I guess you have a different take on the below exchange.
Why are people saying that UT “ignored” the SC and kept doing what they’re doing?
That makes absolutely no sense, and several posters have said the same thing.
The Court didn’t tell UT what to do in Fisher 1 – they told the 5th Cir. Court of Appeals what to do - ie, to apply “strict scrutiny” in their analysis of the UT plan on remand.
The 5th circuit “ostensibly” applied the SS standard on remand, but the SC is obviously not happy with the way they did it.
This has nothing to do with “how UT behaved” after Fisher 1 – there are posters here who obviously don’t know how our court system works, and yet are writing as if they do.
This also ties into the Universities mission. Unlike regional or directional schools, flagship state schools like UT have a mission to serve the entire state. Kids from rural areas like Junction and Lufkin have to have sufficient opportunity to attend. Otherwise, the school would be filled with high-stat kids from the wealthy suburbs of Austin, Dallas and Houston. The 10 percent rule may not be the best method of ensuring an even representation across the state, but it works.
If you take a look at Justice Kennedy’s question to counsel for UT about what additional information UT wanted to put before the Court when they asked the 5th Circuit to remand to the District Court, I think you will get a sense of the argument some of us have highlighted. The “nut” in Fisher 1 was that the 5th Circuit erred in giving deference to the University’s conclusory statements about why their program was narrowly tailored to meet their educational interest. There was some pretty strong language in Fisher 1 about how UT couldn’t even articulate what it was trying to do, let alone prove that its criticalmass theory was narrowly tailored. Kennedy presumably wanted counsel to say that if permitted they would have put in evidence that they have tweaked this or that, or at the very least to articulate some position beyond the critical mass theory. But UT seems content to let everything ride on Kennedy not being willing to flat out say that race can’t be considered as a stand alone factor without some compelling reason, especially with an 8 member Court.
I think it is important to understand that the Court is used to its opinions being read differently than opinions from District or even Circuit Courts. Generally speaking, if they telegraph certain things in their opinions, they expect parties to respond. Either because the Court wants a better record to make some broader point on the topic before them, or because certain Justices are trying to avoid making a broad ruling. While it is always a bad idea to guess on what the Court is going to do based on oral argument, I would bet that what Kennedy was hoping for (and maybe Roberts and Beyer) was that UT would have done something to show the Court that there was more evidence available than a couple years ago so a majority could form around the idea that the right move here is to maybe further refine Grutter, rather than the broader opinion Scalia and Thomas (maybe Alito) want to write.
and yes @“Erin’s Dad” I do have a different take on the passage quoted. Where does Scalia say the schools are “lesser” because minorities do well there?
^ Where are you getting that “because” statement? That is your inference from the earlier post, not mine.
Scalia said
How else would you define insinuation in that context?
Even on CC, posters typically refer to HYPMS, Ivy, or USNWR Top 20 as “elite”, “reach”, “tier1” or "top"schools.
Everything else is referred to as a “match”, “tier2”, “likely”, or “safety” school.
So Scalia would not be alone in categorizibg HBCUs as “lesser” schools.
Which, just so we are clear, he never did
Im not giving Scalia the benefit of the doubt. He knew exactly what he was saying, intimating, or whatever word you want to use to fill in the blank.
Plenty of broadcast and print stories about what he said today, so I am not the only one who was taken aback.
@GMTplus7 categorizing a school as a safety and one as lesser are totally different.
What I know is, I have countless friends that have gone to “these” schools, and many went on to Wharton, Harvard, Yale, etc for grad school.
I will not respond on this thread again because Ive said all I have to say about the case, and I would hate for the thread to be closed.
Isn’t the entire use of SAT scores and GPA based on the ‘mismatch theory’? If that weren’t the case then all college applicants would be equally considered without regard to SAT or GPA. But colleges implicitly recognize that if a difficult college (I think elite and difficult are two different animals) accepts a student who did not excel in high school, that student is likely to fail at the difficult college. That is the rationale for favoring the high SAT/GPA student over the C student.
