Changes to college admission policy in Texas may be leaving some out – namely Hispanics, according to a study conducted by Princeton researchers Dr. Angel Harris and Dr. Maria Tienda, the Huffington Post reports. Under Texas’s new Top 10 Percent program, public universities must enroll students based on their performance in comparison to their high school classmates, rather than with all applicants. The new policy ensures that high school students at the top of their class are admitted, with aims to enroll more students from “poor communities.”
But some argue that this policy is not as effective as the prior affirmative action at selecting a racially and ethnically diverse student body. After analyzing administrative data from the two “most selective public institutions”, University of Texas in Austin (UT) and Texas A&M (TAMU), Princeton researchers Harris and Tienda found “an annual decrease in Hispanic applicants of up to 309 at UT, and nearly 500 at TAMU,” according to a press release for Springer’s journal, “Race and Social Problems”.