Texas students aiming to enroll at UT Austin during the fall 2026 semester will face a higher hurdle. During a UT Faculty meeting on September 16, university president Jay Hartzell announced that students will soon need to be in the top five percent of their high school graduating class to be guaranteed admission.

The change comes as enrollment demand continues to rise among Texas students. UT continues to be one of the most coveted universities in the state, spurred by reports like a May Forbes ranking listing the Austin campus and Rice University as the state's two "new Ivies."

Currently, UT grants automatic admission to the top six percent of Texas high school classes, a detour from a 1997 law requiring public universities to admit the top 10 percent of Texas high school graduates. A 2009 rework of the legislation gave UT some latitude, mandating that 75 percent of its first-year classes must be automatically admitted.

Since then, UT has tweaked the threshold based on overwhelming applications while maintaining the 75 percent rule. In 2017, the school changed the threshold from seven percent to six. Applications continue to set records. UT received approximately 73,000 undergraduate solicitations for the fall 2024 semester.

In a statement, A UT spokesperson said the change was needed given the unprecedented demand.

"UT Austin is committed to continuing to provide world-class classroom and research experiences for our students, even while we are facing record demand," the spokesperson wrote. "That demand has been driven both by the success and growth of Texas, and by greater interest in UT among the state's best high-school students. We see no signs that our demand will substantially fall and revising our auto-admit percentage to 5 [percent] will allow us to continue to meet the state's requirement that 75 [percent] of the Texas residents in each freshman class are admitted based on high-school class rank."

More information about automatic admissions is available at utexas.edu.