Is UT Austin or Notre Dame harder to get into for undergraduate admissions?

For most applicants, Notre Dame is harder to get into overall, while UT Austin can be harder in specific situations, especially for out-of-state students or for very competitive majors. Notre Dame has a smaller undergraduate intake and a highly selective private-school admissions process for all applicants. UT Austin is also very selective, but its admissions landscape is shaped by Texas residency, automatic admission rules for many in-state students, and major-specific competition.

Notre Dame tends to feel tougher because everyone is competing in one national pool, and the university is consistently selective across the board. A student applying there usually needs to be strong academically and also present a very polished overall application, since the school puts real weight on course rigor, character, involvement, and fit with its community.

UT Austin is more complicated. For Texas residents, admission to the university can be more accessible than Notre Dame because state policy gives many top in-state students a built-in path to admission. But getting into a specific UT program, especially business, engineering, computer science, or other high-demand majors, can be much more difficult than getting into the university itself.

For out-of-state applicants, UT Austin can be extremely competitive because there are fewer available spots and no automatic-admit advantage. In that case, the difficulty gap between UT and Notre Dame narrows a lot, and for some majors UT may be just as hard or harder.

Notre Dame is usually harder to get into overall for undergraduate admission. The main exception is UT Austin out-of-state admission and top-demand majors, where UT can become comparably difficult or even tougher in practice.