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 economically disadvantaged student population exceeding the state average of 60.2%. Even with these numbers, however, Caucasian students were the majority racial group admitted to the University of Texas at Austin (“UT”) via TTPL in 2012, 2013, and 2014. Thus, this essay concludes, as did the brief, that “racial isolation in schools is a perverse and insufficient means to attain diversity in higher education.”
Citation: Shakira D. Pleasant, More than Just the Numbers: Fisher v. Texas and the Practical Impact of Texas’s Top Ten Percent Law, 24 U. Miami Bus. L. Rev. 111 (2016).
