Renu Mukherjee “Percent Plans” Undermine Meritocracy in Higher Education They function as a form of indirect affirmative action.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/state-percent-plans-college-admissions-race-affirmative-action
In her 2024 State of the State address, Governor Kathy Hochul announced the “Top 10% Promise.” The policy guarantees New York high school seniors ranked in the top 10 percent of their class direct admission to the State University of New York system.
The initiative, introduced in response to the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on affirmative action in college admissions, is hardly novel. Since 1996, several states have adopted similar “percent plans”—policies that grant automatic admission to public universities based on class rank rather than test scores—in response to bans on racial preferences. But as I show in a new Manhattan Institute issue brief, these plans often fall short, both in advancing racial diversity and in boosting academic outcomes for the students they aim to help.
Consider Texas, which pioneered the “percent plan” model. In 1992, a white woman named Cheryl Hopwood was denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law. At the time, the school based admissions primarily on the “Texas Index,” a composite score combining undergraduate GPA and LSAT results. That year, black and Hispanic applicants needed a TI of at least 189 for admission, while white and “non-preferred minority” applicants needed a minimum score of 199. Hopwood, who earned a TI of 199, sued the law school for racial discrimination.
The United States District Court for the Western District of Texas heard the case and sided with the law school. But Hopwood appealed, and in 1996, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court’s decision. “The law school presented no compelling justification, under the Fourteenth Amendment or Supreme Court precedent, that allows it to continue to elevate some races over others,” it held. At the time, the Fifth Circuit’s ruling was binding, and it invalidated the use of affirmative action in Texas’s public universities.
Texas Democrats feared that, without racial preferences, the number of black and Hispanic students enrolled in the state university system would plummet. So, led by state representative Irma Rangel, they proposed a supposedly race-neutral alternative to affirmative action: the “Top 10% Plan.” Rangel’s plan guaranteed all Texas seniors ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school class direct admission to the state university of their choice, regardless of race or ethnicity. For this reason, Democratic lawmakers understood the policy to be an alternative to affirmative action.
Then–Governor George W. Bush signed the measure into law in 1997 with bipartisan support. Texas Republicans endorsed the bill in part because, as political scientist Cyril Ghosh noted, percent plans are “strongly in conformity with the ideology of the American Dream. They appear solidly meritocratic and avoid preferential treatment of any kind, whether they are racial preferences or legacies.”
While Texas’s percent plan has received much praise, my issue brief offers reasons for skepticism.
First, despite claims to the contrary, Texas’s top 10 percent plan is not truly race-neutral. By guaranteeing automatic admission to the top decile of graduates from every high school, the policy allows lawmakers to use existing patterns of residential and school segregation to pursue demographic goals. Since many high schools are overwhelmingly composed of a single racial or ethnic group, granting top students from those schools admission to the state university system effectively functions as a form of indirect affirmative action—achieving racial diversity without explicitly using race as a criterion.
Further, students admitted under the measure didn’t outperform their college peers as decisively as one might expect. In the early years after the law’s passage, plan enrollees did post higher freshman-year GPAs, on average, than non-enrollees. But by 2008, the gap between the two groups’ average freshman GPAs had almost disappeared. That’s notable, as many proponents of the plan, including former UT Austin president Larry Faulkner, have argued that top 10 percent enrollees outperform those not admitted through the program.
The larger concern with Texas’s plan is that it relies, as do similar policies in other states, on high school class rank rather than standardized test scores. But decades of research show that SAT scores are a stronger predictor of college performance than GPA alone. Percent plans, in other words, may sacrifice academic rigor for perceived fairness—without delivering clear gains in either.
An academic preprint circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research earlier this month underscores the point. Analyzing admissions data and academic records from several “Ivy-Plus” institutions between 2017 and 2023, the authors found that, even when controlling for race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background, students with perfect SAT or ACT scores earned first-year college GPAs that were 11 percent higher, on average, than those of students scoring in the 75th percentile nationally. By contrast, a comparable gap in high school GPA predicted a difference in first-year college GPA of less than 0.1. In short, high school grades were barely predictive—especially when compared with standardized test scores.
Policymakers who care about academic achievement should consider percent plans an unserious solution. They should also acknowledge that such schemes likely violate the Trump administration’s recent Dear Colleague letter, which bars universities from using “non-racial information as a proxy for race.” Instead of following in New York and Texas’s footsteps, other states should ensure that their public universities admit only the most qualified applicants.
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