The University of Tennessee board of trustees approved a new guaranteed admission proposal at their meeting on Sept. 8. This proposal will affect Tennessee high school students across the state and all four of UT’s campuses.
UT President Randy Boyd presented the proposal in an Education, Research and Service Committee meeting that preceded the full board of trustees meeting. This meeting also included the chancellors from UT Knoxville, UT Chattanooga, UT Martin and UT Southern.
In an effort to more aggressively recruit the best and brightest students in the state of Tennessee, this proposal will guarantee first-year admission to any of UT’s campuses for high school students who either finish in the top 10% of their high school’s graduating class or achieve a 4.0 or higher GPA. In addition, students who achieve a 3.2 or higher GPA and have an ACT composite score of 23 or higher will have guaranteed admission to UT Chattanooga, UT Martin and UT Southern.
The proposal was discussed thoroughly by the Education, Research and Service Committee, and most of the debate centered around the third leg. It was originally proposed for all four campuses, but the board and UT Knoxville Chancellor Donde Plowman expressed concern about the lack of space and resources available on campus at the state’s flagship university for another major enrollment increase as a 3.2 GPA and a 23 ACT score is below the typical admission standards at UTK.
“It’s the third part that’s making us nervous that we could guarantee admission that we wouldn’t be able to deliver on,” Plowman said. “We don’t know how many students didn’t apply here last year because they didn’t think with a 23 they could get in.”
The chancellors of the three other UT campuses were in full support of all three legs of the proposal, and they stressed that they had plenty of room for expansion.
Boyd’s main focuses with this proposal were to more aggressively go after a shrinking pool of high school graduates, to keep Tennessee’s best students in-state and to provide more opportunities for students at rural and more socioeconomically disadvantaged high schools.
“From a recruiting point of view, we think this will allow us to recruit more of the best and brightest because we’ll already know that they’re accepted, and we’ll be able to send them out notices much, much earlier in the cycle than we do today,” Boyd said. “We believe that being the first one to tell them that they’re accepted will provide us an advantage.”
President Boyd also stressed the importance of having direct guidelines high school students can shoot for.
“We’ll give hope and a clear goal for students,” Boyd said. “As a freshman in high school, they’ll know what the target is. They’ll know what they need to achieve to be able to enter. We’ll remove the mystery.”
This is not a new minimum requirement to be admitted to any of UT’s campuses. Applicants outside of this criteria will still be considered holistically and admitted. These standards will also be looked over and potentially adjusted every year. UTK adding in the third leg of the proposal in the future when more housing is built — or having different GPA and ACT standards entirely — was discussed but not agreed upon.
This is not a new concept. Some other states across the country, like Texas and Florida, have similar policies in place.
“This will be the greatest decade in the history of the University of Tennessee,” Boyd said. “When they list all of the great accomplishments of this decade, today’s decision will be one of the things that people look back to and say that’s one of the reasons why this is the greatest decade.”
