Does Forced Admission Decrease Diversity?

The University of Texas at Austin has been forced to offer admission to a record number of Texas high school students using just a single criteria — class ranking — and that has hurt the university's ability to increase its racial and ethnic diversity, the school's president said Wednesday.

Eighty-one percent of the students being offered admission to UT's 2008 fall freshman class got in because they graduated in the top 10 percent of their high schools. That number is up 10 percent over 2007 figures and likely will rise to include all students in the not-too-distant future, William Powers Jr. warned.

On Wednesday and in testimony before a House panel a day earlier, Powers said the university could attract a more diverse student body if it was not forced by the state, under a decade-old law, to accept every student with a high class rank.