The Top 10%

I saw a cool story on 60 Minutes tonight. I think it was a repeat, but then the only TV I watch is an occasional episode of 60 Minutes after dinner at my parents' house, so it was new to me. Anyway, the story was this:

Since affirmative action has gone out of constitutional style, Texas tried another angle. The top 10% of each year's high school graduating class may attend state universities. Period. This cuts across all kinds of social lines because schools tend to be geographical and geography tends to be class-based. This is a cool legal hack even before you hear the rest of the story.

Better, it's working really really well. In terms of getting poor non-whites on campus, it's more effective than affirmative action was. Not only that, but UT is posting record academic performance. This basically means that accepting only the top performers on a statewide basis is not a predictor of academic results; something else is going on, and accepting the top 10% on a district-wide basis is "good enough" to produce record-setting academic results at UT.

There are some problem details, such as maybe 10% is too much for the state university system to handle (not all 10% take the state up on its offer, but more do each year), but that seems easy enough to fix. For example, they could put a formula in the law which annually derives the cut-off percentage based on the number of graduates and the capacity of the system.

Among the complainers are kids from the predictably rich/white districts who have more challenging curriculum than the kids in the poor/non-white districts. Kids in the top 11% at the rich/white schools might have been in the top 1% at a poor/non-white school. And there's a white state legislator who wants to end the system because it is "not fair." (Is he seven years old?) What the complainers fail to understand is that the purpose of a state university system is not to reward hard work in a difficult high school. The purpose is to educate the state's population. And it's working!

I am so jazzed about this idea and system that it gives me a whole new perspective on Texas. Every state should do this or something like it.

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