Merit-First Admissions at the University of Austin | Loren Rotner and David Puelz

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Loren Rotner, Associate Provost, and David Puelz, Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the University of Austin. They discuss what makes UATX distinct, including its heterodox faculty, emphasis on tech education, and full tuition scholarships for all admitted students. They talk about the decision to grant automatic admission to any student who scores a 105 or higher on the CLT, with encouragement and guidance for all looking to apply.

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:02.551)
Folks, welcome back to the Anchor Podcast. We're here with Lauren Rotner, Associate Provost at the new University of Austin, UATX, and statistics professor, Dr. David Pels. Lauren, David, great to see you both.

Loren Rotner (00:17.528)
Great to see you, Jeremy. Thanks for having us.

Jeremy Tate (00:20.365)
I don't know that there's a university in the country that has been in the news as much as UATX. I 60 minutes all over Twitter and social media. There's a lot of buzz about what you're doing. I'm assuming most of our audience has heard about UATX and what you're doing. I lot of the heads of school and a lot of these great classical schools we work with are super enthusiastic about it. But assuming folks don't know anything about UATX at all.

I'd love for you to maybe just kick us off and tell us a little bit about why a university launched a few years ago and kind of what the vision is.

Loren Rotner (00:51.2)
Awesome. Well, thanks a lot, Jeremy. And thanks again for having us. And I'll just maybe start by talking a little bit about what University of Austin is, just for those who have never heard of it. It's a new university. It founded on November 8th, 2021. We launched in Barry Weiss's substack. Time is called Common Sense. Now it's called Free Press. Many of your listeners probably know it. We're a university that is solely devoted to one end.

Jeremy Tate (01:12.95)
Thank

Loren Rotner (01:21.174)
And that is the fearless pursuit of truth. We believe that truth exists, but we believe that it's the responsibility of all of us to be open-minded in the pursuit of it, to take all opinions, reasonable opinions seriously, and to try to scrupulously investigate them. And so we are wholly dedicated to that.

We are a four-year university. We're a brick-and-mortar university. So we're a little bit old-fashioned in that way. We don't have any online. We do some YouTube stuff, but other than that, we don't have any online classes or anything like that. It's an undergraduate institution. Just to give you a sense, it launched in three years. So we announced it in 2021, and we launched it just this last fall with our opening class of 92 students.

Jeremy Tate (02:01.036)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (02:13.612)
Okay, okay.

And what exactly was broken? thinking we're in this moment where we've actually got a contraction of four year, three year, four year brick and mortar colleges. A lot are closing and then y'all are launching a new one. And I think identified something real about why the contractions happening about something being broken. What is that in particular?

Loren Rotner (02:39.02)
Yeah, prior, David and I both, I'm joined here again by David Pels, Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science here, who helped design our admissions policy, which we'll talk about in a moment. But the university was responding to just a very manifest and well-documented reality in higher education, where students did not feel comfortable and still do not feel comfortable discussing controversial issues in the classroom.

Jeremy Tate (03:06.71)
Hmm. That's true.

Loren Rotner (03:07.77)
There's a broad sense that there's a lot of self-censorship going on, that students are worried that they're going to be outed on social media for accidentally raising a question or saying something that they themselves may not even fully believe or agree with, but like they simply want to investigate it. And so we are an unabashedly liberal, small L liberal.

Jeremy Tate (03:27.06)
Yeah.

Loren Rotner (03:34.464)
free, open-minded university where everyone is able and invited to say what they think and, you know, openly investigate questions. So that's the reality that we're really responding to. Higher Ed, for a long time, has been dominated really by one side of the political spectrum. And we want to really introduce more balance in higher education.

Jeremy Tate (03:34.635)
Sure.

Jeremy Tate (03:58.06)
Hmm.

