nic parental educational attainment, high povecTy levels and a number of other demographic characteristics all work to create barriers to rapid increase in future Latino educational success. The low levels of attainment and high school completion are not merely artifacts of high levels of immigation. U.S.bom Latinos have much lower educational levels than non-Latinos. This is true even when different generations among the U.S: born are distinguished and analyzed separately. (See Bean, et a1,1994; and Chapa, 1989, 1990, 1992). While dejure segregation may have been eliminated from Texas higher education by the mid-1960s, de facto segregation has continued to this day. In 1980, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Education found that "Texas had failed to eliminate the vestiges of its segregated higher education system and was in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. 2000d. In 1983, just eight years before Cheryl Hopwood applied to the University of Texas Law School, the state of Texas agreed, under threat of federal action, to formulate a plan to desegregate its higher education system, including the UT Law School. According to Coordinating Board Commissioner Kenneth Ashworth, various affirmative action programs resulted in an additional 85,000 Hispanic students and 22,000 Black students being admitted to Texas colleges and universities since 1983. Despite improvements made by race-based admissions policies, scholarships, and outreach, recruirinent and retention programs, minorities have been and continue to be underrepresented at Texas public colleges and universities. (House Research Report No. 75-14) At the time the Hopwood case was filed and decided, the publicly-funded educational opportunities available to minorities were vastly inferior to those offered to majority students (Jones and Kauffman, 1994). Yet the specifics of the Hopwood case resulted in rulings that ignores the great d...
