Posted 5/12/2004 08:32:00 PM by Douglas

I don't know what kind of school UT wants to become, but apparently they're not too concerned with the people of Texas. They're trying to get rid of the automatic admission of the top 10% of Texas High School students.

The University of Texas-Austin will ask the Legislature to limit the number of students admitted under the state's Top 10 percent law, part of a new plan to shrink the state's largest public university.

UT President Larry Faulkner Tuesday endorsed recommendations of the task force on enrollment strategy that also include increasing the size of the faculty, getting more students to graduate in four years and making the school's target size 48,000 students.

Let's forget for a moment that tuition and fees quadrupled in the past decade, but now they're trying to keep their enrollment low by excluding the top 10% of Texas taxpayers that are at the top of their class?

The libertarian in me says this should go the way of the dodo. It's socialist to give red-necks from bum-fuck high schools an automatic ticket to an exceptional school like UT just because they're in Texas. But the red-neck in me sees a kid (me) in a bum-fuck high school that couldn't afford a basic college-bound curriculum (calculus, physics, computer programming, etc.) being excluded from a premiere University experience because they (me) didn't have an adequate SAT/ACT score.

The "top 10%" of my high school was 4 people, and 50% of those people graduated from UT. In four years, so suck on that, Faulkner.