Loren Rotner (04:03.342)
We're, our faculty, don't think of ourselves as a conservative university. Our faculty are very diverse in their points of view and their religious beliefs. We don't, we treat people as individuals, not as members of identity groups. We're against DEI, wholeheartedly against DEI. It's rooted in our constitution. We actually have a constitution that.

formalizes our commitments to our principles, including the treating everyone as an individual and not a member as an identity group in admissions and in all of our grading practices. We actually enforce practices against grade inflation. So no class is allowed to, in fact, rate grade inflate. And so that's another thing that we're oriented against. And then finally, administrative bloat.

Jeremy Tate (04:47.18)
Okay.

Loren Rotner (04:58.392)
Higher Ed right now is dominated by administrators. Administrators have corrupted it, to be quite honest, and I'm an administrator, so I can, I'm a part of the problem, but they've corrupted it, and we are doing everything we possibly can to refocus resources on the core mission of higher education, which is teaching and learning and research, and away from administration.

Jeremy Tate (05:06.156)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (05:26.666)
I love this. One of things I love so much about about UATX and what you're doing is the impact that it's already having on so many other institutions and kind of rethinking why they're doing what they're doing and why they're at where they're at. One of my questions, maybe David, turns to you for this. You're already getting students that were admitted to Princeton and Harvard. I mean, as a branded university, how does that happen?

Loren Rotner (05:51.864)
Well, yeah, think students are looking for a new culture, a new way to learn. And we are certainly getting students from these top schools. I think we're peeling a certain group of those students away. I think we're also activating students that are that that would otherwise sit on the sidelines that have high test scores that are very smart, that are very motivated, but have been going through high school and have looked at a system that

Jeremy Tate (06:12.044)
Hmm.

Loren Rotner (06:22.114)
that just doesn't treat them fairly. That doesn't focus on only their merit, but focuses on things they can control, like their skin color, their race, how the number of years that they played on the football team. And so we are, think, and this is something that I truly believe in, is that we're actually activating a group of students that would otherwise be turned off.

going to these traditional schools. And Jeremy, on that, maybe I'll just provide one example from someone in our current class. as a gentleman, I won't name just for privacy purposes, but his very high achieving individual, know, 1580 on the SAT. OK, so this person could have easily gotten into the Ivy League, but he didn't have extracurricular activities to list on his application because he was caring for his seven siblings.

Jeremy Tate (06:53.685)
Okay.

Jeremy Tate (07:09.376)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (07:20.724)
wow.

Loren Rotner (07:20.938)
And the alternative, he wasn't applying to college. The main alternative for this individual was the Space Force. And he was thinking about joining the Space Force, but he found us instead. And he's here now, one of the leading members of the founding class. So that's kind of our bread and butter. Our people who feel kind of left out of the current Admissions game and don't want to play it, are just kind of tired of all the fakery and the pretension.

Jeremy Tate (07:24.32)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (07:27.83)
Mm-hmm.

Loren Rotner (07:48.878)
and really just want to get down to the work of teaching and learning in the liberal education tradition, which we really espouse and believe in.

Jeremy Tate (07:59.207)
So last week, social media caught on fire. UATX made a big announcement and it was very contrarian to what has been going on. And so we've seen, certainly since the housing market crashed in 2008, massive, massive uptick in test option.

Some universities even going test blind, you you can't even send your score if you want to. We're not going to take a look at it. UATX makes this announcement, you know, that automatic admission CLT score 106. I guess there's a couple other tests out there that you would also accept, you know, we won't name those right now. We love that. That's amazing. But this is, is, this is against the grain, you know, tell us about what was behind this.

Loren Rotner (08:44.162)
Yeah, maybe I'll say a little bit about some of the policy changes and then I'll let David talk a little bit about some of the science behind it and some of the empirical evidence that went into making those changes. But, you know, we had a more traditional policy for this first year because what we wanted to do was take a moment, examine the effects of a traditional policy and also examine alternatives.

we wanted a little bit of time to figure it out. But once we did, it was an easy change to make. mean, what we've done is we've committed to full merit in everything that we do across the board, including and especially in admissions. And so we offer automatic admission to any student who scores at above, it's actually 105 on the CLT or higher, or...

