do the math…
Here are the numbers of 2014 California high school graduates, in thousands:
Hispanic 190
nonHispanic native 3
Asian 41
Pacific Islander 2
Filipino 13
AfAm 24
white 117
biracial not Hispanic 9
not reported 1
total 399 http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/ (you have to click a few times to generate the table)
Using bluebayou’s percentages, here are the numbers of UC qualified graduates of the groups mentioned, imputing the 6.2% graduation rate to both biracial students and AfAm students:
Hispanic 12335
Asian 12775
AfAm 1466
white 19033
biracial not Hispanic 544
HIspanic + AfAm + biracial 14345
white + Asian 31808
There are a bit more than twice as many non-URMs as URMs. But knowing California’s demographics, in the low-income group I’d guess that there are more URMs than non-URMs. I haven’t seen any statistics to break it down though.