Do universities exist for students? Or do students exist for universities?
I'm sure university administration believe the latter, but given that they're supported by the state (in UT's case, ~25% of their budget?) there's a pretty strong argument that they owe the people of the state education.
Unfortunately, what I suspect is going on with all this high minded "get rid of the SATs" is really going to at least help the universities combat what was an increasing pressure to do pre and post testing to validate or establish the value of a university's program. You cannot as easily gain useful information if you have no pre-test.
The very irony of this is of course that it is a kind of deliberate and manipulative breaking of the scientific process by universities who will simply claim even more profusely that their graduates improve over 4 years of study, without any control of variables.
The only possibility I see to circumvent what may be a devious scheme is for citizens to press state Legislatures to require a pre-test on entry and a post-test on graduation. Expect extreme pushback though because the data that is available strongly indicates that universities are largely not actually conferring the value one may expect. In other words, the quality of the students on entry is the primary determination of the quality of the student on graduation, which seems to hold across the board.
The administration will all profess a desire not to be so beholden but it’s part of the game so to speak, you have to play.
Source: current board member of a public university college
I hadn't considered that. Good insight.
Rankings are an easy "objective" measurement administrators can take to financial supporters (either government or private) and say "Here's what we're spending your dollars on." Consequently, rankings become very important to administrators.
The metric that can be measured is not the eternal metric. The result that can be result-driven is not the eternal result.
The best students were called 4clickers. They sat in the front row, with four color pens in hand. They never helped, and one on occasion turned her in for cheating. She used to talk about how competitive thstudrnts were. They all wanted a spot in a graduate program. It was the most depressing school I ever visited. Couldn't wait to leave on Sunday. (I was suprised she cheated, but it taught me something about "the high caliber" student.)
But if you're in one of those programs where the Undergrad is fairly worthless by itself and are competing for a limited number of slots at a prestigious grad program, that's when then cutthroats start to emerge.
Regardless, the argument here is simply which people they select. Assuming they hold 90% of spots for Texans (required by law), it's just a question of how they select people. The university wants to select the strongest students holistically (which some additional diversification criteria) - the state wants it to select the top 7% of students from every high school. Even if you argue the people are owed a state education, either criterion is a valid way to select the students that attend.
I believe california has a similar program (or did at some time since Bakke), specifically for UC (the "higher tier" university system, versus cal state system)
It doesn't get you into the top UC though (which Texas' program does), just any. There is wide variance in UC schools.
And what is the "top" UC anyways. This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I personally think more favorably of UCSD over cal, and, for some disciplines Davis or SC over cal. UCLA is highly regarded across the board and probably exceeds cal, for, say pre-nursing program.
The reason this exists is that it's effectively an affirmative action program for both urban segregated schools and rural schools, which combined have enough political power to pull this off. I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for this to be constructed - note that suburbs in general fight against such policies.
UT itself generally doesn't like the state mandated policy because it results in a less academically strong cohort than other flagship universities, reducing its rank.
Whether one school's admission program is "better" or not depends on what you view as the purpose of universities (something often lost in these conversations). Are you weighing more academically similar cohort (in which case purely predictive measures of performance are most appropriate) or some sort of equity metric where putting students from less socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds with stronger ones can result in higher upward mobility? One can certainly make the case that the Texan system could be failing on both accounts compared to say UCs, but you'd need to try to build a causal model to understand which school is producing better results for students that arrive.