Curtis Westbay"UT-Austin is so hard for Chinese applicants to get into. I don't know why."
When a colleague said this to me in 2018, I didn't know why, either. The University of Texas- Austin is the flagship public university in Texas, the second most populous state in America. It has a huge undergraduate population (in fall 2019, the fifth most undergraduates in the U.S., around 40,000). It has the second largest endowment fund (over $30 billion) of any American university, public or private, behind only Harvard. It is a renowned research university that caught my eye as an undergraduate for its reputation as one of the top schools for graduate study in Latin philology. And yet, in my experience and that of the colleague who said this to me, UT is unexpectedly difficult for Chinese applicants relative to its rank (#42 in this year's U.S. News U.S. university ranking).
I don't expect college counselors to comb Supreme Court opinions to discover anything about the admission processes of individual schools. But when I went down a rabbit-hole of court cases, this case finally provided me the answer to this question. There are advantages of being easily distracted sometimes, it seems.
The Top 10% Law in Texas
As high school counselors, we may not care too much about Supreme Court jurisprudence, but university administrators do. To boot, they have teams of lawyers on retainer to care about them, as well. After Bakke, the University of Michigan looked at the precedent to establish new admission policies. After Grutter v. Bollinger, colleges looked again at their admission policies to reduce legal liability. Between the two cases, Texas enacted Texas House Bill 588— a.k.a. the Top 10% Law. It was exactly the sort of law that, in the majority opinion from Grutter, the Supreme Court seemed to endorse in theory, if not in practice. [Side note— the Top 10% Law was actually a response to yet another court decision, a case called Hopwood v. Texas.]
The law states that, for Texas high school students, if you are in the top 10% of your high school graduating class, you are automatically admitted to schools in the UT system. Hearing about this was the moment of realization for me.
From 1999 to 2008, in 10 application cycles, at least 90% of each incoming freshman class came from Texas every year.
The year I graduated from high school— 2008— a high school graduate from Texas named Abigail Fisher applied to, and was rejected by, UT-Austin. Then, she sued UT-Austin, claiming that the Top 10% Law created an admission policy that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The case was pretty baseless, and in 2016, the Supreme Court rejected it in a 4-3 decision. That it was rejected by a one-vote margin is indicative of conservative permeation of the highest judicial body in the U.S. The notion that the Top 10% Law, a functionally race-neutral policy, would favor minority applicants is not intellectually strenuous enough to discuss here.
In any event, Fisher v. University of Texas provided the public with a view of the innerworkings of UT's admission process. UT is extremely transparent regardless. You can view years worth of their admission data at this webpage.
Quick facts about Fisher v. UT-Austin
- In fall 2008— 620 students from mainland China were enrolled at UT-Austin. That's for the entire undergraduate population, not the incoming freshman class. Of the 3,515 students in UT-Austin's freshman class of 2008, 208 (5.9%) were non-US citizens, and only 116 (3.3%) were international students!
- Abigail Fisher applied with a 3.59 unweighted GPA and an 1180 SAT score. These two factors constitute the student's Academic Index score (AI). She was not in the top 10% of her high school graduating class. In 2008, for in-state applicants, only 47 students were admitted to UT-Austin with a lower AI than her, 42 of whom were white.
- When a student from Texas is not in the top 10% of their class, the admission process changes for them. In addition to consideration of their academic scores, the rest of their application factors into the decision: essays, activities, leadership, service, and "special circumstances."
- "Special circumstances" may refer to a student's level of responsibility at home (e.g. they may be a caretaker for a parent, which may have affected their academic performance in high school); their socioeconomic background (e.g. they may have had to work a job to assist their family); or their race.
- These soft elements of the college application constitute the Personal Achievement Index, and students get a score out of 6. From the brief that UT-Austin's legal team submitted to the Supreme Court: "even if [Fisher] had earned 'a perfect PAI score of 6,' she would not have been admitted to the Fall 2008 freshman class."
Conclusion:
Sometimes, a college is remarkably competitive, despite its rank. In the case of UT-Austin, we know why. But not every university has been the subject of a Supreme Court case which laid bare its admission process.
Each college decides its own process for admitting new students, including the proportions of racial sub-groups within its population. In almost every case, these processes are opaque, but that doesn't mean we can't observe trends over time.
Each year, as we have more students apply to college from our schools in China, we learn more about the likelihood of admission for our students. Usually, we can only rely on the acceptances and rejections of our students as a guide for chancing. When it comes to UT-Austin, the story goes much deeper than that.