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Law
changes graduate school admissions Kelly Shallock, a senior speech pathology major, always knew that experiences people have when they are children impact the rest of their lives. She just never imagined it could affect her admission into a graduate school program. “Your childhood is important because it shapes who you become, but you’re applying right now, not back then,” Shallock said. According to a state law passed in June, public graduate schools in Texas may now consider 11 new factors when deciding graduate admissions and scholarship, including responsibilities as far back as elementary school and a person’s socioeconomic background.
The intent of the new law, which went into effect Sept. 1, is to make it easier for students, especially minority students, to get into graduate school, said state Rep. Fred Brown, R-College Station, vice chair of the House Higher Education Committee. He said recruiting minority students for graduate schools has been especially hard since the Hopwood case in 1996, which resulted in Texas being banned from using race or ethnicity as a criterion in admissions. “We have lost a large number of our brightest and best minority students to other colleges around the United States,” Brown said. “We’re seeing a lot of our students go off to universities in other states. And when that happens, 90 percent of those students never return to Texas.” The author of the bill, Rep. Irma Rangel, D-Kingsville, chairwoman of the House Higher Education Committee, said she was concerned when the Hopwood case said that race should not be considered because anyone who was admitted to a university would have had to show they earned their admission. “For fear that maybe they did not know what to resort to other than race, we wanted to go ahead and list some factors that a graduate program could look to in their consideration of admission for students,” Rangel said. According to the law, graduate schools may no longer use standardized test scores as the sole criterion in the admissions or competitive scholarship process. Dean of Admissions Ray Brown said he thinks this law is an attempt to finally address some of the educational inequities that exist in the United States. “The public sector has (spent) a lifetime of avoiding controversy by relying on solely quantitative factors, that is, grades, test scores and class rank,” Ray Brown said. “It doesn’t make sense to make decisions on grades and tests alone. There are just too many other factors involved.” Fred Brown said the law received little opposition because of the expected positive outcomes that would result from moving toward a more complete individual portrait of students. “We wanted to make sure that we were on an even playing field with the rest of the country so we could attract these graduate students and keep them in our Texas institutions,” Fred Brown said. The first round of applications under this new law are currently being reviewed, so the results are not clear yet, Fred Brown said. At the University of Texas at Austin, no changes regarding the law have been made to the graduate school applications because the university shares a common application with a number of other Texas schools, said Rick Cherwitz, associate dean of graduate studies at UT. Instead, the graduate program sent an e-mail to applicants asking the level of education of their father and mother since that is one of the best kinds of information that can quickly be gathered to establish socioeconomic status, he said. Cherwitz said that most of the university’s departments already look at the individual applicant more than just test results. He said they consider the applicant’s statement of intent, interviews, writing samples, letters of recommendation, portfolios, transcripts and grades. “All admissions decisions at the graduate level are made by the faculty in the student’s specific area, so these are very carefully examined credentials, and it’s not just the numbers,” Cherwitz said. At Texas Tech University, it is up to the department on the graduate level to decide what criteria will count more than others, said Judith Toyama, assistant dean for graduate admissions at Texas Tech. She said that she does have two concerns with applying this new criteria to the application process. “One concern is whether the student is actually telling the true story because there is no way we can check,” Toyama said. “There are some people that would like it confirmed, and there are others that don’t think people could lie about things like that. The second is whether it is relevant to the field that they choose.” In spite of these concerns, Cherwitz said that the law will help by raising involvement for underrepresented groups at the graduate level. “We need some really strong measures to be taken if we want to really recruit an additional number of underrepresented minorities,” Cherwitz said. Laura
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