Data—actual facts—demonstrate that Texas’s Top Ten Percent Law (“TTPL”) is insufficient to achieve diversity in the state’s universities and colleges.1 A significant amount of TTPL students graduated from hyper-segregated schools where African-American and Latino/a students, combined, comprised 80% or more of the total school population. Also, a substantial amount of these hyper-segregated schools had an […]

Adam Lamparello – In Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (“Fisher II”), the United States Supreme Court will decide the constitutionality of the University of Texas’s (“University”) affirmative action policy, and the potential impact of the Court’s decision on affirmative action programs nationwide is being widely debated. Some commentators fear that the Court is […]

Junis L Baldon – The concept of “racial neutrality” remains omnipresent in our political and judicial discourse about the use of race in college and university admissions.  Proponents of “race neutrality” have advocated for the use of class-based, socioeconomic affirmative action as a possible alternative to the explicit use of race in college and university admissions. Indeed, […]

Jonathan R. Zell – Most elite colleges and universities employ a so-called “holistic”-admissions system to select all of their incoming students.  In contrast, the University of Texas at Austin (“UT”)—one of the parties in the Supreme Court’s Fisher cases—uses holistic admissions to admit only 20% to 25% of its undergraduate students.  The remaining 75% to 80% […]