University of Texas at Austin to drop automatic admissions for top Texas students to 5% in 2026

AUSITN (KXAN) — The University of Texas at Austin will soon cut down on the number of top Texas high school students automatically admitted to the university, dropping the threshold from 6% to 5%.

According to a statement from the university, the change will affect admissions for Fall 2026.

President Jay Hartzell made the announcement Monday in a faculty council meeting, as was first reported by the Austin-American Statesman and later confirmed to KXAN by several faculty members in the meeting.

In 1997, the state legislature passed what’s become known as the “top ten percent law,” guaranteeing Texas high school students who graduate in the top 10% of their high school class automatic admission to all state-funded universities. In 2009, lawmakers said 75% of UT-Austin’s first-year, in-state students must be automatically admitted. They allowed the university, however, to set the admittance threshold itself on an annual basis.

In a statement, university officials credited record demand for admittance for the change.

“We see no signs that our demand will substantially fall, and revising our auto-admit percentage to 5% will allow us to continue to meet the state’s requirement that 75% of the Texas residents in each freshman class are admitted based on high-school class rank,” the statement read, in part.

The university has chipped away at the threshold before. Most recently, it dropped from 7% to 6% in 2017. At the time, university officials credited a similar demand, noting that it saw a consistent growth in the number of high school graduations in Texas and an increase in applications.

In Monday’s statement, university officials said, “UT Austin is committed to continuing to provide world-class classroom and research experiences for our students, even while we are facing record demand.  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.”