UT Austin seems to have rejected several students, especially OOS, with high test scores, GPA, etc. while accepting several students with lower stats. Post your stats and your applied major.
Same observation from many NJ applicants !! Does anybody know why ?
@Dhruv97 & @Dang856 I have a couple of observations that might answer your questions. First, its always going to be harder for OOS applicants to get into UT-Austin. UT is the state’s flagship public university supported by Texas taxpayers and the entering class is a little over 7,000 each year which is way less than the number of qualified in-state applicants. As a result, UT has capped the number of out of state students so that it can admit as many in-state applicants as possible.
For the class that entered UT last year the out of state admission numbers are listed below:
Summer/Fall 2014 Freshman Class
Out-of State Applicants: 8,362
Admitted Out-of-State Applicants: 2,302 (28% of those who applied)
Enrolled Out-of-State Students: 539 (6% of those who applied; 23% of those who were admitted)
An admission rate of 28% for out of state applicants is up there with some of the highly selective private universities. In addition to the cap on the numerical number of out of state applicants, many of the OOS applicants tend to apply for very competitive majors. A point that needs to be emphasized here for both OOS and in-state applicants to UT is that applicants do NOT compete against all other applicants seeking admission to the University. Rather, applicants compete against the other applicants who are applying for the SAME major. Someone applying as a STEM major therefore is not competing with someone who is applying to the College of Fine Arts. Someone applying to the McCombs School of Business is not competing against someone applying to the College of Liberal Arts. Hence, there are always going to be some students admitted to UT with lower test scores and GPAs than many other applicants who were denied admission. For example, on the admission thread there is an in-state applicant who was admitted to the College of Fine Arts with an ACT score well below 30 and a 3.3 GPA. I think we can safely assume that there were not many kids with 32+ ACT/2200+SAT scores who were in the applicant pool competing with him for a slot to be admitted to UT as a Design major in the College of Fine Arts. However, UT needs students in the College of Fine Arts who are Design majors, and so he was accepted along with numerous others to the College of Communications and College of Liberal Arts with lower stats than those seeking admission to the STEM or business undergraduate programs.
The undergraduate engineering and business programs at UT are ranked in the top 20 in the nation according to US News. There are only X number of admission slots available for applicants in each major. Therefore, it is a very competitive admission pool for those applicants applying for those majors, this is why the UT application ask applicants to specify the major they are choosing to be admitted to. If you know where to find it, there are actually admission formulas for each of UT’s main colleges (Liberal Arts, Business, Engineering, Natural Sciences) that emphasize different subscores of the ACT/SAT to fit the profile of what each school is looking for. So there are going to be numerous students who applied for engineering and business programs who are denied admission to UT with stats greater than the Design major who was admitted to the College of Fine Arts.
Good luck with your college search process and I’m sorry UT wasn’t the school for you. However, a year from now you won’t even remember this anymore as you will be thriving at the place you were meant to be at.
@fatherof2boys can you please tell me where I can find the admission criteria/ formula for individual schools and/or majors. I am specifically looking for Moody school of communications. Thanks!
@Mscofield88‌
Here is the link which gives information you need.
My son was OOS and got admitted in to chemical engineering. One important thing I observed from this pdf is for cockrell, if somebody is submitting SAT, they consider Math and Writing score. CR is not considered in the formula. Pretty surprised by that. To my knowledge, generally it is M + CR combination which will be considered. Hope this document helps.
@Mscofield88 I just read your post and I see that @midclassdad has provided the link to the info.
One thing I will caution you about is that while seeing the formulas is interesting, they are pretty much useless by themselves in predicting whether a particular person will be admitted. That’s because unlike some schools (Iowa for one) there is no magic number that you can plug into the formula that guarantees admission. You would need to know the class rank and test scores of all of the other applicants in the pool for comparison purposes. Even if you have that information, you still could not forecast for certain who will be admitted because in addition to academic index (AI) which the formula helps you to compute, UT also assigns a personal achievement index (PAI) to the other aspects of an applicants file - the personal essays, extracurricular activities, employment, awards… The PAI and the AI are plotted on a grid to determine who is offered admission to UT. Accordingly, in a hypothetical scenario where two applicants have the same class rank/test scores, the PAI becomes the deciding factor in who has a higher placement on the grid.
@midclassdad I agree with you that many of the inputs and their relative weights in these formulas are counter intuitive. Specifically, it appears that UT places a greater emphasis on the Writing component of the SAT than many schools. I’ve heard at recruitment fairs from highly selective schools such as Vanderbilt that, with respect to the SAT, they don’t even consider the Writing section for admission purposes - its just the SAT CR + M; however, they do require a writing section score. The University of Alabama similarly requires the SAT writing score to be submitted; however, they only consider SAT CR+M for admission and scholarship purposes. It appears that UT is going against the general trend by placing such a heavy weight on the SAT Writing section.
I suppose my question would be now, why would top statted OOS kids full pay so much to go to school when the admission rigour isn’t applied across the board? Does this have much of an effect on engineering particularly? It seems it must have an effect on the teaching and participation if the top and bottom students are so widely spread?
Because it is still a great school and engineering is a strong department. Strong profs and lots of $. The top students are brilliant; a smart kid will find his peer group. Engineering is pretty selective even for in state students. But yes, those first year courses are weed out courses.
