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UT System Chancellor McRaven Blasts Top 10 Percent Rule
Why isn't Sharp speaking out on this?? Why is Kyle Field and Chip Brown the only things he talks about??
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UT System Chancellor McRaven Blasts Top 10 Percent Rule
Why isn't Sharp speaking out on this?? Why is Kyle Field and Chip Brown the only things he talks about??
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So UT will eventually have the highest ranked public university in every major Texas metro and A&M will have a campus in McAllen.
That pretty much sums up the leadership of the two systems.
quote:Why should he speak out about this? Trying to make entrance to a PUBLIC school as hard as Ivy League schools is flat stupid. It doesn't "diminish" the value of your degree. It may make professors think their own value is improved, but that's about it. And, as a taxpayer in this state, if tsips want to limit their political power in this state, more power to them. A&M has played second fiddle to tu for too long due to their numbers in this state. Pumping out more excellent Aggies every year is a good thing.
UT System Chancellor McRaven Blasts Top 10 Percent Rule
Why isn't Sharp speaking out on this?? Why is Kyle Field and Chip Brown the only things he talks about??
quote:Not sure why you are blaming some elitist prof for this. Speaking as a not-so-elitist prof, the really elite faculty are not as concerned about the top 10% stuff as the parents of the suburban snowflakes who aren't getting admitted. In part this is because a fair number of the faculty who get recruited in competition with the Harvards and Stanfords at a place like Texas or Texas A&M have very little direct contact with the subset of the top 10%ers who are not ready for college, and some of them have no real contact with undergrads at all. They care more about the grad students and postdocs they can recruit.quote:Why should he speak out about this? Trying to make entrance to a PUBLIC school as hard as Ivy League schools is flat stupid. It doesn't "diminish" the value of your degree. It may make professors think their own value is improved, but that's about it. And, as a taxpayer in this state, if tsips want to limit their political power in this state, more power to them. A&M has played second fiddle to tu for too long due to their numbers in this state. Pumping out more excellent Aggies every year is a good thing.
UT System Chancellor McRaven Blasts Top 10 Percent Rule
Why isn't Sharp speaking out on this?? Why is Kyle Field and Chip Brown the only things he talks about??
I don't give two ****s what some elitist professor thinks of himself.
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UT System Chancellor McRaven Blasts Top 10 Percent Rule
Why isn't Sharp speaking out on this?? Why is Kyle Field and Chip Brown the only things he talks about??
quote:quote:Not sure why you are blaming some elitist prof for this. Speaking as a not-so-elitist prof, the really elite faculty are not as concerned about the top 10% stuff as the parents of the suburban snowflakes who aren't getting admitted. In part this is because a fair number of the faculty who get recruited in competition with the Harvards and Stanfords at a place like Texas or Texas A&M have very little direct contact with the subset of the top 10%ers who are not ready for college, and some of them have no real contact with undergrads at all. They care more about the grad students and postdocs they can recruit.quote:Why should he speak out about this? Trying to make entrance to a PUBLIC school as hard as Ivy League schools is flat stupid. It doesn't "diminish" the value of your degree. It may make professors think their own value is improved, but that's about it. And, as a taxpayer in this state, if tsips want to limit their political power in this state, more power to them. A&M has played second fiddle to tu for too long due to their numbers in this state. Pumping out more excellent Aggies every year is a good thing.
UT System Chancellor McRaven Blasts Top 10 Percent Rule
Why isn't Sharp speaking out on this?? Why is Kyle Field and Chip Brown the only things he talks about??
I don't give two ****s what some elitist professor thinks of himself.
There are at least two distinct issues related to admissions and the top 10% in my view. The first is just the math of the raw numbers and the optimal size of the universities. The main valid reason to get rid of it, in my view, is that as the denominator grows, it may be impossible to scale the flagship schools to accommodate everyone who is admitted and wants to come. If the State of Texas had gone the way of California wrt the UC System (not on everything, of course) and aimed to have more flagship-quality schools, then the load would be spread out over the state. But it seems to me that the history has made the quality difference between Austin and Arlington, or College Station and Kingsville, much greater than between Berkeley and the other UC System schools.
