A Direct Pathway to Dallas
The University of Dallas has recently started an automatic admission program that collaborates with Catholic schools in Texas, Oklahoma and Lincoln, Nebraska to give students fast-tracked admission to UD. This program creates a more direct pathway for local students applying to UD.
There are several requirements for students applying to the UDallas Promise program. Applicants must have an unweighted GPA of 3.75 by the end of their junior year, score a 1250 on the SAT, 28 on the ACT, or 94 on the CLT and have no disciplinary record during high school. The applications are due March 1.
Clare Venegas, vice president of marketing and communications, said, “UDallas Promise is a recruitment tool, essentially to help speed up the process for these high school students to be admitted to UD.”
Andrew Ellison, vice president of enrollment management, said, “UDallas promise is an extension of something that was pioneered in freshman undergraduate admissions a couple of years ago. It started with something we called ‘Crusader Promise’ for students in Catholic high schools in the Dallas or Fort Worth area.”
In the past year, UD has decided to extend this automatic admissions initiative to every single Catholic diocesan high school in the state of Texas. The program has also been extended to all the dioceses of Oklahoma. since Oklahoma does not have a Catholic college or university of its own.
When asked why the program is also being extended to Catholic high schools in the diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, Ellison said, “The bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska, Bishop Conley, is a UD alumnus, who at one point when he was Father Conley, was chaplain to the Rome campus from UD. Because of a special friendship we have with him, we decided to offer that to the Catholic schools in Lincoln, Nebraska as well.”
As someone who has worked in high school college admissions offices, Ellison explained that part of the purpose of UD Promise is to remove some of the stress from college applications.
“Getting accepted to an American college or university is so high stress, right? It’s the cultural paradigm,” said Ellison. “Everyone assumes it’s supposed to be nerve racking. It’s supposed to be high stakes. It has been dramatized in television and movies and shows for decades where kids are freaking out about whether or not they’re going to get into a good college and all that.”
UDallas Promise is meant to reduce that stress for families and high schoolers. Hopefully, the more streamlined process will make for a calmer application experience.
This fall, UD admissions has received a thousand applications for the fall semester of 2025, which is about 400 more applications than there were at the same time last year. According to Ellison, while not all of these applications are due to UDallas Promise, the increase of applications portends exciting things for UD’s future.