On these other tests, I'll just mention them quickly. 1460 on the SAT or higher or 33 on the ACT or higher. So they're all equivalent essentially. and it's all you need to do is send us a score. You can apply to us in under seven minutes and you have to meet basic eligibility requirements. And then we have an integrity check to just make sure you are who you say you are, that you haven't committed crimes, et cetera. And you're in.

Jeremy Tate (09:43.872)
Yeah. Yeah.

Loren Rotner (10:06.188)
I mean, it's that simple because we ultimately believe, look, we're a little bit like the military. We believe we want to attract the best and brightest to us. And once you get here, that's what's important. Like we want to raise you up. We want to try to get the best we can out of you when you're here. It's not about what you've done necessarily. It's about who you can be in accord with your intellectual capacities and potential. But

Jeremy Tate (10:27.99)
Hmm.

Loren Rotner (10:34.03)
I'm happy to maybe turn it over to David for a second because he actually developed our emissions algorithm, which we're the first college in the United States. We've actually published our emissions algorithm. So you can actually see how we make decisions. We're fully transparent. It's a very simple emissions algorithm, but I'll let David talk a little bit about the science behind it. then why, what is the empirical evidence for this position? Yeah, sure. So.

Jeremy Tate (10:36.716)
Yeah.

Loren Rotner (11:00.654)
This is one of the easiest computer algorithms to talk about because it because you can basically describe it in 10 seconds. It's it's it's ranking on standardized tests and then it's ranking on a couple other test scores if you're below these thresholds. And and and it it's also very easy to talk about the evidence behind this. If you look at the breadth of a college application, typical college application measures all kinds of things. They ask you to do college essays. They ask you to

to check all kinds of boxes saying what your race and your gender are. They might ask you to do some type of video interview. They might ask you to do all kinds of other things. They might have specialized essays. And if you look at a very kind of robust literature on this, even before AI, these college essays were not predictive of success in college.

Jeremy Tate (12:00.183)
Mm-hmm.

Loren Rotner (12:01.134)
Now we have AI that's being used to write anywhere between 20 and 50 % of essays to these typical colleges. And so it's just a major problem. It's not something worth asking for. even if we did ask for it, there's no signal in it. So it's not a predictive thing at all. And so if you look at all possible things that you could measure, and this goes,

Jeremy Tate (12:09.196)
Thanks.

Jeremy Tate (12:15.084)
Yeah.

Loren Rotner (12:29.806)
even for GPA, the most predictive variable of success in college is just a standardized test. And if you look at the correlation, people kind of debate as to what the exact correlation is between a standardized test score and performance in the first year, the second year, and beyond, but it's anywhere between 0.4 and 0.6.

Jeremy Tate (12:41.121)
Mm.

Loren Rotner (12:59.842)
It gives us a really good idea of the strength of the applicant. And so it's a policy. It's a beautiful policy. It's a simple policy. It's focused on the evidence. And it's very transparent. And so that's why we're super excited about it.

Jeremy Tate (13:19.958)
So this discussion about fairness and admissions, MIT, thought it was very interesting, their rationale for going back to requiring, they were actually making the case that you're going to give the soft skills. You actually make things more unfair when you do that. The parents that can get their kids published or a patent or whatever else.

Those kids are going to be, they're going to have an advantage. The advantage goes to the affluent privilege kids, not the one raising seven siblings. So what are you predicting? mean, UATX is clearly emerging as an industry leader. In five years, will the pendulum have swung all the way back pre-COVID? Most colleges requiring a standardized test. What do you see coming?