@Alfonsia let me try to answer your question. US News ranks UT-Austin undergraduate business school #8 in the nation. The schools immediately below UT are the following: Cornell; Notre Dame; USC; WashU; Emory; and Georgetown. UT’s undergraduate business program is ranked higher than all of these schools and even with out-of-state tuition, UT’s sticker price is cheaper as well.
US News Ranks UT-Austin’s undergraduate engineering program Tenth in the nation in a three-way tie with Princeton and Cornell. Some of the schools with lower rankings on that list include Northwestern (13); John Hopkins (15); Duke (18); and Columbia (22). Again, UT’s sticker price is less than all of these schools.
As @Lizardly stated, UT is a great school and the undergraduate engineering and business programs are amongst the best in the nation, including better than a number of the programs at some Ivy League schools and their peers. Also, I have to dispute your claim that UT is a school whose “admission rigour isn’t applied across the board.” If you were to have access to the freshmen profile at any of these other schools, you will also find that their fine arts and education majors don’t have the same SAT/ACT scores as those applicants who are granted admission to the engineering/business majors. Its only because UT is a public institution that this information is much more publicly available.
Having stated all of this I can understand your question. When I attended UT Law School there were a number of New Yorkers in my first year class. When I asked them why they choose to pay the OOS premium to attend UT there response was that even with the OOS premium, the total cost of tuition at UT Law School (ranked #15 by US News) was less than the cost of attending NYU or Columbia law school.
For sure getting to specific information re entry and progression criteria in engineering/STEM vs other courses is a real frustration (for MANY schools). The cited CAP report is an interesting read though. This is my first kid through the system and it is an eye opener for the next round. There is so much to know after scratching the surface.
OOS applicants should keep in mind that UT is required by Texas law to limit the entering freshman class to no more than 10% combined nonresident+international. For an entering class of around 7000 that’s only 700 places. UT receives approximately 14,000 U.S. non-Texas resident and international entering freshman applicants, so that works out to about a 5% acceptance rate.
My son had automatic admission…was accepted for petroleum engineering and did not submit his SAT score! He has great numbers all the way around, extra curriculars etc…
My child was put on wait list and offered PACE/ Caps. She applied to McCombs - Marketing
In State - Hispanic - Fully bilingual with international travel/ living experience in Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.
Full IB- GPA (w/uw) 4.5/3.6 - Top 8%
SAT: M:700 - CR-600- W-700
National Hispanic Scholar
Soccer Varsity - lots of xtra curricular
Work experience in sales, customer service and marketing events
Deca 3rd place state competition.
Her class mate (African American) with similar stats (but not bilingual, no international travel experience, no sports, no National Merit award, etc) was accepted.
I was pushing her to go to ASU (Barrett Honors College) with dual major (Marketing and Econ) on Business Honors at WP Carey with a full tuition scholarship plus yearly stipend (will cover room). From a return-on-investment and price-to-quality ratio perspectives that made more sense to me. I am kind of happy with McCombs decision, that helped my case.
I probably fit into those kids with lower stats that was accepted. I am instate though. And I got into Cockrell no idea how. 2090 SAT w/ 1450 Composite. 790 math level 2 but my rank is horrendous! top 39%. i think the only thing that saved me was an internship i did at cockrell and got a recommendation from a professor.
Yes, @vs1997 your SAT/Class Rank do not stand out for aerospace engineers applicants. However, in addition to being in-state, the holistic portion of your application was probably among the strongest. UT does admission by plotting on a grid the objective factors such as high school rank and standardized test scores (academic index) on the horizontal axis of the grid, and the essays and extracurricular activities (personal achievement index) on the vertical axis of the grid. Where an applicant falls on the intercept of these two data points determines whether they are admitted or not. Your academic index was likely below that of the other applicants; however, your personal achievement index is what probably pushed you over the top - in addition to being an in-state applicant.
Junior in a top public high school in KS, top 5% of a class of 400, 4.0 uwgpa, 4.42 wgpa, 33 ACT score, volunteer activities and part time job with good references, will be submitting for National Hispanic Recognition honors. Planning on biomed engineering. We are visiting A & M this spring and are looking for an out of state tuition waiver. Do these numbers provide enough of a shot at Cockrell to make a side trip to see UT worthwhile while we are in TX? Sounds like getting in is hard enough, making getting a competitive scholarship (to get in-state tuition) even more unlikely…
Thanks for any recommendations.
I definitely think your stats look good, swinging by Austin would be worth it for you.
GR8, just looking at the rejected stats should give you pause though, if I had known that UT was only about 5% OOS I would never have paid the 75 for kid to apply. My own fault entirely though.
It’s pretty difficult to get an out-of-state tuition waiver at UT. Read about it here:
http://www.engr.utexas.edu/undergraduate/scholarships/outofstate
@gr8One FloMoMom is correct. TAMU has a program where any OOS student who is awarded at least $1K in competitive scholarship is automatically given an OOS tuition waiver. Many people think this is a TX state program but it isn’t. It is school-specific and UT’s program is very different and not at all automatic. That being said, if you are OOS and visiting Texas, it would be well worth the time to look at both schools, especially if you student is interested in engineering.