<p>My son is out of state and has been admitted to the CS department at UT. Saturday, we received an advertisement, addressed to him personally, from an Austin realtor. The ad was about buying real estate in Austin to become classified as an in-state student. </p>
<p>My questions are two-fold: 1) Is this legit? Can he really be classified as in-state if we bought a condo in Austin for him to live? and 2) How in the ****@! did they get his name and address? Does UT give this information away or sell it? Is there some insider leaking this info?</p>
<p>The thought of UT leaking personal information of students for profit is upsetting.</p>
<p>I don’t know if UT would dump private information without there being some caveat. i.e., a place in apply Texas that says, “I give the University of Texas to share my information with housing agencies, etc” or has your son filled out any type of information at all after admittance? We have all probably been guilty of not reading the fine print. As far as OOS residency and if a purchasing real estates makes that go away…I have no idea…way outside my lane.</p>
<p>We received he same mailer (and another one about a month ago) and I am also disturbed that private acceptance data is leaking outside the admissions office (that is my view of it - I can’t believe any university would willingly release that info). My husband said he researched the relator of the mailer we received, and apparently he has a bunch of bad reviews on Yelp, and is considered somewhat of a slumlord. </p>
<p>There is info on the UT website about requirements for obtaining Texas residency for tuition purposes.</p>
<p>Never got info from realtors, but did get info from laundry services. Sometimes the ads looked really official, like they were affiliated with housing. I wonder if my son checked some box releasing his data. </p>
<p>OP, my OOS son received in-state status after living in Austin for a year. We added him to the title of my parents’ house in Austin. That was in 2011. After that, they really tightened up the rules. Even for my son, one of the rules was that he not receive 50% or more of his support from his parents. We could answer that honestly because my parents paid his tuition his freshman year (the question very clearly specified support from PARENTS). I think it would be pretty difficult to get in-state tuition now, but feel free to call UT and ask for their residency person. They were really helpful for us - they don’t mind telling you what you need to do. They never made me feel as if I were trying to do something unethical.</p>
<p>We received a flyer like that in the mail, too. (Snail mail.) I was shocked and wondered the same thing about how they got our personal information. The flyer initially looked like it was related to UT itself, but upon closer inspection, it was clear it was not. I thought it was odd, too, that while it boasted that the company had assisted folks for years in establishing residency for in-state tuition purposes by selling parents real estate, it also contained a fine-print caveat that the rules on establishing residency through ownership of property had changed for the worse. I promptly shredded the flyer and threw it away. Very disappointed because our personal info had to have been supplied by UT, and that’s not cool–even if (especially if) some release was hidden in fine print somewhere.</p>