Choosing a non-ranking school is a gamble. It takes your student out of the auto-admissions group and moves them to the 25 percent holistic pool. That pool is very competitive especially for engineering, business and computer science. Of course, if you know they aren’t going to be top 7 percent in their current school, it may be worth the risk.
The only kids I have seen leave our district are those who had other issues with our school. I’d characterize our district as one of the top 10 in the state. For the most part, they don’t like the size and competitiveness so they aren’t interested in more of the same at UT or A&M.
Since number of students in the top 10 percent of their high school class is a factor in USNews, I don’t expect McRaven/ the legislature to drop too far below that with any change they make chasing rankings. People who think their top quarter kid from a competitive school will have a shot are probably going to remain disappointed. Due to financial aid constraints and population growth, UT has way more demand than it can handle.
It doesn’t have to be a matter of excellent versus underperforming schools. It could simply be a matter of a school that hosts an academic magnet program versus one that does not.
For example, my daughter attended a high school that hosted a selective admissions IB program (which she was part of). The IB students, drawn from neighborhoods all over the county, accounted for 1/4 of the graduating class. Their presence had a devastating effect on the class rank of the other students. (Theoretically, our district doesn’t rank. But in fact, rank exists, as you will see in a moment.) At the awards assembly at the end of senior year, they announced the names of the kids in the top 5% of the class (so much for rank not existing, right?). Every kid in the top 5% was from the IB program. No non-IB kids from the school’s own neighborhood were included.
Now imagine that they called the names of the top 5% of the class in one of the high schools in our district that does not host a magnet program. Not only would all of them be neighborhood kids, their chances of ranking so high would actually have been enhanced by the fact that most of the academic superstars who live in that neighborhood wouldn’t go to the neighborhood school – they would be at one of the magnets. Having the most academic kids in a neighborhood skimmed off the top and sent elsewhere is an advantage (from the class rank point of view) for those who remain.
If I found out that the high school my kids were destined to attend was going to host an academic magnet program and if I had kids who were reasonably academic but unlikely to qualify for any of our district’s magnets (such as my son, who was just a little below magnet level, academically), I would definitely consider moving to a neighborhood served by a different high school.
(By the way, class rank exists everywhere, even if it isn’t made public. You can’t be considered for admission to any of the service academies without a class rank. Have you ever heard of a school district whose kids are ineligible for the service academies for this reason? Me neither.)
I always come on here when top 10% is brought up so people understand that it’s the rural lawmakers who keep this law in place. They know their schools can’t compete admissions-wise with suburban districts that offer oodles of AP courses.
Additionally, the top 10% law applies to all state schools, UT System or not, except for UT-Austin. UT was allowed several years back to lower the Top Whatever percentage (sometimes 7%, sometimes 8%) of students it must accept because too much of the entering class was being taken up by the auto-admits and the university didn’t feel like it had the ability to make the class it wanted. The Top Whatever percentage is because they are limiting the auto-admits to 75% of the entering class, so that they still have 25% of spots for things like, oh, football players. From UT’s website:
Automatic Admission
Texas law offers eligible freshman applicants automatic admission to public colleges and universities. The initial legislation, passed into law in 1997, offered automatic admission to eligible students in the top 10 percent of their high school class.
In 2009, the law was modified for The University of Texas at Austin. Under the new law, the university must automatically admit enough students to fill 75 percent of available Texas resident spaces. Each fall, the university notifies Texas school officials of the class rank that current high school juniors need to attain by the end of their junior year in order to be automatically admitted.
Summer/Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 applicants: Top 7%
Summer/Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 applicants: Top 7%
Summer/Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 applicants: Top 8%
Summer/Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 applicants: Top 7%
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board establishes the rules that govern which students are eligible for automatic admission.
Even applications from students who are automatically admissible are subject to holistic review to determine the major to which the applicant will be admitted.
To be more specific, the special allowance to go from 10 percent to 7 percent came with a legislated maximum of 10 percent non-residents. The legislators were making sure that UT could not do what the UCs are now doing in denying qualified residents in favor of less qualified non-residents.
From UT’s website: