The class rank requirements for automatic admission into the University of Texas at Austin are getting more stringent.
UT President Bill Powers says that for the Summer/Fall of 2014 and Spring of 2015, UT will automatically admit Texas seniors who rank in the top 7 percent of their high school class.
That’s down from the top 9 percent this Fall/Spring and the top 8 percent next Fall/Spring.
The rule (since 1997) had been that the top 10 percent of Texas high school graduates received automatic admission to UT but the state legislature modified the rule in 2009 so that automatic admissions would fill just 75 percent of Texas resident spaces at UT.
The rest of the in-state slots are filled through "holistic review"—a process during which UT says the Office of Admissions consider's an applicant's "academic and personal achievement." The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering a case involving the university's consideration of race as a factor in that admissions process.
