What You'll Actually Pay
Price after grants
$12,814 to $26,596 a year for in-state students, depending on income.
College Scorecard 2024 estimate · in-state rates
See the price at your income ↑Sticker price
Full cost before aid: $29,807 a year in-state. Average need-based aid package: $18,038.Aid and debt
40.8%
receive need-based grants
$22,645
average debt at graduation
4,160
students got merit aid
about 18% of undergraduates
$9,878
average merit award
Getting In
Key dates
Test scores
SAT, middle 50% of those who submitted: 1170–1390 · 79% of the class submitted
ACT, middle 50% of those who submitted: 24–32 · 12% of the class submitted
38% were in the top 10% of their high school class.
What they value
- Very important
- Course rigor (AP/IB)
- Class rank
- GPA
- Important
- SAT/ACT scores
- Personal essay
- Recommendations
- Extracurriculars
- Character
- Volunteer work
- Work experience
- Considered
- Special talent
- Demonstrated interest
- Not considered
- First-gen status
- Legacy status
- Where you're from
- In-state residency
What this means for you
UT Dallas rates course rigor as Very Important, and your essay, your recommendations, and your activities as Important.
MoreLess
Rigor means AP, IB, and dual enrollment carry real weight — make sure your mix of AP or IB courses is strong. A strong essay can differentiate an otherwise average application. Recommendations matter here too — a recommender who knows you well helps. And depth and leadership in a few activities matter more than a long list.
UT Dallas rates demonstrated interest 'Considered' — it can tip a close decision, without being decisive.
Source: Common Data Set 2025–26, Section C7 (admissions factors)
UT Dallas just showed you what it values in an application. Use that to write a Why-UT Dallas essay that's actually about you — not a template.
Get sourced starting points for your essayStudent Life
23.8% of UT Dallas classes have fewer than 20 students.
23.8%
under 20 students
44.2%
20 to 49
32%
50 or more
Every class section counts, labs and seminars included; first-year courses tend to be larger. UT Dallas CDS 2025–26, I-3.
23:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus life
22%
live on campus
3%
of men in fraternities
3%
of women in sororities
Who attends
- Asian41.8%
- White19.5%
- Hispanic19%
- Black6.6%
- Unknown / other4.3%
- Multiracial3.7%
Enrolled undergraduates; international students are counted separately and not included. UT Dallas CDS 2025–26, B2.
Popular majors
Will They Graduate?
63.3% of UT Dallas students graduate in 4 years.
63.3%
finish in 4 years
Entered fall 2019
79.2%
finish in 6 years
Entered fall 2019
90.49%
return after first year
Finishing late means paying for extra semesters, so the 4-year rate is the one that shows the cost.
Students with Pell Grants
74.1% finish in 6 years, against 79.2% of all students.
A 5.1-point gap: Pell Grant students finish less often than students overall.
City & Culture
Beyond the data — what it's actually like to spend four years in Richardson.
This is a commuter campus in a suburb, and pretending otherwise would mislead.
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UT Dallas sits on the north side of Richardson, eighteen miles from downtown Dallas, and 78% of its undergraduates live off campus — 22% are in university housing, against 43% of first-years, so most students move out after freshman year and drive in. What that costs is obvious: the campus empties in the evening, and a student without a car has to plan around it. What it buys is less obvious and genuinely unusual. The campus edge is the Richardson Telecom Corridor, the second-largest employment centre in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, so the internship is often a ten-minute drive rather than a summer relocation. And the student body is overwhelmingly Texan — only 5% of undergraduates come from out of state — which makes this a school that Texas families choose on price and proximity and STEM strength rather than on the college-town experience. Since October 2025 the DART Silver Line has stopped a third of a mile from campus, connecting UTD to four other rail lines and to DFW Airport, and UT Dallas students can apply for free DART passes. It is the first time the campus has had rail, and it changes the arithmetic for a student who was counting on a car.
The City
Major city
Richardson, TX
Best For
Notable alumni
Notable Alumni
Aziz Sancar
Won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping how cells repair damaged DNA — the first Nobel laureate to come out of UT Dallas. He earned his PhD in molecular and cell biology here in 1977, worked five years as a lab technician at Yale afterwards, and is now the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry at the University of North Carolina. He received the university's inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award.
Class of 1977
James F. Reilly II
A NASA astronaut who flew three Space Shuttle missions and made five spacewalks helping assemble the International Space Station, then served as the 17th director of the U.S. Geological Survey from 2018 to 2021. He took all three of his geosciences degrees here — a bachelor's in 1977, a master's in 1987 and a PhD in 1995 — and worked as an oil and gas exploration geologist in between.
