After you apply, then comes Application Review

Freshman applicants to the University of Texas at Austin can be admitted to the university in two ways: automatic admission based on Texas law and admission based on holistic review of a complete application.

Automatic Admission

If you’re a Texas applicant, we’ll initially review your application to determine if you qualify for automatic admission under Texas law. If you do, you’ll be automatically admitted to the university—although not necessarily to the major you request.

Because Texas law doesn’t guarantee admission to a specific major, even if you qualify for automatic admission, your application may go through holistic review to determine the major to which you’ll be admitted.

Holistic Review

The Office of Admissions uses holistic review:

• To determine which major some automatically admitted applicants will be admitted to
• To make admission decisions for all applicants who are not automatically admitted to the university (i.e., Texas applicants who do not qualify for automatic admission, out-of-state applicants, and international applicants)

If your application goes through holistic review, we will consider every factor that makes up your academic achievement and your personal achievement. No one factor guarantees admission and no one factor means that an individual applicant will not be considered for admission.

Review for Restricted Majors

Some majors at the University of Texas at Austin are so highly competitive that admission to them for automatically admitted students cannot be guaranteed. These majors are those that do not have room even for all the automatically admitted students who apply to them.

Here’s how the process works when decisions are made about who will be admitted to one of these majors:

• When making decisions for a restricted major, Texas applicants who qualify for automatic admission to the university are considered for automatic admission to a given major based on their relative class rank.
• The highest ranked automatically admitted Texas applicants (the top 1%, top 2%, top 3%, etc.) are admitted until 75% of the spaces available for Texas applicants are filled.
• The remaining Texas spaces in the restricted major are filled competitively through holistic review as space allows. Texas applicants who are automatically admitted to the University but who weren’t automatically admitted to a given major are considered for admission to a given major along with Texas applicants who do not qualify for automatic admission.
• Applicants not admitted to the restricted major are then considered for their other major choice or for admission to the university as an undeclared major when necessary.