Percent plans, automatic admissions, and college outcomes

Lindsay Daugherty,Paco Martorell,Isaac Mcfarlin

doi:10.1186/2193-8997-3-10

Abstract

Abstract Access to selective universities is highly coveted because of the perception that attending one provides opportunities otherwise difficult to obtain. To broaden access to the state’s flagship universities in a manner that does not rely on conventional affirmative action, Texas passed the Top Ten Percent Plan in 1997, which guarantees automatic admission to any public university in the state to students in the top decile of their high school class. We estimate the effect of eligibility for automatic admissions on college choice and persistence for students in a diverse urban school district. Regression discontinuity estimates show that eligibility for guaranteed admissions has a substantial impact on enrollments at Texas flagship universities and increases the number of semesters enrolled at flagships. The increase in flagship enrollments appears to displace enrollments in private universities but has no effect on overall college enrollment or the quality of college attended. The effects are concentrated in schools that have high college-sending rates (relative to other schools in the district), suggesting that automatic admissions may have little effect on students in the most disadvantaged schools. Jel I2

Highlights

An influential body of research shows that the college wage premium has risen in recent decades (Katz and Murphy, 1992; Juhn et al 1993; Goldin and Katz, 2008)
Our findings show that eligibility for automatic admissions under the Top Ten Percent (TTP) Plan increases the likelihood that students in our sample enroll at a Texas flagship university
We find some evidence that barely being in the top ten percent of one’s class increases the total number of semesters enrolled at a flagship university over the four years following high school graduation

Summary

Introduction

An influential body of research shows that the college wage premium has risen in recent decades (Katz and Murphy, 1992; Juhn et al 1993; Goldin and Katz, 2008). Percent plans, including the Texas TTP Plan arose as an attempt to formulate a policy that would help maintain diversity in competitive public universities in a way that did not explicitly give admissions preferences based on race (U.S Department of Education 2003). The idea behind these plans is that the top students in schools with high concentrations of low-income and underrepresented minority students would be eligible for admissions preferences even if their other credentials (e.g., SAT scores) were lower than those of students in more competitive high schools who did not qualify for the admissions preference. The extent to which percent plans would increase diversity in selective public universities depends on there being considerable segregation across high schools by race and socioeconomic status (Horn and Flores, 2003)

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