Texas students striving for automatic admission at the University of Texas at Austin will need to be in the top 6 percent of their high school graduating class beginning in 2019.
The current threshold is the top 7 percent, but the university said Friday that the growing number of Texas high school graduates necessitates a tightening of admission standards.
In 2017, the university received 51,000 applications from Texas graduates, compared to 38,000 applications in 2013.
The change takes effect with the summer and fall semesters of 2019 and does not impact students applying for the summer and fall of 2018.
State law requires UT Austin to automatically admit 75 percent of the first-year in-state students, and the university sets the admission threshold on a yearly basis.
The number of high school graduates is projected to increase by almost 50,000 through 2025, the university said Friday, so the change from 7 percent to 6 percent allows the university to adjust to that growth.
In a statement, UT Austin President Gregory L. Fenves said:
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"UT Austin is committed to providing a world-class education to exceptional students from across Texas. Today, the university is enrolling about 1,000 more freshmen than it did six years ago. We accomplished this by dramatically improving four-year graduation rates, making it possible for us to serve more students. We are committed to even further improvements, which will continue to expand access to UT."
Angela Ogero, a South Grand Prairie High School student, expects to be automatically admitted at UT. She is in the top 7 percent of her class, and worked hard to get there. Besides taking advanced placement classes, she is the senior class vice president and a tutor.
"It is not easy at all," Ogero said.
However, it may have been a different story for her next year, because right now, she is in the top 6-and-a-half percent.
"It is a relief that it is not going to affect me, but I just feel really bad for those who are not in the top 7 percent next year," she said.
Her college counselor now knows with the change they will have to change the college preparation process.
"It is something that we want to communicate early, especially since we are at the beginning of the first semester, so our juniors can make sure they are taking the right steps and making the right decisions, so that they can give themselves the best opportunity to get the grades and the rank that they are looking to get," said Holly Moore, Grand Prairie ISD district college advisor.
