Talk To Me Like I’m Stupid: The Texas Affirmative Action Case.

The state of Texas attempted to diversify its student body in a race-neutral way that could survive a constitutional challenge. Their novel idea: granting automatic entry to any of the Lone Star State’s institutions of higher education for any Texas high school student who finished in the top 10 percent of her class. Because Texas’s public schools, like those around the country, are so segregated, the plan would ultimately diversify the student bodies of its public colleges and universities — and its flagship, the University of Texas at Austin, in particular — as the top 10 percent of kids from an all-black high school in Dallas would get in, as would the top 10 percent of kids from a mostly Hispanic high school in El Paso.

After the files of the non-top-10% applicants are scored, they are plotted on a matrix for the school or major for which admission is sought, with the Academic Index on one axis and the Personal Achievement Index on the other. After considering the number of students in each cell and the available spaces for a particular major, admissions officers draw a stair-step line on the matrix, dividing the cells of applicants who will be admitted from those that will be denied. For each cell, admission is an all-or-nothing proposition: all the applicants in a cell are either admitted or denied.

Which brings us to Abigail Fisher, the petitioner in this case, who says that she was not granted entry to UT-Austin because she’s white, and that UT’s policy violates the Constitution because it considers race. (There was a second petitioner originally, but she dropped out of the case.) Fisher, who has since graduated from Louisiana State, applied to UT-Austin for fall 2008, with a high school GPA of 3.59 and an SAT score of 1180 out of 1600. Okay scores, but not spectacular.

UT said in its amicus brief that the given how competitive the ’08 freshman class was, Fisher “would not have been admitted even if she had received ‘a ‘perfect’ PAI score of 6.'” Fisher was also denied entry to UT’s (since-scuttled) sumer program, which gave provisional admission to kids who were denied outright if they completed certain academic requirements over the summer. The school said that one black kid and four Latin@ kids with Academic Index/Personal Achievement Index scores that were the same or lower than Fisher’s were admitted to the summer program, but so were 42 white kids with identical or lower schools. “In addition, 168 African-American and Hispanic applicants in this pool who had combined AI/PAI scores identical to or higher than petitioner’s were denied admission to the summer program,” the university wrote. [Emphasis theirs.]