AUSTIN, Texas — Jeremiah David Garza, a junior at Manor Early College High School, has always envisioned becoming a Longhorn.
"It is a dream school of mine because, well, a lot of my family's been to UT, so I hope I can too," Garza said.
But for his class, it is going to be harder to get into the University of Texas. High school students looking to enroll in the fall of 2026 will need to be in the top 5% of their graduating class to receive automatic admission, which further lowers the 6% threshold that was established in 2017.
Hailee James Howard is also a junior.
"Just dropping a little bit or just slacking off a little bit can completely change my chances of getting in," Howard said.
KVUE reached out to UT Austin about the competitive nature of applications for the university. The university provided the following statement in response:
“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. We see no signs that our demand will substantially soften 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.”
A UT Austin spokesperson also said that the school had nearly 73,000 freshman applications for the fall of 2024, which is a 10% increase in applications over each of the last two years.
"There's so much pandemonium that's currently taking place," Dale Price, the founder of Austin-based college planning agency Access College America, said. "Parents and teenagers are wondering if they actually have a fighting chance of getting admitted into the University of Texas, but they absolutely do."
Despite the changes, Price still sees a silver lining.
"They're lowering the cutoff in terms of the number of applicants they must accept into the University of Texas. And so they're actually making room for the 25% of the other applicants that will be applying to University of Texas to go through that holistic review," Price said. "I do hope that the university really carefully takes into consideration that grades are important, but students are more than a stat."
Garza feels it is helping to educate future generations of Texans by setting the standards high.
"You get the feel that the next generation is going to be better and better," Garza said.