[Myrddin]

"Earlier this month, Texas A&M University quietly decided to begin automatically admitting the top 20 percent of students from 250 low-performing and predominantly minority high schools in the state. At other high schools — with mostly white students — the bar for automatic admission will remain at 10 percent.

The UCSD experience was that 83% of unqualified students admitted under the "affirmative action" programs dropped out before the end of the first year. Once the students are admitted, they find themselves in a ruthlessly competitive environment. The other students have no intention of lowering their own performance to permit the unqualified to compete. This is especially true in pre-med programs. The net effect is lost opportunities for qualified students that had to be excluded to make room for the unqualified ones and total waste of taxpayer subsidies of the university system. The unqualified ones acquire the added stigma of college drop-out as well.