Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Yep. As they've done since 1996, when Texas' Top 10 percent rule became law, there is a drive in the Legislature to undermine the automatic admission to any public university for the top 10th of each high school graduating class.

Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, wants to cap those admissions at 50 percent of total enrollment, and her bill will probably pass in the Senate. How it will do in the House — where minorities and rural residents, the law's biggest beneficiaries, are better-represented — is another matter.

The 50 percent cap idea arose most recently last year, when University of Texas at Austin President William Powers Jr. complained in an op-ed column that since the bill's approval, UT's Top 10 percent admissions have risen each year, exceeding 70 percent last fall.

“If this trend continues unchecked,” he wrote, “we will be required to admit more than 100 percent of our class under this rule.”

That isn't a new argument, nor have the reasons for its accuracy changed.

College administrators argue that they need to assemble classes that will give students a “universal education” that expose them to peers from widely varying backgrounds, and that the Top 10 rule limits their choices of other students.

Others complain that the law is unfair to students from “better high schools” that don't make the Top 10 mark, favoring, instead, Top 10 grads from less-demanding schools. Another is that students with special attributes, such as athletic, artistic or musical prowess, or outstanding leadership ability, are crowded out by less-deserving ones from lesser schools with lower SAT scores and who don't play the violoncello or badminton, or even know what they are.

But 12 years of statistics paint a very different picture.

UT-Austin's Top 10 percenters have consistently outperformed non-Top 10 percenters — even those with much higher SAT scores — in retention and graduation rates as well as grades. And while just a few Texas high schools once provided half of UT's frosh, today's come from a much larger array.

And we shouldn't forget that the Top 10 percent law was passed after federal courts struck down affirmative action and minority enrollment at UT and Texas A&M University plummeted. The new law was a merit-based, race-neutral alternative means to improve diversity numbers, which into the mid-1970s — when affirmative action came around — still showed UT's minority enrollment in the single digits, percentagewise.

David Montejano, an academic broadly credited with coming up with the Top 10 percent idea, points out that “in terms of diversity, the 10 percent law is doing much better than the best days of affirmative action.”

And its results have been spectacular. So what is this challenge really all about?

It's about two things. Powerful state officials who were once able to make a phone call and get a slacker kid into UT can no longer do so.

But more important, it is about Texas' dearth of Tier 1 public universities in places where good students want to study. We can fix that, and next week I'll detail what we need to do to keep Texas economically competitive.