Last week, the Texas Senate voted to limit Top 10 Percent admissions to 50 percent of any state university's total freshman class. And last week, a House committee agreed.

This is not about a simple problem. It is an undeniable symptom of a much greater problem that we Texans refuse to face: We don't have enough top-end universities that smart kids want to attend.

If the Top 10 Percent Rule isn't altered or somehow limited, says University of Texas at Austin President William Powers Jr., within two years the entire freshmen class will be composed of high school graduates who finished in the top tenth of their classes.

Is that really all that bad?

Well, not really, says David Montejano, who is credited with coming up with the Top 10 Percent Rule while he was on the UT faculty. He now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.

“Welcome to the world of higher education,” he chuckles. “Now they will be able to choose which Top 10 Percent students they want.”

The undergraduate classes of the nation's top universities — public and especially private — are heavily populated with the top decant of each state's high school graduating classes. The reason, he says, is that the top tenth of graduating classes are the high school students who are most focused and most studious.

Students with stellar scores on college entrance exams whose grades aren't commensurately high, Montejano says, are another matter. Grade-wise, high test scorers are too often “brilliant slackers who only do great on things they're interested in.”

And they aren't likely to do that well in college either.

The Top 10 Percent Rule has done wonders in many ways, Montejano says. While a handful of Texas high schools once provided more than half of UT's frosh, now the diversity of the student body is noticeable. They come from a vast array of the state's high schools. They now represent much more of what Texas is about.

But we should not forget that the Top 10 Percent Rule does not apply only to UT-Austin. Any student who graduates in the top 10th of his or her class is automatically admitted to any public university supported by the state.

UT-Austin's last freshman crop had more than 70 percent who were admitted under that rule. And judging from the growth rate, that school's admissions administrators won't have anything to do after next year.

But Texas A&M University-College Station and UT-Dallas are the only two other state universities that even approach the 50 percent level in admissions. Their administrators aren't worried about that problem at all.

Clearly, if there is a problem with Top 10 Percent admissions, it isn't about admissions, it is about where students want to go to study.