Abstract Access to selective universities is highly sought-after due to the prestige of these institutions and the perception that attending one provides economic opportunities that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. However, there remain large disparities by race and socioeconomic status in who attends these institutions. To help expand access to the state's flagship universities in a way that does not rely on race-conscious affirmative action, Texas passed the Top Ten Percent Plan in 1997, which guarantees automatic admission to any public university in the state to students in the top decile of their high school class. This paper estimates the effect of eligibility for this admissions guarantee on college choice and persistence for students in a large urban school district. We do so using a regression discontinuity design that compares the outcomes of students who barely made it into the top decile to those who barely did not. We find that eligibility for automatic admission has a substantial impact on enrollments at Texas flagship universities and increases the number of semesters enrolled at a flagship university. This increase in flagship enrollment appears to displace enrollment in private or out-ofstate universities but has no effect on overall college enrollment or on the quality of college attended. The effects on flagship enrollment are concentrated in schools that have high college-sending rates (relative to other schools in the district), suggesting that automatic admissions may have little effect on the outcomes of students in the most disadvantaged schools