Loren Rotner (14:06.67)
Yeah, I think we're absolutely going back to required standardized tests. mean, as you mentioned, or I think implied, there's about 90 % of colleges right now are test optional. And so it's wild. I mean, it's a totally different world from the world that, know, Jeremy, when you and I were applying to college, it's just a very different world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For me, it was 2003. But yeah, I I just think

Jeremy Tate (14:28.335)
1999, I'm an old man,

Loren Rotner (14:36.148)
You know, UT has studied this very carefully. Our main competitor, the University of Texas at Austin here, our friends over there, they dropped the standardized test, but I think they brought it back recently because they did a lot of sophisticated and deep studies and found that people who had not submitted a standardized test really performed a lot worse in college. mean, it's just, it's so much harder to select on the basis of just highly subjective and frankly, gameable and fakeable.

Jeremy Tate (14:57.216)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (15:00.918)
Sorry.

Jeremy Tate (15:06.526)
Yep, yep.

Loren Rotner (15:06.686)
criteria like essays and extracurricular activities and even letters of recommendation, etc. you know, the SAT look, if you read, there's one of our friends at the university is a gentleman named Rob Henderson, I would commend him to all of your listeners. He has a wonderful substack. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, early founding faculty fellow here at the University of Austin, very influential on us. But if you read him,

You know, this is another another great example of the great equalizer that is the standardized test. I mean, he was born to horrible poverty. OK. And foster care got a two point two GPA, but he got a very high test score because he has very high native intelligence. And that got him into Yale and got him, you know, launched in life. And that's the kind of kid we really want to find an appeal to someone who isn't born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

Jeremy Tate (15:56.032)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (16:04.022)
Yeah.

Loren Rotner (16:05.838)
And we're so committed to that and so committed to the merit principle that we offer full tuition scholarships to every student who earns admission to the University of Austin. So we're totally agnostic as to whether you can pay for this education at this time. It's because we want to be accessible.

Jeremy Tate (16:19.114)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (16:26.905)
And Laurie, can you repeat that? mean, that's incredible.

Loren Rotner (16:29.91)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we offer some, our founders scholarship, called. We offer a full tuition scholarship to every admitted student at the University of Austin. We have further scholarships. We have need-based scholarships beyond that. We have something called the Lonsdale-Migaro-Build Scholarship, which is limited to students who score above a 1550 on the SAT and CLT and ACT equivalents. So we're very committed.

to the principle of making this accessible to every student regardless of financial means. But just back to your question, Jeremy, I just think this whole test optional movement has been a disaster. I think everybody knows it. MIT, UT, they're all going back.

Jeremy Tate (17:07.37)
Hmm. I love that you're just saying it out loud though. Finally somebody. So we all appreciate that here at CLT. You know, I remember probably 15 years ago, you know, I was tutoring doing SAT, ACT prep, helping a student and the mom asked me to help.

with the essay and I'm helping and then I realized she really basically means writing the essay for the student. So we went from, you know, high-pay tutors writing essays to AI writing essays for free and y'all had the integrity and the honesty to just say out loud what's actually happening. On the essay component, mean, are colleges already saying we get what's going on and discontinuing it as well? Are y'all kind of cutting edge on this front as well?

Loren Rotner (17:50.978)
I think we're pretty cutting edge on this front. I think a lot of colleges, they frame it in terms of fit. And the recent affirmative action decision at the Supreme Court, we discovered that so-called personality factors or personality tests, how did those really come through? mean, those came through the essays. And essays are used to discriminate. I mean, just pure and simple. And so I think colleges like them.

because it allows them a way around some kind of objective measure of merit and allows them to consider factors that maybe they shouldn't be considering. maybe David, do you want to weigh in on that? Yeah, no, think essays are to the degree that they're not written by AI. They are absolutely used to discriminate. There's actually, you know, there's some recent work I was reading a paper yesterday that showed that you can.

