texas has one pretty good school. and that's it. in comparison with other big states, e.g. california, texas is a joke.
You are joking, right? I got into UT through the top 10% law, but frankly I think the law sucks. I went to a lower income school where it was so much easier to get into the top 10% of the class and a lot people are not qualified to get into UT but yet this law lets them do so. The thing about UT right now is that they were being forced to accept a lot of kids in the top 10% due to this law that anyone who wasn't top 10% would have a minuscule chance of getting in because there weren't many spots left. No these aren't bubble kids, these are very well qualified students who deserve to get into UT but are punished due to going to a much better school where it is much harder to get in the top 10% due to the competition. I'm sorry, but you really don't now what you are talking about with this statement.
Good change. Also need to get rid of the CAP, too many dumb people coming from CAP program. Not saying all people I've met from UTSA or UTEP are not really qualified, but alot are... If they do decide to keep the CAP, make it harder to meet the CAP requirements or something...
I don't understand where the data about people with a real good GPA and SAT score like 2100 would get rejected from UT come from? I got this document. http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/shared-bl...9/02/ut_pushing_to_scale_back_top_1/top10.pdf On page 5, it says I think SAT of 1219/ 1600 is the same as 1828/ 2400 and 1285/ 1600 is the same as 1927/ 2400.
If Texas wants to be a UC-Berkeley, Michigan, UVa, we need to get rid of the top 10/8% rule and just accept purely on how baller you are. Make it an elitist public institution (it pretty much is, but should be moreso) and then we'd be moving on up from top 50 to top 20 best colleges in the country.
Some interesting stats about freshmen entering UT-Austin in the Fall of 2009. Make of them what you will. Residency ■ Texas residents: 90% ■ Out-of-state students: 7% ■ International students: 3% Gender ■ Men: 47% ■ Women: 53% Ethnicity ■ White: 51% ■ Hispanic: 21% ■ Asian American: 20% ■ African American: 5% ■ Foreign: 3% ■ American Indian: 0.4% ■ Unknown: <0.1% High School Academic Performance ■ Graduated in top 10% of class: 81% ■ Graduated in top quarter: 94% ■ Graduated in second quarter: 5% Average SAT Scores* ■ Critical Reading: 592 ■ Mathematics: 631 ■ Writing: 592 * SAT national averages are Critical Reading – 501, Mathematics – 515, and Writing – 493. Average ACT Scores ■ UT Austin average: 27 ■ National average: 21 Freshman Year Experience ■ Live on campus: 56.6% ■ Women who join sororities: 9.6% ■ Men who join fraternities: 12.6% Freshmen Retention ■ Freshmen (2008-2009) who returned for sophomore year: 92.4% Financial Aid ■ Freshmen receiving financial aid: 57% ■ Undergraduates receiving financial aid: 51% http://bealonghorn.utexas.edu/whyut/profile/index.htm
If they had gone to ACC, it would have been an extremely easy and convenient way to matriculate to UT, it is sure as heck more convenient than going to San Marcos. The only school that matters is the one you get your degree from. If I were in their position, ACC would have been the smart and sensible choice.
592+631+592 = 1815. That is no where near 2100. It is also the average, which means there are more who got in with less. These numbers do not separate out the score for top 10% and Non top 10% like the article I quote though.
Studies have shown that the SAT is a fairly poor predictor of college GPA. The only thing the SAT is a really strong predictor of is a student's household income.
This. But the household part wasn't really true in my case. I don't think I even finished writing my essay on the SAT, but at the college level I have had a steady 3.6-3.8 GPA
So change the SAT then. What is the correlation between the SAT and GPA? How weak/strong is it? I know that, for example, the LSAT has a 40% correlation between score and class rank. That's pretty strong. *edit: there's always going to be some disadvantage to being poor... that doesn't justify punishing people who *aren't* poor with this silly rule.
I'll make one more small attempt to make you understand. These kids are driven. They have many hours of college credit before they even graduate from the magnet high school. When my son went to his highly ranked out of state university (which is costing us a bloody fortune, I can tell you, because it is an out of state state university, who gives their scholarships, understandably, to their in-state students), he already had about 37 hours his first year before he stepped onto the campus. In other words, he'll be a junior this Fall in his second year. His two friends are in the same ballpark, although they had a few less hours. What on earth were they going to take at ACC? Freakin' electives? Do you understand now? I agree that ACC and other community colleges are outstanding alternatives for finding your way into a top rated state school that won't let you in for your freshman year, but in this case, ACC was pretty useless to his friends.
I think the problem is that you want to give poor people a chance, at some point. Instead of having them be disadvantaged for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, it is always at the expense of the middle and upper class.
I'm just going to say this and maybe I'm just too simple minded to understand anything else. Getting in is not even half the battle. I was accepted into alot of schools coming out because i had a good gpa and made a 1250 on my sat back in 1990. After waiting too late and going through my scholarship offers, i went to swt to hoop. I had to learn how to learn. I got through in highschool by just being smart, but i had to do something differnt in college. Graduated in 5 years and moved on with my life. I don't care what high school you come from, adjusting to college life takes another skill altogether. I had some of my bets friends who were smart also flink out and was at home on scho pro and i had friends who i didn't think had a chance graduate in 4 yrs and in the top of their class. Just wanted to share a story BTW, my daughter finished 45 out of 900 at creek last year and was accepted everywhere and chose SFA for the nursing school. She always wanted to be a nurse and felt this was the best school for her and she didn't want to be in those huge class and on that huge campus at Texas or TAMU.
I agree. In my four plus years in college (I graduate this fall) I have sucked it up academically. I've gotten very few A's, and mostly B's and C's. I was never the party type, but studying was very hard to me and trying to understand a lot things killed me. I eventually adjusted, but I never been the best student. I really do try my hardest though and I guess I can live with myself for that. I've had two internships and my employers really liked me (they told me to come back if I wanted to), so at least I know I'm not totally useless in the real world. I guess I'm just not "textbook" smart, whatever that might mean.
It doesn't always have to be that way. The top 10% rule is essentially like trying to fix a societal ill at the very end of its life cycle. You have to fix it in the beginning, giving kids a decent, fair shot at an education, no matter their income or background, not just giving them different standards at the end of process. If you did everything you could to give both the poor and the rich and the middle class a quality education, then you can sleep well at night knowing that you did everything possible, and whoever doesn't choose to take advantage of that opportunity has no one to blame but themselves. But doing it for one group at the expense of another, and also doing it so arbitrarily and after-the-fact, is just plain fail.
but how else do you do it? as a higher education institution you don't have the ability to change school funding and ensure isds do a better job and states do a better job. so you want to create diversity, and also have an obligation, especially as a state school, to be inclusive. given that quota systems are not acceptable to scotus, and that even point systems probably won't pass muster, you don't have the luxury when having tens of thousands of undergraduate students to do individualized analysis. so what is a practical and a reasonable way to incorporate lower income and minority students, without running afoul of current scotus jurisprudence and/or political problems?
I don't agree with this at all. As a university, even a state university, you should have an obligation to nothing except educating the people who qualify on academic merit for acceptance. The State has an obligation to make sure everyone is given fair and equal access to education at the K-12 level. Beyond that, it's up to the individual. Nobody owes you anything.
But does the "10% rule" work? I would argue that it doesn't, not as a means to diversity. Look at the stats I posted earlier. 5% of the students coming into UT as freshmen were Black. Five percent! 21% were Latinos. In comparison, 20% were Asian, who tend to come from better economic circumstances. Is it working? Out of state students were 7% and foreign students 3%. I can tell you that the administration at UT is not happy about those last two numbers, just as they aren't happy about the diversity this system has been producing.
