Beginning in fall 2024, the University of Tennessee will guarantee admission to high school seniors in the state who rank in the top 10% of their graduating classes or who have a 4.0 or better core high-school grade point average.
The new guaranteed admissions policy was approved by the UT Board of Trustees last Friday, which said that the new framework would “expand access, recruit more of Tennessee’s top performing students to the university and promote greater geographic representation from across the state.”
In addition to the 10% or 4.0 GPA guarantee for the flagship campus in Knoxville, Tennessee high school seniors will be ensured admission to the regional campuses in in Martin, Pulaski and Chattanooga if they meet a third standard: maintaining a 3.2 GPA and scoring a minimum of 23 on the ACT or 1130 on the SAT.
The policy does not guarantee admission into a particular college, school, department, major or program within the university.
“We want Tennessee high school students and their families to know how they can be guaranteed admission to the UT campus of their choice,” said UT System President Randy Boyd in the university’s release. “Identifying these standards allows us to make earlier admissions offers for more Tennessee students, and it allows them to start planning for their college experience with more certainty.”
With the move, UT joins public universities in at least a dozen other states such as Arizona, Florida and Texas that offer guaranteed admissions to students based on high school standing.
The Board indicated that results of the initiative would be reviewed annually, and that adjustment might be made in the future based on the results.
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville has projected its fall 2023 enrollment to be a record high at more than 36,000 students, eclipsing the previous record of 33,805 students set during the 2022-23 school year. Its entering class this fall will be more than 6,600 students.
In 2022, Tennessee’s public high schools graduated 64,580 students. Using that number, UT’s proposed admission policy would make as many as 6,400 prospective students automatically eligible for admission to the university in 2024. During that same year, 15,939 (27.7%) of Tennessee’s high school graduates had an ACT composite score of 23 or higher.
“We want to keep our state’s best and brightest in Tennessee,” added Boyd. “By offering automatic admission, prospective students will know earlier in the college selection process that there is a place for them at their state’s top public university system.”
Now that the Supreme Court has banned race-conscious admissions, more universities are likely to look to “top 10% plans” as one race-neutral policy intended to achieve greater student diversity.
A model for such plans is the state of Texas, which introduced its automatic admissions policy for the top 10% of high school graduates more than 20 years ago, after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals banned affirmative action in college admissions in that jurisdiction. However, the effects of that plan on racial diversity has been less than what many proponents anticipated, suggesting that such guarantees, in isolation, are not a powerful solution.
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