Jeremy Tate (18:39.328)
You

Loren Rotner (18:48.184)
try to quantify essays. are some, there's some interesting statistical techniques to do that. And, they're that, that content is actually highly correlated with socioeconomic status. So, so if they, if, if they're proxying for that, then yeah, it can be used to, to, discriminate against people. could be used to maybe proxy for race. and, and so because of all of these competing variables and correlated variables, we, just wanted to throw it all out and just say, look, we,

Jeremy Tate (19:09.132)
Hmm.

Loren Rotner (19:18.102)
We know what's predictive. We only care about merit, so let's just focus only on that. it's been beautiful for us and it's been wonderful for us because I think people love the simplicity of it and they love the transparency of it. And we're hoping that a lot of really smart students that would be sitting on the sidelines otherwise are deciding to give us a look.

Jeremy Tate (19:46.796)
Sure, Love that. What are some other distinctives at UATX right now? mean, you're saying three years, not four years. Tell us about that decision.

Loren Rotner (19:59.534)
Well, though, so we are we are a four year institution. So so not three year institution, but just correct that quickly. But we look, we're often compared to other schools that have a serious liberal liberal education tradition like St. John's or Hillsdale or Thomas Aquinas or University of Dallas. These are awesome institutions. I'm a big fan of all of them. But the biggest difference, I would say, between them and us.

We have an all required liberal education curriculum in the first two years. It's called our intellectual foundations curriculum, but we also are very tech oriented. were founded by our founders are Barry Weiss, Joe Lonsdale and Neil Ferguson and Pano Canellos. And Joe Lonsdale has really, he provided the seed money. He is really championed this university. He's a founder of Palantir. He is really helped this university.

Jeremy Tate (20:32.385)
Good.

Loren Rotner (20:54.53)
be very tech oriented, tech facing. We want students to come in and be leaders in our society. And for us, that means not only really appreciating the inheritance of the West and its principles, but being a, you know, really getting the technical training and skills and also the skills in terms of entrepreneurship that are required in order to really lead and build and fix problems, public and private problems.

in the United States. We're a very pro-American university, which also makes us somewhat distinctive. We're also in downtown Austin. So we're at 6th and Congress here on the third floor. And it's awesome to be in downtown. There's just so much opportunity here. There's so much energy here.

Jeremy Tate (21:33.014)
the

Loren Rotner (21:49.614)
So that makes us kind of distinctive for being so small, but being downtown. We have something called the Polaris Project that all students work on for their four years at the University of Austin. And it's a project of their own creation, their own making. They can choose to, you know, write a screenplay or build a business or, you know, try to solve a social problem.

and they investigate all of the ways that it has that people have attempted to do such a thing and then try out novel solutions. And so they're mentored in that project by our talent network, which is composed of incredible people who have just done such incredible things. you know, like Alex carp, the founder of Palantir or Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal. He was actually just here this week giving some lectures.

Jeremy Tate (22:33.153)
Hmm.

Loren Rotner (22:44.448)
So it's a very distinctive place. It's really intellectually alive and vibrant. The students are very self-starting and self-selecting. There's a lot that I would say is very distinctive about it. I've taught at a bunch of institutions. It really has its own flavor and character that you gotta come and check us out.

Jeremy Tate (22:49.974)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (23:04.384)
Yeah, yeah. I'm wondering if you could speak into, know, folks have argued, you can get out, you know, the Harvard Library no longer has a monopoly on information. Get everything online. Take online classes. UATX is saying no, there's real, real value to being physically together in person, in community, at a time when people are questioning that. I wonder if you could speak into that.

Loren Rotner (23:33.39)
Yeah, do you want to? Yeah, I mean, we we have a we have a very special culture here. And and I think the the starting point of that culture is the fact that we have all of our students on campus and in a in a in a small currently, but vibrant campus where they are taking seminar classes together. Our classes are typically capped at around 16 students. So there's.

All kinds of active discussion during class. Students will often continue that discussion after class. And there is for sure tremendous value in having everyone be here in person versus sitting behind a computer and seeing a professor lecture over Zoom. All of our professors are very engaging.

