WASHINGTON -- When a federal appeals court barred affirmative action in Texas college admissions in 1996, it didn't take long for the nation's largest university to feel the impact.
Enrollment of African American and Latino freshmen dropped sharply the next year at the University of Texas' main Austin campus. And from 1995 to 1997, the number of African Americans in the university's first-year law school classes plunged from 38 to four.

Since then, university officials have devised creative ways to try to restore campus diversity without directly considering race. The Texas Legislature pitched in by passing a law granting all high school students automatic admission to their choice of 35 state colleges if they finish in the top 10 percent of their class.

Now, within days of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling likely to decide the fate of affirmative action in higher education for the foreseeable future, some of the nation's leading universities are wondering whether they, too, will have to search for race-neutral ways to attract minorities.

Aware that the court could simply pull the plug on affirmative action, many schools have monitored alternative approaches that have had limited success in Texas, California and Florida -- states where consideration of race in school admissions is already barred.

The court is weighing two reverse-discrimination suits that lawyer Kirk Kolbo and two colleagues have fought on a pro bono basis for five years at the behest of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Individual Rights. The plaintiffs are three white applicants who were rejected by the University of Michigan and its law school.

The cases are generally considered the biggest of the court's 2003 term. They mark the first time the justices have revisited the court's landmark 1978 ruling that barred racial quotas in college admissions but said race could be a factor if there is a compelling government interest.

Scores of colleges, Fortune 500 corporations, civil rights groups and former senior military officers have filed friend-of-the-court briefs urging the court to uphold the use of affirmative action. They contend the justices' decisions could shape the face of classrooms, key professions, the Pentagon's officer corps and executive suites for years to come.

President Bush, whose administration filed a brief supporting the suits, has touted Texas' 10 percent plan as proof that there are better ways than racial preferences to achieve campus diversity. The U.S. Department of Education has circulated a brochure listing alternative approaches.

But Douglas Laycock, a UT-Austin law school professor who co-authored a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the deans of 171 law schools, contends there is no substitute for affirmative action. He said Texas' 10 percent solution "doesn't work all that well" in building minority enrollment in undergraduate schools and "doesn't work at all for law schools."

Laycock's brief includes a racial breakdown of 3,724 law school applicants across the country who achieved a 3.5 grade-point average and a score of 165 or better on their Law School Admission Test. Just 86 were African American, Latino or American Indian, underscoring the importance of letting the top schools consider other factors such as race, the brief states.

Despite an array of alternative recruiting strategies, the Texas law school's enrollments of first-year African Americans and Latinos last year still were 45 percent and 33 percent respectively below levels of eight years ago.

Critics of the "percent plans" for undergraduate schools say they only work well in states that have large minority populations and in schools that for all practical purposes are segregated.

In 1996, California voters became the first to ban affirmative action in admissions when they passed Proposition 209.

That same year, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals barred affirmative action in college admissions in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. In 1997, Texas legislators came up with the 10 percent plan, which then-Gov. George Bush signed into law.

The University of Texas launched other measures, including a computer analysis to identify high schools in poor areas that had rarely sent students to the flagship Austin campus.

Ultimately, UT officials identified 70 schools that all turned out to be minority-dominated, allowing a recruitment drive that focused on minorities but wasn't based on race. University President Larry Faulkner spoke to assemblies at many of those high schools to encourage graduating seniors to apply, and the university established scholarships for those schools exclusively.

While the number of African American freshmen enrolling at the Austin campus fell from 266 to 190 between 1996 and 1997, it climbed to 296 in 2000 before declining last year to 272. In a state where the Latino share of the population is shooting up, the number of Latino students dropped from 932 to 892 the year after the ruling but rose to 1,137 last year.

Larry Burt, University of Texas financial aid director, said if the court bans affirmative action altogether, "then everybody else is going to have to become as clever as we are" in finding alternatives.

But, he added, "I don't think they can. The demographics are different. I was able to find a solution that may not be available in Minnesota."

At the University of California's eight campuses -- thanks to a policy change spearheaded by UC President Richard Atkinson that requires the top 4 percent of every California high school be accepted to a UC campus -- the combined enrollment of African Americans is back to 1995 levels, and Latino enrollment is at an all-time high. But in the system's most selective campuses -- Berkeley and UCLA -- the numbers of African American and Latino freshmen were sharply lower last fall than in the mid-1990s.

In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush issued an order banning affirmative action in 1999 and guaranteeing enrollment for students in the top 20 percent of every high school graduating class. But Bush's order allowed affirmative action in recruiting and financial aid, helping the University of Florida at Gainesville not only hold its own but make gains in minority enrollment. A court ban, however, would remove those tools.

Patricia Marin, one of several Harvard researchers who have studied minority enrollment in the three states, said "the most twisted aspect" of percentage plans is their reliance on segregated schools.

While African American and Latino high school students often don't fare as well when competing academically with whites and Asians, those in minority schools get automatic admission if they rank high in their graduating class. "Essentially, we're asking higher education to reap the benefits of segregated high schools," she said.

Another problem is that a Supreme Court ban on affirmative action would apply to any private school that accepts federal funds -- and state percent plans don't apply to those institutions.

Despite this handicap, Rice University in Houston has compensated for the ban by aggressively recruiting minority applicants and targeting financial aid to disadvantaged students, without mentioning race. Scholarship programs for Latinos, for example, were altered to offer aid to students "whose primary language is Spanish," and the school set aside other financial aid for increasing diversity, "not racial diversity."

But while some expect the conservative-leaning court to find legal grounds to do away with affirmative action, Harvard University law school professor Randy Kennedy, who has written extensively on the subject, doubts that will happen.

In a recent interview, he noted that even though former President Reagan voiced his opposition to affirmative action, "he didn't cut back on it radically."

"And the reason for that is, even people who don't like certain features of affirmative action also don't like the idea of there being an obvious paucity of racial minorities in important spheres of our society," Kennedy said.