Texas has been in the news a lot this week -- from state Sen. Wendy Davis's epic filibuster against a set of "small government" abortion restrictions, to AG Greg Abbott's announcement that in light of the SCOTUS decision that nobody is attempting to suppress minority votes any more, he's going to go suppress some minority voting rights -- to the point that, somehow, the affirmative action case involving the University of Texas at Austin's admissions process has gotten swept under the rug a bit.
Now, this is in no way intended as a defense of Abigail Fisher, the plaintiff in that case. By all accounts, she was in no way qualified for admission to the University of Texas and decided to sue the university on the grounds that, somehow, her skin color was the reason she didn't get in.
But there are plenty of Abigail Fishers in this state. Most of them don't go out and sue the admissions office for rejecting their application, but there are many, many young people in the state who want a high-quality university education -- and can't get one in the state of Texas.
The reason? Well, it starts with the fact that the state of Texas has exactly one public university in the US News top 50 national universities, and just two in the top 100. Compare that to California -- Texas's favorite rival these days -- which has six public universities in the top 50, and seven in the top 100. UC-Berkeley is a highly-regarded university -- but then, so are UCLA, UC-Davis, UC-Irvine, UC-San Diego, and UC-Santa Barbara. And the other two universities in the UC system (Riverside and Santa Cruz) aren't bad. Hell, even San Diego State checks in at #165 in the US News rankings -- tied with Texas Tech, the #4 school in Texas.
So, the University of Texas's Austin campus, the flagship campus, has roughly 8,000 spots in its freshman class; that's in a state that in 2012 had about 290,000 high school seniors. Between the two of them, UT and Texas A&M (the other top 100 public university in the state) have the capacity to educate a little more than 5 percent of the high school seniors in the state.
And that's led to a lot of unhappy young people. The Republicans in the state have used that unhappiness and focused it on a convenient (for them) target: the University of Texas's affirmative action program. In the fall of 1990, the entering freshman class at UT was 70 percent white; last year, it was 45 percent. That, of course, has largely kept up with the changing demographics of the state -- though non-Hispanic whites are still overrepresented compared to the general population (in 2012, only 30 percent of K-12 students in the state were non-Hispanic whites.) But, hey, why not find a scapegoat to anger your base?
What gets glossed over in all of this, however, is that there are far more high school graduates in the state who want a top-quality university education than the available supply. So, many young people, like Fisher, go to universities outside of the state than go to the state's second-tier universities (which are perceived as being lower quality.) And many of them will ultimately return to the state after they graduate.
All of which is really an indictment of the conservative model of governance. What Rick Perry doesn't tell you about his model for growth is that the only way that it can possibly work is to leech off the investments that other states (and even countries) make in their populations. The conservative model of low taxes and poorly-funded public services means that Texas has to attract jobs and people from other places.
And, in the end, the conservative model creates a lot of Abigail Fishers -- unable to obtain a good education because of poor funding for education, and duped into thinking that the problem is affirmative action. Because when education is this poorly-funded, universities have to make choices about who gets a good education -- and some people aren't going to like the choices they make.