They lead their class as well. And we have a very special culture here that I'm proud to be part of. The students all live together in community as well. So they all share a single dorm. They're required to live in that dorm for their first two years so they can really bond. And they cook together. We don't have a dining hall. We don't have a meal plan. They cook together. They do everything.

Jeremy Tate (24:56.457)
They gotta... That's awesome. Yeah.

Loren Rotner (24:59.082)
Yeah, we treat them like adults, which is a little unusual, I think, for university culture. That's another very distinctive thing. They act like adults and we treat them like adults. and so, yeah, we really believe that, look, if you're going to have a genuine community, intellectual community, you really have to know one another. And in all ways, I mean, outside the classroom, inside the classroom, you need to develop the trust that's required to really be able to take

one another's opinions seriously and question them, right? I mean, if you're a thousand miles away, it's a little bit harder to trust that person. So can you really open up to that person? And for us, being in person is just so crucial for that.

Jeremy Tate (25:44.013)
Now I am embarrassed to admit this publicly, but I never cracked even 100 on a CLT. It was like a life goal. I never broke 100. And I don't want to discourage other students from applying when you're automatically admitted with a 105 for students that are maybe not quite at that level. Should they still submit an application?

Loren Rotner (26:08.128)
Yes, okay. Thank you for prompting me, Jeremy, on this because it could be commonly misunderstood that we're not admitting any student under a 105 CLT. That's not true. We do have a regular emissions track. You're not automatically admitted under that threshold. You're still capable and absolutely encouraged to apply. But in addition, what we consider

are AP and IB scores and SAT subject tests, which have been discontinued in 2021. So probably that's irrelevant to most people. we do consider those two. And then third, consider, and this is admittedly very subjective. Like we don't hide behind some claim of objectivity here. But we consider three achievements. So we want to know what you've done, not anything else. And so.

Jeremy Tate (26:39.596)
Yeah.

Loren Rotner (27:00.798)
If you've scored a 92 on the CLT, okay, but you have volunteered for 20 hours a week, helping your sick grandmother and caring for your sick grandmother, we want to know about that. That's an impressive thing to be doing. Or if you've won a junior Olympic gold medal, we'd like to know about that or have participated in junior Olympic fencing or I mean, I can just come up with so many different options, right?

Jeremy Tate (27:10.688)
Mm-hmm.

Loren Rotner (27:30.582)
And we want to be very open-minded about what those things are. Like you can be as creative as you want in assessing what you consider to be an achievement. And we will assess that, right? We want to value those things that are predictive of success in college and life. And if you were a star varsity athlete on the football team, a college quarterback,

you probably have a lot of skills in terms of leading and managing a team. We want to know about that. That's highly predictive of success in life. I wouldn't discourage anyone who doesn't have the 105 plus CLT from applying. We will absolutely consider your application and you should certainly apply.

Jeremy Tate (28:19.34)
Well, I love what I'm hearing and CLT hires big out of Hillsdale. We hire big out of St. John's in Annapolis. And there's this irony that we talk about in the Anchor podcast, sometimes where this kind of education, a deep dive into Western canon, a deep dive into what it means to be human, the goal isn't to be employable, but ironically, they make the very best employees at the end of the day, folks who have actually really learned how to think. And they've learned how to be in a room with people who may not agree with them and to not have a total meltdown, which is actually very, very important.

and kind of right now as well. Again, we're here with Lauren Rautner, Associate Provost at UATx in Austin, and also Dr. David Pelz, who is the statistics professor there. Again, what you're doing is having a big reach outside of Austin as well, think a real influencer now among colleges and universities and what the future is gonna look like. So thank you for the good work. And we can't wait to get our first UATx graduate here at CLT.

Loren Rotner (29:17.902)
Thank you. Yeah, we'll send him or her as soon as we can. But thank you very much for having us, Jeremy. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Jeremy.

Jeremy Tate (29:24.577)
Thank