University of Texas at Austin

In brief

The University of Texas at Austin is the flagship of the University of Texas System. The Republic of Texas set aside 40 acres in its capital for a national university in 1839, but building it was delayed by annexation and the Civil War. By our measure of academic influence, it ranks #18 in the United States and #41 in the world. It admitted 26.6% of applicants for fall 2024; admitted students had a median SAT score of 1380 and a median ACT score of 30.

Land granted as its endowment was later found to hold oil, and the University of Texas System’s endowment is among the largest of any American university. In 1982 UT recruited the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg from Harvard.

Where UT Austin’s influence is strongest

UT Austin’s influence is broad: 12 of the 24 broad fields we measure rank in the US top 20. Its strongest broad fields, by US rank in our data, are:

• Communications and physics: #14 in the US each
• Law, literature, and history: #15 each

Within those fields, UT Austin is a national leader in several specialties:

• #1 in the US: alternative education
• #3 in the US: semiconductors (behind Stanford and MIT) and automated reasoning (behind Stanford and Carnegie Mellon)
• #5: distributed computing

By comparison, UT Austin sits further back in economics (#43), biology (#47), and religious studies (#60).

How we measure influence: these ranks come from the citations and recognition earned by a school’s faculty and alumni in each discipline, not from surveys or admissions statistics. See our methodology.

Notable people

UT-connected Nobel laureates include Steven Weinberg, the chemists John Goodenough and Ilya Prigogine, the geneticist Hermann Muller, the immunologist James Allison, and the novelist J.M. Coetzee. Its alumni and faculty also include the writer Jorge Luis Borges, the singer Janis Joplin, the filmmakers Wes Anderson and Robert Rodriguez, the actor Matthew McConaughey, the journalist Walter Cronkite, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Michael Dell, founder of Dell Technologies. Our full lists of UT Austin’s most influential alumni and faculty appear below.

Frequently asked questions

Is UT Austin hard to get into? Moderately. It admitted 26.6% of applicants for fall 2024; the middle half of admitted students scored 630–740 on the SAT reading section and 620–770 on math.

What does UT Austin cost after financial aid? Tuition is $11,656 for Texas residents and $44,816 for out-of-state students in 2025–26. The average net price for aided students with family incomes of $48,000–$75,000 was $12,412 in 2024–25; it ranged from about $8,979 for incomes below $30,000 to $30,480 for incomes above $110,000.

How do UT Austin graduates do? 89.2% of students who started in 2019 graduated within six years, and 97% of first-year students return for a second year. Ten years after starting college, former students had median earnings of $81,694.

What is UT Austin best known for academically? By our influence data: communications, physics, law, literature, and history, plus specialties such as semiconductors, where only Stanford and MIT rank higher.