Why and how is UT Austin more unpredictable than ivy league colleges?Answered
A senior that I know got into most of the UC schools as an out of state student, but was rejected by UT Austin as an in state student, and I'm pretty sure she had a stellar application, but others I've heard from seem to have mid scores and activities (there are quite a few with pretty strong applications as well), but still get accepted into UT Austin.
What is the standard for UT Austin?
What parts of the application hold the most weight in these situations?
What could give me an advantage over the rest of the applicant pool?
Anyone who has been accepted into UT Austin, what did you learn from your application experience? What advice would you give future applicants?
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1 answer
UT Austin is one of the few universities in the country that has an Auto-Admit policy for all in-State Texans who are in the Top 6% of applicants and by Texas law, they have to fill at least 75% of the seats available before opening up admissions to out of state or those who didn't meet the Top 6% cutoff.
My best guess is that your friend missed the 6% cut-off and then had to compete with a giant pool of Texas applicants and out-of-state and International applicants for the remaining 25% of spots.
I'm not sure what the Class of 2027 stats were but I bet they had about 70000 applications and admitted 20000. So 15000 of those admits were in-state with 6% and the other 5000 were OOS/other Texans and Int'l Applicants.
The other factor is the college to which they were applying. Some majors like CS, Business, and Engineering are really competitive, more so than Humanities like Spanish or English or History majors. So they may have missed the mark by not meeting the 6% cutoff and picking a hard major.
Therefore my advice as a Texan would be to make sure you are graduating in the top 6% of your class and if you must attend UT Austin but are not 100% strong in all your course rigor, ECS, etc, then pick a major that is under-subscribed and try to transfer into something else if you don't want to stick with that major. I heard a rumor that UT Austin is trying to crack down on applicants who try to game the system and then change majors so it might be difficult to do that.
UC schools are often less harsh on out-of-state students because they get triple the tuition from such applicants. So I have a friend that got into UC SD much easier by applying from the East Coast beating out other Californians.
I would not characterize UT Austin as being more unpredictable than Ivy League Schools because they are not. As a public university, they are less swayed by hooked applicants than Ivys and have in place a more meritocratic process that is simpler and streamlined.
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