The second issue is how to determine the mix of admits within whatever you set as the numerical goal. IMO, you can fix the first problem within the general philosophy of the top 10% rule without doing what tu wants in scrapping it altogether. Just float the percentage. Say that X% of the total admits to the A&M and Texas will come from the top students in each HS. If that goes down only to the top 5%, fine. If it extends beyond 10%, fine. That's how I would handle it. To me, the value of diversity includes exposing kids from small farming communities to urban and suburban kids, not just having suburban kids with different skin colors or surnames. Now, I recognize that this goal might not be met if the incoming freshman classes in Austin and College Station turn into just the children of the Asian immigrant MDs in those communities, but I would be want to see data saying that was happening before worrying about that possibility.
It has always seemed to me that the pushback against the top 10% approach at tu and other places is more about control than diversity. And it has the goal of being like what I once saw written about diversity in Bill Clinton's cabinet: in addition to white male liberal Ivy League lawyers, there would be a diverse mix of liberal Ivy League lawyers of all genders, sexual orientations, and races.
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UT System Chancellor McRaven Blasts Top 10 Percent Rule
Why isn't Sharp speaking out on this?? Why is Kyle Field and Chip Brown the only things he talks about??
Because it doesn't matter what Chancellor McRaven says.
quote:All the relevant legislation happened long before McRaven was Chancellor. It's hard to tell from what I could find from a quick Google whether the driving force was lobbying from tu or from pressure from the voters in the districts represented by the sponsor (Florence Shapiro) and various cosponsors (Nelson, Dan Patrick, Seliger and Wentworth). Color me shocked to discover that Shapiro represents Plano.quote:quote:
UT System Chancellor McRaven Blasts Top 10 Percent Rule
Why isn't Sharp speaking out on this?? Why is Kyle Field and Chip Brown the only things he talks about??
Because it doesn't matter what Chancellor McRaven says.
how is it that you believe what he says does not matter when UT has already been able to get the top 10% rule down to 8% or even 7% some years and to fix the % of auto admits under the rule to a set % of the total freshman class for UT
this while A&M actually willfully passed on even trying to do so when UT made the change in the past because A&M wants to open the doors to all the 10% students they can without concern for quality or consistency of outcome
quote:if you paid attention at all you would know the proposal was put forth by UT and pushed for by UT not anyone in the legislature and both the Austin president and the System were for itquote:All the relevant legislation happened long before McRaven was Chancellor. It's hard to tell from what I could find from a quick Google whether the driving force was lobbying from tu or from pressure from the voters in the districts represented by the sponsor (Florence Shapiro) and various cosponsors (Nelson, Dan Patrick, Seliger and Wentworth). Color me shocked to discover that Shapiro represents Plano.quote:quote:
UT System Chancellor McRaven Blasts Top 10 Percent Rule
Why isn't Sharp speaking out on this?? Why is Kyle Field and Chip Brown the only things he talks about??
Because it doesn't matter what Chancellor McRaven says.
how is it that you believe what he says does not matter when UT has already been able to get the top 10% rule down to 8% or even 7% some years and to fix the % of auto admits under the rule to a set % of the total freshman class for UT
this while A&M actually willfully passed on even trying to do so when UT made the change in the past because A&M wants to open the doors to all the 10% students they can without concern for quality or consistency of outcome
In terms of the political action from tu officials, it's not clear how much was led from the Chancellor's office vs the President.
As you probably know, the reason this is in the news now is that in order to get the exemption, they had to continue race-based affirmative action programs that are currently being challenged again in the Supreme Court. From the reporting I've seen, the 2009 law is written so that the exemption goes away if SCOTUS strikes down what they've been doing in affirmative action.
A&M officials made the decision that the top 10% rule was better than having admissions officials do race based scoring of applicants. I tend to agree that the more objective measures, while flawed, are better than systems that give rise to stories like this.
One other thing I found interesting was that tu claimed that they needed to go below the top 10% to fill certain majors like Geosciences and Education, where the top 10%ers didn't want to go. It would be interesting to know if they actually used the exemption in that way and if it was successful, given the way students try to game the system. We see versions of this where students declare for our major only because they think it gives them the best chance of switching to ENGR after Engineering is full. This sucks on many levels, IMO, and it's not clear to us if it even works.
