Like me, supporters of the University of Austin (UATX) have thought that it should be possible to enroll academically outstanding students. Indeed, sotto voce, we have speculated that, even in the first year or two, UATX would be able to match elite schools like Harvard and Williams in terms of objective metrics, such as SAT scores, since, unlike them, UATX would not need to lower standards for athletic and racial quota admissions.
Alas, we were overconfident. The most interesting statistic to emerge from the 60 Minutes segment about UATX last fall was that the inaugural class had an average SAT score at the 92nd percentile.
Cynics will note that percentiles are not how people normally present SAT scores. Why not just give the average score? More importantly, the College Board provides two different percentiles, one normed against the entire population and the other for comparison with college-going students. We don’t know which one 60 Minutes is referring to.
If we use the college-going comparison group, the 92nd percentile corresponds to a 1380 Math + Verbal combined score. For the entire population, it would be 1310. Let’s be generous and assume that the average for the first class is 1380.
In that case, not only is UATX failing to get students to choose it over Harvard, where the average applicant’s SAT score is 1550, but it is also not even getting students with the highest SAT scores to select it over Vanderbilt and Bowdoin. Perhaps there is not as much demand among the highest-scoring students for the “fearless pursuit of truth” as we might hope.
[RELATED: UATX Is Wierd. Weird Is What We Need]
These admissions problems are confirmed by UATX’s new offer that:
If you score 1460+ on the SAT, 33+ on the ACT, or 105+ on the CLT, you will be automatically admitted, pending basic eligibility and an integrity check.
A 1460 SAT score cutoff, corresponding to the 96th percentile, is consistent with the current average of 1380, close enough to attract new students, but not so low as to produce overwhelming numbers of applicants.
However, for UTAX supporters, the concerning aspect of the changes comes in the details:
Expedited Application Deadline: April 15, 2025
Decision Date: April 27, 2025
Deposit Deadlines: May 1, 2025
Starting March 31, 2025, all applicants must adhere to our merit-first application and admissions policy.
UTAX is changing its admissions process, not for next year but for the current admissions cycle.
Back in January, UATX outlined a process with Early Decision in November, Early Action in December, and Regular Decision I in February. Yet, obviously, even with all that, UATX was unable to fill its class. The adjective that comes to mind is desperate.
Every other school has already made its decisions and has emailed all its applicants. You can be sure that UATX had hoped, by this point, to have filled its class with the most academically talented high school seniors. Although we should all applaud the movement to a more transparent admissions process, there is no avoiding the conclusion that UATX is making these changes, not from a position of strength but from one of weakness.
Photo by Ryan Conine — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 217495023
I think one big challenge for UATX is that its reputation in the quantitative fields — that’s STEM, but also economics — does not measure up to that of its competitors. Humanities alone is not enough. Harvard has more STEM majors than humanities majors, and let’s not talk about MIT! Even humanities majors prefer schools with strong STEM departments because otherwise the credential is not taken seriously. UATX needs to address that.
You raise the same question I have, but from the opposite end — is there a place for a truly liberal arts college in America of 2025?
We no longer have a leisure class — at least a leisure class that considered it necessary for their sons to have a classical liberal education, and their daughters to be “finished” for marriage and able to be articulate hostesses.
So what/where is the market for (any) truly traditional liberal arts college?
The other thing is that I’m not so sure how I would do on the modern SAT.
If asked how many sexes there are, I’d say two, or maybe three (male, female, and confused) — when the “right” answer is probably something like 47. And we have a Supreme Court Justice who doesn’t know what a woman even *is* — how would she ever be able to decide a sex discrimination case?.
Justice Brown Jackson has both an undergraduate and law degree from Harvard.
We’re supposed to respect an institution that turns out someone like her?!?
On some of the SAT’s abbreviated reading questions, I can understand how the purported “correct” answer may be possible, but I often fail to see why a different answer isn’t (a) also correct and even (b) better than the one they want.
But then the SAT is an aptitude test, and I’m not so sure how I’d do as an undergraduate today, nor how long I would last. I had enough “fun” as a graduate student…
And THAT is the comment made in the 60 minutes clip that caught my attention — that a significant portion of the UATX cadre had been kicked out of other Institutes of purported Higher Education. That’s the statistic that I’d love to see, and as a qualitative researcher, I’d want to know the details.
When I was 18, I probably would have said “male, female, and confused” — and I know exactly what would happen to a UMass undergrad who said something like that today — it isn’t pretty….
“Cynics will note that percentiles are not how people normally present SAT scores. Why not just give the average score?”
Mean, median, or mode???
I can think of several legitimate reasons why they might do this, starting with that they are dealing with a sample size of 92. Let me repeat that, they only have 92 students — Harvard has 7,000 undergraduates, UMass Amherst has 24,000.
When n=92, a single outlier can have a dramatic impact on a mean average, the example I like to give is that of a 50 year old kindergarten teacher and ten 5-year olds — the average age in that classroom is 9. Even outside of its small size, a school like UATX is likely to have SAT outliers — in both directions.
Remember too that the SAT (Scholastic APTITUDE Test) is intended to determine aptitude to the traditional university, and we’re also talking the modern “woke” SAT here as well. So the students they are looking for may not do well on this test — which other prestigious colleges have considered worthless for evaluation purposes for well over a decade now.
You want to compare UATX to Harvard — fine, compare it to Harvard in 1636 where education consisted of rote memorization encouraged with corporal punishment, and I believe Harvard maintained that through at least the 17th Century. Every college I am aware of was a bit rough in the first decade as it got established.
And the thing to remember about UATX is that as its not accredited yet, hence anyone wanting to go on to law or medical school can’t. Likewise anyone wanting to teach in a public school won’t be able to. This will hurt recruitment.
Hence I’m not surprised that half the students are from Texas, which isn’t the Northeast — in culture or climate.
This does not surprise me. UATX is getting students with SAT levels of students at good, selective colleges. It is not getting Harvard/Princeton/MIT level students. It is not getting students of the level of the top quarter at Berkeley, which has similar numbers with Harvard and similar SAT’s, maybe better.
This makes me think of the campaign by Trump and his acolytes to try to destroy the top American universities, to destroy American science. This is not going to leave a bunch of Harvard-level schools with names like UATX. This is a very dangerous game that Trump and associates are playing.
If the purported “top American universities” were truly of such merit, it wouldn’t be possible for Trump or anyone else *to* “destroy them.” Likewise, American (academic) “science.”
American higher education is where passenger rail was sixty years ago, and while President Trump may administer the coup de grâce, much as President Johnson did with his decision to stop shipping the US Mail by rail, the Evil Orange Man wouldn’t be able to harm a healthy educational industry.
Massive Oak trees do not fall because the wind was blowing or because wet snow/ice accumulated on their branches. They come down because they have rotted from the inside out, and the few inches of solid wood left on the outside was barely enough to hold up the tree even when the wind wasn’t blowing.
The core of academia is rotten and it will soon fall from its own weight, with our without President Trump. Between the plagiarism, fraud, and inability to duplicate even “honest” experiments, please tell me again just how great American academic science is today….
You somehow seem to think that Harvard undergraduates are somehow superior — I merely see them benefiting from a level of resources that a state university is unable to provide. It’s been said that one has to have an 800 SAT score to go to MIT, but one has to be a true genius to find housing at UMass Amherst.