Since the top 10 percent or so are already accepted, the case seems to boil down to whether to give a black potential mismatched kid a leg up over a white mismatched kid. (That is those upper class minority students the UT wants to have diversity within diversity)
One of the issues at UT under the current system was that the average white student scored in the 90th percentile of all standardized test takers. However, the average black applicant, who typically got in due to the 10 percent rule from a primarily minority district, only scored at the 50th percentile. This created a large mismatch between the white and black student body at UT. It also kept middle and upper class blacks who attended suburban districts out of the system.
UT wanted “diversity within diversity” or “holistic” admissions so they could target the black kids at the wealthier suburban schools who would otherwise not be able to get in under the 10 percent rule even though they scored higher than many of the kids from the poor rural or urban districts. Getting rid of this secondary admission system was the point of the Fisher suit.
Aren’t you then providing anecdotal evidence to support the observations that black HS students who are under-prepared due to being educated in underperforming HSs and who then attend “lessor” schools w more aggressive remediation programs, are better equipped to gain admission and succeed in the most elite/rigorous graduate-level schools?
Did u read those 2 NYT articles I linked in post #20?
Why would that keep upper class blacks out of the system?
Exactly right, if the following is true:
quote: If you look at the performance of holistic minority admits versus the top 10 percent admits, over time they fare better. And frankly, I don’t think the solution to the problems with student body diversity can be to set up a system in which not only are minorities going to separate schools, they’re going to inferior schools.
[/quote]
The black (and Hispanic) students they are getting with 10% are not the top achieving ones in the state - those are at high performing (presumably mostly white and high income) schools where they make up the 10-20%ile.
They don’t want all the minority kids to be from lousy schools, I guess is the argument.
The minority kids in wealthy districts have the same chance as wealthy white kids under the 10% rule. They have had the great educations those districts provided. They are likely the children of college educated professionals.
Maybe what doesn’t make sense is the 10% rule per school. Maybe, like California, it should be the top 10% statewide.
@TatinG - The University of Texas has two tracks to admission described as follows:
The direct admit pool is drawn from the top 7 percent of high school graduates in Texas. The applicants GPA and test scores only matter in defining if they make it to the top 7 percent of students within their school, so students compete against other students in their school to get into UT, not students from other districts. It gives excellent access to UT for a variety of low income urban and rural schools.
However, if you are outside the top 7 percent of your class, you have to go through the 25 percent of UT’s class reserved for “holistic” admissions. UT uses race as a factor in deciding whether or not to admit non-auto-admits via the holistic route. The lawsuit seeks to stop UT’s use of race as a factor in the holistic portion of the admission process.
There are two problems with this system. First, many kids who attend poor urban and rural school districts and finish in the top 7 percent of their class are not academically competitive with the rest of the student body at UT. This is the “mismatch” problem that Scalia references, and studies have shown that these low-scoring kids have more academic issues attending a school like UT than if they attended a school with lower qualifications.
The other problem is that the auto-admit system leaves a great many kids in more competitive high-scoring school districts out of the auto-admit system and pushes them into the “holistic” review system. Many of these kids are more academically qualified than the kids admitted under the auto admit system, but they have to compete with each other for these spots. UT uses racial preferences in the 25 percent of kids going through the holistic admissions process to try and get more qualified blacks, and Fisher sued to stop affirmative action in the holistic review side of the admissions process.
If you go with the top 10 percent statewide, you will get a student body primarily made up of those who attended schools in wealthy suburbs of Dallas, Houston and Austin. That is not the goal of UT.
Note that top 10% applies to all Texas public universities (except UT Austin, where it is top 7% or 8% to leave some space for non-automatic admits); the other Texas public universities have additional automatic admission criteria, usually combining rank and test scores, though they have some portion of the space for applicants who do not meet their automatic admission criteria or come from non-ranking high schools.
It is likely the case that the intent is to send a message that all high school students in Texas (not just those from top-end high schools) have a chance (admission wise) to go to any of the Texas public universities if they can reach a clearly marked threshold of achievement in high school.
So wealthy minority students from those competitive districts don’t get in under the auto admit system?