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and what would s a sponsor being from Plano have to do with it the fact is the 10% rule works against districts like Plano and going below 10% to 7% or 8% only works against them more
A&M made the decision to keep the 10% rule because they wanted more students it had nothing to do with race based admissions it had to do with warm bodies
quote:I understand the representative for lowering the 10% rule for UT was from Planoquote:
and what would s a sponsor being from Plano have to do with it the fact is the 10% rule works against districts like Plano and going below 10% to 7% or 8% only works against them more
A&M made the decision to keep the 10% rule because they wanted more students it had nothing to do with race based admissions it had to do with warm bodies
The Plano sponsor was of the tu exception to the top 10% rule, not the original top 10% law. She wanted the cap on top 10%ers to be even lower, but the final number was a compromise.
A&M's decision on the top 10% was absolutely about race based admissions after Hopwood; I remember Gates talking about it. Enrollment can be increased without the top 10% rule just by admissions decisions.
quote:I think it would really only work out that way for a Plano student that was also "diversity" (and specifically not Asian)
I think you missed the point of that law for Plano. The goal was to increase the slots for those below the top 10% by capping the fraction of automatic admissions in the freshman class. When you do that while holding enrollment constant, the top X% has to use a smaller value for X. I think the Plano rep wanted to cap automatic admits at something like 50%.
Shifting top 10% to a smaller fraction also helps kids from areas like Plano because a) the absolute numbers are smaller, leaving more room for other admits that use the criteria favored by the suburban parents, and b) the very top kids from other districts are more likely to have offers from other schools, which makes them less likely to take a slot.
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UT is capping at 50K and trying to reduce back to 45K. They'll get the best and brightest. The rest will go to A&M if they can't afford a private college. .
SMU has passed A&M in the rankings. Baylor will too in the next two years.
quote:A&M is not "turning away qualified applicants"
Well that's got to be the longest post without a lick of punctuation I've ever seen.
Bioprof is correct that lowering the 10% law would benefit the larger schools like those in Plano as a disproportionate number of slots at the universities go to rural kids. They might be smaller schools but there's many more of them in the state than 6A schools. Honestly I'm probably fine with that being the case as there are alternative auto admissions that are available (top 25% and high SAT score) which swing the pendulum back to the schools that prep for the national entrance exams better.
I'm a Plano ISD product and the 10% rule has little bearing for most of the kids the high schools produce. The competition for that echelon begins before junior high and basically demands a kid has no extra curriculars.
Also correct on the statement regarding Gates. He did away with both affirmative action and legacy points in admissions, and in turn relied on the 10% rule.
As to the point of "figuring out why 11,500 students decided to go elsewhere," that was covered previously in this thread. A&M has one of the best enrollment yields in the country. Therefore the fact that half of all applicants go elsewhere is not concerning...it far in away beats the national trend.
The consideration to continue enrollment growth is in part due to turning away qualified applicants. What I haven't heard sufficiently argued is why that would be a poor course of action if faculty and facilities grow in tandem.
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As to the point of "figuring out why 11,500 students decided to go elsewhere," that was covered previously in this thread. A&M has one of the best enrollment yields in the country. Therefore the fact that half of all applicants go elsewhere is not concerning...it far in away beats the national trend. .
quote:Link to the yield data from earlierquote:
As to the point of "figuring out why 11,500 students decided to go elsewhere," that was covered previously in this thread. A&M has one of the best enrollment yields in the country. Therefore the fact that half of all applicants go elsewhere is not concerning...it far in away beats the national trend. .
I apologize if I missed this earlier in the thread, but I assume the "national trend" includes nearly all universities including a great many that we all agree Texas A&M should be, as a university (not yield), better than.
I'm not shocked that our yield is above average nationally considering we're a very large public flagship university, with a high admissions rate (~70%), and in a region that's not particularly overflowing with high quality universities.
I think the more interesting statistic would be our yield for higher quality applicants. (And within that group I'd also be interested to see our yield for out-of-state students.)
UT-Austin's desire to minimize automatic admissions is certainly a control measure. The fewer students automatically admitted, the more control you have. I have mixed emotions about affirmative action, but, although I don't know much about what kind of weight it plays in UT-Austin's undergraduate admissions process, I'm sure they have much more control over which students they allow in to achieve "diversity" and I know they certainly have the more diverse campus.
