When affirmative action was outlawed in Texas about 10 years ago, lawmakers replaced it with the Ten Percent Plan -- Texas students who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class would automatically be admitted to one of Texas’s public universities. The goal was to control for the effects of school segregation -- students from different schools would get the same chance to get into UT, no matter whether their school was affluent and advantaged, or poor and disadvantaged, as long as they graduated in the top 10% of their class.

As CBS’s 60 Minutes reports, the 10% plan has been very successful in maintaining and even increasing racial/ethnic diversity at the UT schools, even better than when affirmative action was used. In fact, as the article explains, it’s been so successful that many affluent White students and their families are now complaining that it places them at a disadvantage if they happen to attend a highly competitive high school and can’t quite graduate in the top 10%, even though their GPA, college prep courses, and SAT scores are better than many 10% students from poorer schools.

Still, most of the kids entering under the Top 10 plan are white, because the guarantee applies to every high school in Texas. But if every student entitled to come to the University of Texas actually came, would the university be able to handle it? “No, we couldn’t come close to handling it,” says Faulkner. “And in fact, that’s where we are now.”

Where they are right now is almost out of control: forced to accept more and more “Top 10″ percenters. This year, they made up two-thirds of the freshman class. Faulkner, who long supported the law, now wants it revised to cap the number of top 10 percenters at no more than half of any incoming class.

But Sen. Wentworth is leading a drive to repeal the law entirely, and he has support from many voters who think their kids are now being shut out of the system. “The current situation in Texas is that you can have a young man who is an Eagle Scout, who’s president of his student council and captain of his football team.

But because he’s in the top 12 percent, he’s not automatically admitted,” says Wentworth. “But somebody else who’s in the top 10 percent, who didn’t even take the recommended curriculum for college work, who took the minimum curriculum, automatically goes to the University of Texas at Austin -- and that’s not fair.”

I suppose that it was inevitable that now that the top 10% plan is doing what it was designed to do -- assist historically disadvantaged students of color get into college -- that the historically advantaged group (Whites) are now crying fowl and again want to change the rules of the game.