Giving Compass' Take:

• Jill Barshay discusses the failure of the Texas 10% policy to increase diversity at flagship universities and the barriers to entry for underrepresented groups.

• Barshay points to a lack of student awareness of the importance of flagship schools as a missing element to the success of this policy. What are ways to support underrepresented students in the college decision process? What are other solutions to augment this policy?

• Read more about improving diversity and inclusion practices in higher education.

Research is showing that a policy that takes the top students from the state’s high schools didn’t increase diversity in Texas’s elite universities or increase the number of high schools that feed them.

Beginning in 1998, Texas guaranteed admission to its most selective public universities to any student who graduated in the top 10 percent of his or her high school. The goal was to find a way to increase the enrollment of black and Latino students after a federal court banned race-based affirmative action in the state.

“We found that high schools were just as likely to send students to the flagships after the policy as they were before,” said Daniel Klasik, an assistant professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

According to the researchers’ calculations, 45 percent of Texas’s 1,700 public high schools never sent students to UT Austin and Texas A&M, College Station, in the years before the 10 percent program. After the policy change, only 7 of these 775 “never” high schools consistently sent any students to these two flagships. Nearly half never sent a single student to either flagship in the 18 years between 1998 and 2016.

Thousands of high-achieving students have an automatic seat at a flagship but aren’t taking them. Why?

One thing noticed in this study was that extra recruitment efforts at underrepresented high schools, combined with a small amount of scholarship funds, increased the likelihood that a high school would start sending its top students to the flagships by double digits.

For the flagships, the lesson from this study is that the effort to visit remote and unfamiliar high schools can pay off. For high school guidance counselors, the researchers say the lesson is that high achieving kids need more support.

Read the full article about the Texas 10% policy by Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report.