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UT Austin is lowering its automatic admission threshold to 5%

People walking around and on steps at a college campus in front of a tower
Michael Minasi
/
KUT News
UT Austin currently automatically admits Texas applicants who rank within the top 6% of their high school graduating classes. President Jay Hartzell announced Monday it will drop to 5% for students applying for the fall 2026 semester.

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Texas students hoping to be automatically admitted to UT Austin will need to rank in the top 5% of their high school graduating class starting in the fall 2026 semester.

UT President Jay Hartzell announced the change during a UT Faculty Council meeting Monday.

Right now, students must rank in the top 6% of their graduating class to be guaranteed a spot at the flagship university. The current threshold will remain in effect through the spring 2026 semester.

A 1997 Texas law requires public universities in the state to automatically admit students who graduate in the top 10% of their high school class. But, in 2009, Texas lawmakers gave UT Austin a little bit of wiggle room because it gets so many applicants.

The Legislature said that instead of guaranteeing that the top 10% of the state's high school students got into the university, UT Austin had to automatically admit 75% of its first-year classes. The measure also required UT to set an auto-admit percentage for the state's top-ranked students to meet that criteria. (The remaining 25% of the first-year class is admitted through a holistic review process.)

A UT spokesperson said in a statement to KUT that the university wants to continue to provide "world-class" experiences for students while facing record demand.

"That demand has been driven both by the success and growth of Texas, and by greater interest in UT among the state’s best high-school students," the spokesperson wrote. "We see no signs that our demand will substantially fall, and revising our auto-admit percentage to 5% will allow us to continue to meet the state’s requirement that 75% of the Texas residents in each freshman class are admitted based on high-school class rank."

The last time UT Austin announced it was lowering the threshold for its auto-admit policy was 2017. It dropped from 7% to 6% for students entering their freshman year in the fall of 2019. The change occurred after the university saw the number of applicants jump from 38,000 in 2013 to 51,000 in 2017.

UT received nearly 73,000 applications for the current fall 2024 semester, which marked a 10% increase from the year before. That year UT also saw a 10% increase in applicants.

Becky Fogel is the education reporter at KUT. Got a tip? Email her at rfogel@kut.org. Follow her on Twitter @beckyfogel.
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