'Percent Plans' Come Up Short, Says Harvard Study
Feature Story by Civilrights.org staff - 2/20/2003
The Harvard University Civil Rights Project has issued two reports that conclude that percent plans are not effective replacements for traditional affirmative action."Appearance and Reality in the Sunshine State: The Talented 20 Program in Florida" and "Percent Plans in College Admissions: A Comparative Analysis of Three States' Experiences" compare the strategies and ultimate shortcomings of the Texas, California, and Florida alternatives to traditional affirmative action.
The upcoming Supreme Court decisionsin Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger will decide the future of affirmative action, making the timing of these reports especially pertinent. The Bush administration has filled a brief opposing the University of Michigan procedures, while maintaining strong support for the percent plans that are now in place in the three states.
These percent plans dictate that a certain percentage of every graduating class of every high school in the state be admitted to a state school. Presumably, this removes other barriers to minority enrollment and will provide a diverse pool of students.
The Harvard report details how these plans have not had the kind of universally positive results portrayed by the Bush administration and other critics of traditional affirmative action.
As Catherine Horn of the Civil Rights Project stated, "The reports show that percent plans are clearly not effective substitutes for race-conscious admissions policies. They cannot be applied at national universities, private universities, or graduate and professional school programs, and they simply do not yield the levels of diversity that race-conscious admissions policies produce."
The Civil Rights Project was careful to emphasize that while there are crucial differences between the three state programs, there are also weaknesses in all of them.
- Florida grants admission to a state school to the top twenty percent of each high school class. This is no way guarantees admission to the most competitive colleges, which are also the ones most in need of higher minority enrollment. The program is hindered by the fact that, "the talented 20 includes far more White and Asian students than Blacks and Hispanics."
- Texas is the only state of the three that gives the student the choice of campuses. However, it uses a more competitive 10 percent plan. The failings of percent plans can be seen in the precipitous drop in minorities attending Texas A and M since affirmative action was ended in the state.
- California has the most discerning plan, with only the top four percent of graduates assured admission to state schools. Another complication is that two of its state schools are two of the most competitive colleges in America. This has lead to accusations of "cascading" minorities to less selective campuses.
- All three states had low minority enrollment in their universities before affirmative action was ended, despite the fact that all three have rising population rates of African-Americans and Hispanics. Harvard noted that students in these states face great educational disparities long before the college level, disparities that are reinforced through the percent plans.
Many staunch supporters of affirmative action, including corporations, universities and organizations, including the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), a longtime supporter of affirmative action as a vital means to help ensure equal opportunity in America, have filed amicus briefs in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger.
