Affirmative Action the Texas Way. (April 15, 2008)

As president of the United States, George W Bush may have been the willing tool of the Neocons and a rolling disaster, but as Governor of Texas, it appears that he oversaw the inauguration of a program that made higher education available to thousands of matriculated high school students who otherwise would not have been given the opportunity of going to university.

Now in its tenth year the program has evoked the interest of British educationists.

As Richard Scorer reports in The Guardian today: "After a legal challenge to affirmative action policies prevented universities in Texas from considering race as a factor in admissions, the state's legislators came up with an innovative alternative. In an attempt to make affirmative action colour blind, the top 10% of students at all the state's high schools were granted automatic admission to state universities."

In short if you were in the top 10% in your high school you got an automatic admission, others had to take entrance examinations.

As it turned out to the surprise of a number of educators who "feared that even the best students at poor rural and inner-city high schools would never survive academically at top colleges such as the University of Texas" after 10 years the system works.

Mr Scorer reports: "At the University of Texas at Austin, students admitted under the '10% rule' tend to get better grades than other students. They have a higher rate of graduation. Racial diversity has improved; the number of Hispanic and African-American students has risen by around 30% for each group. The student body has become much more economically and geographically diverse."

The approach has also affected the type of students that are drawn from minority groups: "Poor white students from rural Texas and poor urban black students now get a real chance of entering a top university. That does far more to promote genuine diversity than the traditional affirmative action programmes, which tended to give preferential admissions to children of upper-income ethnic minority families."

Perhaps those attending the 2020 summit this weekend might give that Texas initiative a thought and consider whether or not it could serve as a model for Australia?