Graduation Rates Show Continued Impact of UT Austin’s Emphasis on Student Success
AUSTIN, Texas — The University of Texas at Austin maintained its recent success in increasing its four-year graduation rate and improved its six-year rate this year, underscoring the long-term benefits of its focus on improving student success.
From 2014 to 2019, overall four-year graduation rates have increased from 55.1% to 69.8%, where they have held steady for the past two years. Six-year graduation rates improved during the same period, rising 2.8 percentage points in the past year to reach a new high for UT of 85.6%.
Graduation rates at UT have shown consistent improvement since 2011, when the university set a goal to increase the four-year graduation rate from 52% to 70%. In 2013, the university implemented a number of campus-wide student success programs and began analyzing student data to provide proactive graduation support for students. The programs offer peer mentoring, academic support and scholarship access to help more incoming students succeed in college.
The university continues to make especially noteworthy improvements in the four-year graduation rates of first-generation and low-income students.
In 2019, 60.1% of first-generation students graduated in four years, compared with just 43.2% in 2014. Similarly, the four-year graduation rate of Pell Grant eligible students rose from 44.1% in 2014 to 60.3% in 2019.
Four-year graduation rates for African American and Hispanic students showed broadly similar increases during the same period.
In addition to improving graduation rates, UT’s efforts have led to a 0.6% increase in the first-to-second year undergraduate retention rate, which is now 95.7%. U.S. News & World Report recently ranked UT Austin No. 14 in the country for first-year student experience.
In addition, fall enrollment highlights include:
- Total university enrollment decreased slightly to 51,090, a 1.4% drop from 2018.
- The overall percentage of black students (those who identify themselves as “Black only” or “Black – two or more, excluding Hispanic”) rose slightly from 4.8% to 4.9% of the student body. The percentage of black undergraduates rose slightly from 5.0% to 5.1%.
- The overall percentage of Hispanic students rose from 20.9% to 21.7%, and the percentage of Hispanic undergraduates rose from 23.4% to 24.4%.
- The percentage of white undergraduates dropped from 40.1% to 38.8%.
- The percentage of Asian undergraduates rose from 22.0% to 22.6%.
- The overall percentage of international students went from 10.1% to 10.0%.