Whether affirmative action should exist, the importance of diversity on campus, and even what "diversity" means...those are ideological discussions I personally don't want to have, but there is no doubt having liberal automatic admissions policies lower university control over the makeup of their student body.
quote:A few points:
The consideration to continue enrollment growth is in part due to turning away qualified applicants. What I haven't heard sufficiently argued is why that would be a poor course of action if faculty and facilities grow in tandem.
quote:You cannot pin it as "simply idiotic" without knowing which kids are coming to A&M and which kids are not.
Seeing 11,500 kids go elsewhere as a bad sign is simply idiotic. Are you telling me that because those 11,500 kids went elsewhere A&M had to lower their standards and admit kids that would not have qualified had there not been those empty spaces voided by the 11,500?
Aren't the kids being admitted still in the 10% & or SAT standards?
quote:In the huge scheme of 4-year advanced education, yes, I agree and don't argue A&M is not a "back-up" school but I for me that has ever really been the argument in the thread. Its about where A&M's place among public system flagships and reputable private schools is, will, and should be.
Link to the yield data from earlier
The factors leading to the yield itself are difficult to discern. Factors like affordability, distance from home, specialized programs or religious affiliation all have meaningful effects in a decision to attend a university, not just the academic ranking.
But the story that it tells is that A&M is not some back up school (as has been claimed on this thread by a few folks) and that the overall enrollment percentage is quite high when viewed against the full range of universities nationally and exceptionally strong among public universities. This would be affirmative support for your statement that A&M should be viewed as better (or at least preferable to) the majority of other universities out there.
quote:Have y'all defined what "qualified applicant" even means?
We are absolutely turning away academically qualified applicants. I have family members that lived that fact.
quote:Who would you rank as the top 10 universities in the United States?
Just another way TAMU is beating everyone else's ass.
To those that say tu is surpassing A&M--I'm not sure what you're smoking.
quote:quote:You cannot pin it as "simply idiotic" without knowing which kids are coming to A&M and which kids are not.
Seeing 11,500 kids go elsewhere as a bad sign is simply idiotic. Are you telling me that because those 11,500 kids went elsewhere A&M had to lower their standards and admit kids that would not have qualified had there not been those empty spaces voided by the 11,500?
Aren't the kids being admitted still in the 10% & or SAT standards?
Lets put top 10% (and other) automatic admits aside for a second and talk about non-automatic admits, we have hundreds or thousands of them running around campus.
Pretend that we have 1000 spots for we want/need to fill with non-automatic admits. If the 1000 top applicants all accepted and attended A&M, we had a yield of 100%, we would accept the 1000 top admits and our student body would be composed of those 1000 best applicants. However, any time one of those top 1000 declines A&M, you start accepting applicant 10001, 1002, and so on...so yes, if your best applicants do not attend your school you either have to accept a smaller student class or accept applicants who have lesser qualifications.
So, yes, anytime admitted students go somewhere else, your standards have probably been forced to be lowered unless those students were on the lower end of your applicant pool.
And yes, this happens just about everywhere, and like I said before, the question for me is less what is your overall yield, but which particular students are enrolling and not enrolling. If the top 47% of our accepted students enrolled, it'd be great but I suspect that is far from the case.
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I agree that would be interesting and telling to see what schools applicants turn down or accept in lieu of A&M, but so far as I'm aware that data doesn't exist. I could well be wrong, but I believe it would have to be mined from the individual applicants.
quote:quote:Who would you rank as the top 10 universities in the United States?
Just another way TAMU is beating everyone else's ass.
To those that say tu is surpassing A&M--I'm not sure what you're smoking.
I'll go ahead and play spoiler and tell you that the 10 largest university campuses in the United States are Arizona State, Central Florida, Ohio State, Florida International, Texas A&M, Minnesota, UT-Austin, Michigan State, Florida, and Indiana.
How many of those 10 schools made your list of top 10?
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So my question for you is, do you REALLY think there is a difference in applicant 1000 & applicant 1001?
I still don't see where you know which of the 11,500 that went elsewhere were not replaced by someone just as good or maybe even better.
You realize there are a lot of applicants these days and 11,500 is a very small number.
Surely you don't think a large portion of those 11,500 all just decided to go to sip, do you? A few hundred, sure, but a few hundred sip applicants also came to A&M.