Class of 1977
Naveen Jindal
Chairman of Jindal Steel & Power and a two-term elected member of India's parliament. He earned his MBA here in 1992 and in 2011 pledged $15 million to the business school — at the time the largest gift ever made by a UT Dallas alumnus — after which the UT System Board of Regents renamed it the Naveen Jindal School of Management, the name it still carries.
Class of 1992
Gabriel Dawe
The installation artist behind the Plexus series — room-sized sculptures woven from miles of coloured thread that read as bands of solid light. He developed the series as a graduate student in the CentralTrak residency and took his MFA in arts and technology here in 2011; the work has since been shown at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery in Washington and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. UT Dallas named him a Distinguished Alumnus in 2018.
Class of 2011
Alumni selected for name recognition and range of fields. Not from the Common Data Set.
Traditions
Traditions
The Whoosh
The hand salute students throw at games and ceremonies, invented in the early 1990s and named for the sound a comet would make if there were sound in space. It goes with Temoc — a blue-skinned comet in human form, 'Comet' spelled backwards — who was designed in 1998 by a student, Aaron Aryanpur, and is still the university's mascot.
Chess
UT Dallas built a scholarship chess programme in 1996, deliberately, as a way to recruit and to signal what kind of place it wanted to be — the idea came from a humanities professor, Tim Redman, a past president of the US Chess Federation, at a time when only UMBC had tried anything similar. It worked: the team won the first President's Cup, the Final Four of collegiate chess, and full-tuition chess scholarships are still awarded every year alongside a chess club, for-credit chess courses and summer camps for children.
Oozeball
The annual mud volleyball tournament, run by the Student Ambassadors since 2002, with teams of six to ten. It sits alongside a set of small campus rituals that a commuter school works to sustain: dunking your class ring in the reflecting pools at the Ring Ceremony, rubbing the head of the Cecil Green statue for luck during finals, and Legacy Lane, the engraved paving stones set by class year along the creek behind the McDermott Library.
Weekend escapes from Richardson
Weekend Escapes
Within driving distance from Richardson
Downtown Dallas
25 minutesThe Arts District — the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Meyerson — plus Deep Ellum's music venues and Fair Park. Reachable on DART with one transfer at CityLine/Bush, which matters if you don't have a car.
Fort Worth
50 minutesA completely different city from Dallas despite sharing an airport: the Stockyards, and the Kimbell and Amon Carter museums, which are worth the drive on their own.
Turner Falls and the Arbuckle Mountains, Oklahoma
1 hour 45 minutesStraight up I-35 past Lake Texoma to the nearest real hills, a swimming hole and Oklahoma's tallest waterfall. The closest thing to topography within reach of a flat metroplex.
Getting there and game days
Getting There & Game Days
Nearest airport
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW)
30 minutes from campus
Flies international — you can start a trip abroad from here.
Pro sports nearby
- Dallas Cowboys NFL
- Dallas Mavericks NBA
- Dallas Stars NHL
- Texas Rangers MLB
- FC Dallas MLS
- Dallas Wings WNBA
Internships and jobs nearby
Career Proximity
UT Dallas was founded by the three men who founded Texas Instruments — Eugene McDermott, Erik Jonsson and Cecil Green — to keep technical talent in North Texas, and the campus still sits inside the industry that produced it. Richardson's Telecom Corridor, which begins at the campus edge, holds more than 5,700 companies and over 130,000 jobs, and is the second-largest employment centre in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. State Farm is Richardson's largest employer with roughly 8,000 people at the CityLine development a couple of miles from campus, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas runs its headquarters on the same site, and Texas Instruments, Fujitsu, Raytheon and Honeywell all operate in the corridor. Push another fifteen minutes north into Plano and Frisco and the corporate headquarters keep coming. The practical consequence is that a UT Dallas student can hold a semester internship without moving anywhere.
Top Industries Nearby
Major Employers
- Texas Instruments
- State Farm
- Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas
- Raytheon
- Fujitsu Network Communications
The Richardson Telecom Corridor starts at the campus edge; downtown Dallas is about 18 miles south, roughly 25 minutes by car or a DART ride with one transfer
Who thrives here
Who Thrives Here
UT Dallas admits 69.1% of applicants, so getting in is rarely the hard part. It opened in 1969 and still reads that way: a research campus dropped next to the Telecom Corridor rather than a college town, with 23,007 undergraduates and only 22% of them in university housing. Greek life is marginal — 3% of men and 3% of women — and the centre of gravity is the labs, the chess programme and the drive home. Classes run large: 23 students per faculty member and only 23.8% of sections under 20. On money it is one of the plainer arguments in the catalog. In-state students pay $14,664 and everyone else $40,164, the school meets 66.0% of demonstrated need, and graduates leave with $22,645 in average debt. 63.3% finish in four years and 79.2% within six. Anyone who wants a residential four years should sit with that 22% before applying.