Cleaning House
May 15th, 2007 at 10:16 am
It’s likely that the biggest change we’ll see in higher education this session is SB 101 — a rejiggering of the top 10 percent automatic college admissions rule. The bill lets state-funded universities cap the number of students they admit under the top 10 percent rule at half their incoming class. (Currently, every school has to admit all top-10-percenters who apply.)
That’s the basic provision at the heart of Sen. Florence Shapiro’s bill. Taken on its own, that wouldn’t fly with many senators who see top 10 percent as a tool for boosting minority and rural enrollment. So Shapiro (R—Plano) and other senators crafted a compromise. They tacked on a handful of extra provisions in committee, and on the floor, until the bill had the universal appeal it needed.
Time and again during floor debate, Shapiro refused to accept more heavy-handed amendments from Sens. Dan Patrick (to limit out-of-state admissions), Tommy Williams (to remove the top 10 percent rule entirely) and others. She said her bill represented a careful compromise, a result of weeks of work to drum up support from as many members as possible, including Sen. Royce West (D—Dallas), who had been opposing the bill. The Senate passed Shapiro’s delicate, finely worded piece of legislation 28-2, but then they did something really dumb.
They sent it to the House.
Of course, they didn’t have much choice about that — but the House Higher Education Committee heard SB 101 Monday morning, and it was clear from the start that those weeks of careful compromise didn’t draw a lot of water among House members.
Chair Geanie Morrison (R—Victoria) said she’d simply removed all the compromise elements from the Senate version. That way, the committee could “just pass a 50 percent cap, and the House can decide as a body what we want to decide to put in the legislation….I wanted to bring a clean bill” to the House floor, she told her committee.
Passing a “clean” 50 percent admissions cap would do the most to limit top-tenners’ access to UT-Austin, the school this bill is aimed at. Luis Figueroa, of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the committee that cap could effectively give UT-Austin a top five percent rule instead.
It’s likely, though, that there’ll be plenty of amendments once SB 101 hits the House floor, and at least some of them will stick. If the final House version, amendments and all, is sufficiently different from what the Senate passed, the details would have to be worked out quickly by a conference committee that could include some ornery senators wondering what happened to the careful compromise they made.
The Senate’s extras, which Morrison cut, include:
• Another 10 percent of the incoming class must come from the pool of top-tenners who didn’t make the first cut; individual choices are at the school’s discretion.
• Any school that implements the cap on top-10-percent students would have to offer $4 million in scholarships to students from in-state.
• All top 10 percent students get a $1,500 scholarship from the state, for whatever school they eventually attend.
• The bill’s provisions will sunset in 2015, and Texas will go back to the top 10 percent law we have today (forcing the Legislature to renew this debate in eight years).
