University of Texas efforts to increase student diversity in jeopardy

A key part of how the College of Texas goals to draw a various pupil physique may quickly be undone.

• Many candidates to the state’s flagship college in Austin obtain a so-called holistic assessment that takes race and ethnicity into consideration — together with grades, essays, language spoken at residence, management qualities and standardized-test scores.

Driving the information The U.S. Supreme Court docket is broadly anticipated to rule later this yr that colleges cannot explicitly think about candidates’ race.

Why it issues: A various pupil physique, which might foster a extra enriching instructional expertise for all college students, is beneath menace.

Between the traces: UT officers are outdated palms at reshaping their admissions insurance policies to attempt to construct a various set of scholars.

Flashback: In 1996 a federal court docket struck down UT Legislation College’s affirmative-action admissions coverage, in Hopwood v. Texas, for Cheryl Hopwood, one among 4 white college students who sued the college alleging they’d been discriminated towards as a result of the legislation college gave preferential therapy to individuals of shade.

• The state then adopted a type of affirmative motion that has held as much as lawsuits by guaranteeing admission to all state universities for college kids who graduated within the high 10% of their Texas high-school class.
• The rule is now restricted to the highest 6% at UT Austin.
• By guaranteeing admission to college students from all elements of the state, together with from excessive colleges which can be mainly Black or Latino, the legislation has elevated geographic and racial range within the admissions course of.

Between the traces: As we speak, no less than three-fourths of UT’s freshmen from Texas achieve admission that manner.

• Most different candidates obtain the holistic assessment.

The intrigue: The present Supreme Court docket challenges to affirmative motion insurance policies had been spearheaded by Edward Blum, a UT alum who has beforehand attacked the college’s admissions insurance policies.

By the numbers: UT’s 52,384 undergraduate and graduate college students within the fall had been 34.6% White, 24.8% Hispanic, 21.1% Asian and 5.3% Black.

What they’re saying: UT officers declined to make anybody within the admissions workplace or president’s workplace obtainable for an Axios interview about how the college is planning for a post-affirmative-action panorama.

• “The ruling itself is fairly unpredictable and so it may very well be very far reaching or it may very well be extra slender, it may go in both route,” Julie J. Park, an affiliate professor within the School of Schooling on the College of Maryland, informed Axios.
• “Establishments are simply going to be scrambling,” she mentioned.