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If a school like UT limits their admission to only the top 10% (or, honestly, 7-9%) of applicants, how will they admit legacies or athletes, both groups whose GPA and SAT scores are lower than the rest of their class? This applies for state and private schools.
While a lawsuit against every AA program is bound to happen, I'm not sure Abigail Fisher is the best test case. While she may have been an average student, she was mediocre for the case of getting into one of the most competitive public universities.
When Miss Fisher was asked about exactly what it is she's missed out on by not attending UT, this was her reply:
"The only thing I missed out on was my post-graduation years," she said. "Just being in a network of U.T. graduates would have been a really nice thing to be in. And I probably would have gotten a better job offer had I gone to U.T."
Ironically, she's totally Googlable as the plaintiff in this case. Won't this hurt her chances in the job market in the long run? She's employed now, but as someone who just went through the job search, I can tell you that memories are long--especially when Google is involved. Fortunately, most of my results were related to races and charity events, not lawsuits that resulted from my not getting my way! Jennifer Gratz, the plaintiff in the Michigan case, has made a career out of being a mediocre whiner--maybe, if this case goes through, Abigail Fisher can do the same thing!
Also, couldn't she have transferred to UT, if going was so important to her? Or was this lawsuit more about one gigantic whine?
I will object to one item: "The university said the Top Ten program was a blunt instrument and that classes in many subjects have few or no minority students."
That has nothing to do with the Top Ten program, and more to do with the fact that some subjects simply do not attract students of underrepresented groups. My profession is one of them--in four years of undergrad and two years of grad school, I was always one of the only, if not THE only, non-Asian minority in architecture classes. Even at HBCUs, architecture programs are majority white or Asian.
Florida eliminated AA years ago, and they've done a good job of providing outreach programs to underrepresented minorities (which in Florida is black and Asian) and kids in rural areas of the state, letting them know as soon as Freshman year what they need to do in order to get into the flagship universities. Maybe this is something that Texas could expand...?
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