Why is UT-Austin so competitive?
The peak of volcano Tajumulco, Guatemala at sunrise (13,789 ft)
One of the most common questions I receive from parents is, “When and how did UT-Austin get so competitive?” They will say, “Back in my day, as long as you didn’t flunk out of school and had a decent SAT, you could gain admission. It didn’t matter what major you chose either.”
This sentiment motivated me to write my first two books, Your Ticket to the Forty Acres and Surviving the College Admissions Madness. The college admissions landscape has changed significantly in a single generation. For fall 2025, UT Austin received over 90,000 applications for an estimated admissions offer of 16,000. That means UT’s admissions rate is around 17-18% nowadays.
In this post, I overview the past 25 years of UT admissions data. I share four reasons why UT is uniquely competitive among flagship public universities in the south. Still, they are part of a larger trend of top 100 universities everywhere becoming more competitive.
UT-Austin Admissions Trends since 2000
Consider that for Fall 2001, UT received around 21,000 applications and admitted 15,700 for a 75% admissions rate. When I applied for Fall 2007, UT received around 25,000 applications and offered admission to 14,000 students for a 56% acceptance rate. That’s only an additional 4,000 applicants over a six-year period.
I gained admission to Liberal Arts Honors as a high school senior. I have no doubt that my unimpressive resume and 29 on the ACT with a top 2% class rank would not have been competitive for UT Honors nowadays. I was a first-generation college student at a low-resource high school, but nothing was remarkable about my application.
Changes in the automatic admissions state law
In 2009, UT-Austin confronted an issue where almost all of their spaces for Texas residents were occupied by those guaranteed admission by ranking in the top 10% of their class. The Texas Congress passed SB 175, which modified the automatic admissions cutoff to constitute 75% of admitted Texas residents. For the past fifteen years, the automatic admissions cutoff has gradually decreased from the top 9% to the top 5% starting with Fall 2026 first-time freshman applicants.
For Fall 2012, the first year I worked for UT, the university still wasn’t super competitive. UT received around 31,000 applications for 15,700 admitted students, for an admissions rate of around 50%. Back then, only a few hundred students applied for computer science, and the most competitive major was petroleum engineering because the price of oil was much higher than it is today.
By Fall 2017, UT received over 47,000 applications and admitted 40% of their applicants. That’s still a long way off from today’s 17% admissions rate. For Fall 2020, the last pre-COVID admissions cycle, UT received 53,500 applications, but then by Fall 2022, that number increased to 66,000. UT added 7,000 more applicants the following year for Fall 2023. So, the rate of change has accelerated significantly in the past five years.
One reason UT is becoming increasingly competitive is that a similar number of high-achieving applicants are applying to way more schools. Students today apply to three times as many schools as in 1990, so that’s another way this generation is different from your parents. That’s why application numbers have increased everywhere, and not just at UT. UT is one data point in a much broader trend around the college admissions arms race.
Another reason UT is popular is the significant increase in out-of-state students, especially for STEM and Business majors. Moody Communications is also increasingly popular. Since UT is strong in basically every major, it’s less one-sided than other schools like Indiana, which is well-known primarily for business, or UIUC in computer science and engineering.
I address out-of-state admissions in another video, but the summary is that the out-of-state admissions rate has declined from 40% in 2017 to 5% today. The football team's two great seasons and continued migration to Austin make it an appealing city. Tech and finance firms are increasingly setting up regional headquarters or relocating entirely to Texas. UT and Austin being more attractive appeals to broader populations than a generation ago when Austin wasn’t quite on the radar like it is today. Austin’s population has increased from 780,000 in 2010 to almost a million today. It’s more than doubled since 1990.
A third reason is that more Texas residents are applying for UT than a generation ago. That’s one reason the automatic admissions cutoff has gradually decreased from 10% to 5%. When I worked for UT in the early 2010s, many top high school students in Texas didn’t bother applying.
If you can believe it, many families saw UT as a backup and safety school. Back then, few applicants were denied their first-choice major, unlike today when no class rank or SAT is safe for STEM and business majors. Since Ivy League and equivalent admissions processes weren’t anywhere near as competitive as today, top Texas students were reasonably confident they would get into a top 20 school. However, over the past decade, UT has been seen as a more desirable option and the top choice for many high-achieving students. The game theory and meta have changed because insecurity throughout the education and economic systems means anxious students apply to more schools to hedge their bets. Most students are lucky to gain admission to a single top 50 university.
The final reason UT and universities everywhere are becoming more competitive is aggressive marketing and recruiting techniques. I dedicate a chapter to these corporation-type marketing schemes in my Admissions Madness book. Still, big data and AI allow UT’s marketing and communications teams to target families in more precise ways than ever before. They aim to drive application numbers as high as possible to elevate their prestige on college ranking lists. They spend millions of dollars to elevate UT’s academic and athletics brand. Increased scarcity of spots on campus creates a flywheel effect where more students are denied, leading to more students applying to UT and other top schools.
I hope you enjoyed this overview of how and why UT Austin has become more competitive since the year 2000. The easiest way to reach me is to email directly to kevin@texadmissions.com