What Top % are You? — College Sage

In recent years, we have watched an emerging trend of universities providing top high school students a guarantee that they will be admitted if they fall within a certain top percentage of their high school class. What does this mean for you? Well, it highlights the increasing necessity to “stand out” as an applicant if you’re below the top tier. And that is why we think The College Sage is so valuable to students. We work with students to help unleash their passions during high school and help them understand - at the beginning of high school - that their decisions matter!

We have included a list of many of the states where colleges offer this guaranteed admission policy at the end of this blog. But let’s start by zeroing in on a few states that have really spearheaded the guaranteed admissions movement, Florida and Texas. Florida’s Top Twenty program enables public school students in the top 20% of their graduating class to a guaranteed spot in one of the state’s 12 public universities. Now each university will have different qualifications to guarantee acceptance at their schools. We did the math on this and found that there were approximately 194,000 public high school graduates from Florida in the 2023-2024 school year. Then we took 20% of that to find that 38,818 students would be guaranteed admittance to an in-state university - note this does not guarantee admittance to your first choice in-state university. Just as a comparison, UF has about 7,000 freshmen per year. Wow! So this means that if every Florida resident who scored in the top 20% of their high school was guaranteed admittance at UF and they all decided to attend, they could fill up the freshman class 5.5 times over! Of course, that won’t happen, because the top 20% of students will be granted admittance in one of 12 in-state public universities, but nevertheless it’s an interesting way to think of the competitive situation.

Next, we looked at the University of Texas at Austin. The initial Texas legislation passed into law in 1997, offered automatic admission to eligible students in the top 10 percent of their Texas high school class. In 2009, the law was modified for The University of Texas at Austin. Under the new law, the University must automatically admit enough students to fill 75 percent of available Texas resident spaces. Each fall, the University notifies Texas school officials of the class rank that current high school juniors need to attain by the end of their junior year in order to be automatically admitted. In 2023, UT Austin admitted 11,962 top 6% students of which 5,431 students enrolled in their freshman class. As you can see, this guaranteed admittance program definitely poses a threat to less qualified students applying to UT Austin and the out-of-state accepted student body is lower than at most other public universities across the country. Of the 9,367 students who enrolled in the freshman class, we estimate that less than 13% were from out of state.

The last university we are going to look at is one of the most recent to offer a guaranteed admissions program, the University of South Carolina. On August 1, 2023, USC announced it would elect to guarantee admission to the top 10% of South Carolina public and private high school graduates. Significantly lower than Florida and Texas, SC only had 49,660 public high school graduates and 2,170 private high school graduates. The top 10% of these graduates include 5,183 students. Additionally, USC Columbia enrolls about 6,500 freshman students in their freshman class. So, if the 5,183 students who landed in the top 10% of their classes decided to attend USC once they were guaranteed admission, that would take up approximately 80% of the freshman spots available. While approximately half of those top 10% of students already typically applied to USC, you can see how this new program is increasing visibility to another 50% of students who may not have believed they were an obvious fit to gain admittance.

While there’s both good and bad to guaranteeing admission to these state universities, one thing's for sure. If you’re not a top student or not a resident of that state, you probably need to contact thecollegesage.com now! Many states are placing more emphasis on requiring their public universities to admit more in-state students. This trend increases the selectiveness of schools across the country and hence, the need for students to stand out in order to have the best chance at admittance.

Want to learn more? Here’s the full overview of guaranteed programs by state!

Colleges/states that offer a guaranteed program