A viral moment at a University of Texas at Austin football game, where a large section of seemingly South Asian fans was captured cheering, has renewed scrutiny of the school’s undergraduate demographics — and of the state law that critics say has shaped them for nearly thirty years. According to reporting by The Federalist, racial and ethnic minorities make up 68.9 percent of UT Austin undergraduates, and 56.2 percent are women, leaving white males at just 13 percent of enrolled undergraduates.
Those figures surprised many observers, but The Federalist argues the numbers are not purely the product of a changing state or a merit-based race. Instead, the outlet points to a pair of Texas admissions rules — one adopted in the 1990s and modified since — that it says artificially boost racial diversity at the state’s flagship campuses.
A Post-1996 Pivot
Texas had used race as an admissions criterion in the 1990s, but in 1996 the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the state could not do so. The Federalist reports the decision had immediate and visible consequences: the class admitted right after the ruling saw Hispanic enrollment fall by 15 percent and black enrollment drop by 25 percent.
The legislature responded in 1997 by passing the so-called “Top 10 Percent Law,” which guaranteed automatic admission to the UT system or any state-funded university for the top 10 percent of every public or private high school graduating class in Texas. According to The Federalist, that change effectively removed merit from the equation — not because it identified Texas’ strongest students overall, but because it identified the top performers within each individual high school.
The distinction matters in practice. Students at lower-income, lower-achieving schools — which the outlet notes typically correlate heavily with non-white areas — were guaranteed slots by competing only against classmates rather than against applicants from across the state. A 2009 decision expanded UT Austin’s flexibility further: the university is now only required to fill 75 percent of Texas resident slots with automatic admissions, with the top 5 percent guaranteed seats at the Austin flagship. The Federalist calculates that leaves only about 15 percent of UT Austin slots for Texas high schoolers genuinely awarded on merit, before the 90 percent threshold is reached and the final 10 percent can be filled by out-of-state or foreign students.
Small Schools, Same Problem
The percentage system, according to the outlet, also disadvantages high performers at smaller schools. A student hoping to win guaranteed admission to UT Austin from a private high school with a high-performing graduating class of 200 would need to finish in the top 10. At number 11, they would miss the cutoff. A public school with 1,000 graduating seniors, by contrast, has 50 guaranteed slots available.
Every student at the smaller private school could outperform all 1,000 at the public school, The Federalist notes, but that does not factor into the Texas formula. The outlet adds another wrinkle: if a high-performing school sends its top 5 percent to Ivy League or out-of-state institutions, those UT Austin slots are not rolled down to the next students in line. The school simply does not use its allotted automatic admissions for that graduating year, and the next-best students remain locked out of the flagship campus.
The Federalist frames the outcome bluntly, arguing that high-performing students at Texas’ top high schools — which it describes as overwhelmingly white and Asian — are being discriminated against by lower-performing students who happen to outperform weaker classmates. In its illustration, a graduating class of 500 with an average SAT score of 1300 would have roughly the same number of UT slots as an equally sized class with an average score of 1050.
Demographics Shift Beneath the Debate
The outlet ties the current admissions picture to broader demographic change in Texas. Since 2000, Hispanics have accounted for the vast majority of the state’s population growth, while Asians — a much smaller share overall — have more than doubled their slice in 25 years. In 2000, The Federalist reports, white residents made up 52.4 percent of Texas’ population, Hispanics 32 percent, and Asians, including Indians, 2.7 percent. Census Bureau estimates for 2025 place whites at 37.3 percent, Hispanics at 40.9 percent, and Asians at 6.7 percent. According to the group Every Texan, Indians constitute the largest share of Asians in the state at 32 percent of that total.
The Federalist’s CEO, Sean Davis, offered a pointed assessment to the outlet: “People are upset by the systemic displacement and replacement of Americans, specifically white men, with foreigners across every major institution in America. That it is happening in a state like Texas makes it even more stark.”
The piece concludes by arguing that despite white Americans now being a minority in Texas, the state’s admissions apparatus still tilts in favor of non-white applicants, making acceptance harder for prospective white students than for any other group. The Top 10 Percent Law remains in force today, and UT Austin has not announced any change to the automatic admission framework in response to the recent viral episode.
Source: thefederalist.com — https://thefederalist.com/2026/09/17/texas-schools-like-ut-austin-use-this-rule-to-artificially-boost-diversity-instead-of-merit/