<p>My thoughts?</p>
<p>Honestly, I don’t care so much about the top-10% rule anymore. The last of my three spawn is about to leave for her freshman year out of state. None went to UT, but UT was the safety school for all three, and I did have deep interest in how admissions worked for a long time. It is a constant subject of discussion among parents of high school students, a group from which I have now graduated.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, my view is tht UT does not seem to have been unduly harmed by the rule. The university is like a big mixing machine, taking the brightest kids from every community and mooshing them together for four years. There are societal benefits to that. </p>
<p>And it is no surprise that top-10% can’t be killed politically. Consider that only California and Texas are majority-minority states. How politically feasible would it have been to have UT be all-white? That is what you have had in no time if Hopwood had been not been countered. That is actually what we have now at Texas A&M.</p>
<p>The rule has been around long enough that Plano kids and parents have adapted. Will it kill some of them to go to Texas Tech instead? No.</p>
<p>The money issues seem solved by allowing the state universities to charge what they want to. It is now $20,000 a year to go to UT for a resident. The need to discount for disadvantaged kids is balanced by the Plano and Spring Branch kids that are happy to pay full sticker price.</p>
<p>The current kerfuffle about the B-on-time loans does not really have anything to do with the top-10% rule. As I understand it, Gov. Goodhair vetoed the bill that would fund them, along with a bunch of other popular bills, as a way to get back at the Ledge which embarassed him more than usual during the session that just ended.</p>