Class of 2027 · South Texas
You are in the top 8.2 percent of your class, so admission to Texas public universities is automatic. And you will walk out of high school with a UTRGV associate degree already finished. That combination means this is not about getting in. It is about which five schools are worth your time and your family's Hazlewood hours.
Your dad's Hazlewood benefit is 150 credit hours of free tuition at Texas public schools, and it counts undergraduate and graduate hours together. Your brother already used some. Whatever you use is gone for your youngest sibling. The associate degree you are finishing in high school is the big lever here: dual credit hours were almost certainly not charged against Hazlewood, so you arrive with roughly 60 hours already paid for by somebody else. Move the sliders to match reality, then pick a path.
Nothing selected yet
Choose a path below to see what it spends.
Same question, two very different bets. One gets you earning at 20 or 21 with no debt. The other pays more but costs four extra years and money your family does not have sitting around.
You told me your dual credit is Physiology, Anatomy, Biology, and Chemistry through UTRGV. Here is exactly how that lines up against what each path requires. The course numbers are the real ones, straight from the program documents, so you can match them against your transcript line by line.
TSTC scores applicants out of about 535 points. The Admission Test for Dental Hygiene is worth 500 of them. Manual dexterity is 15, the science grades are 8, the commitment questionnaire is 5, dental assisting experience is 5, and a patient referral is 2. Everything that is not the ATDH adds up to 35 points.
Which means the entire dental hygiene strategy is one sentence. Study for the ATDH. Not more volunteering, not a better essay, not a dental assisting certificate. The test.
For the 2025 cohort the exam had to be completed by December 20. If the 2027 cohort follows the same pattern, that is about three months from now, and missing it costs a full year. Confirm the real date with Raquel Rico, program director, at [email protected] or (956) 364-4702.
Only four courses are required before you start. Everything else, including Microbiology, A&P II, Nutrition, Psychology and Sociology, is built into the program itself.
The whole degree is 68 credit hours. Take off the 14 prerequisite hours you likely already have and it spends about 54 Hazlewood hours. 30 students are accepted per year. Minimum 3.0 GPA, C or better in every prerequisite.
The DPT requires 35 hours of science before you can apply. This is the harder list, and it has a gap your dual credit does not cover.
Physics is the real obstacle. Two semesters with labs, and high schools almost never offer university physics as dual credit. That is 8 hours you would pick up during your bachelor's.
Tap five. Every school here is a Texas public institution, which is the only kind Hazlewood pays for. Private ones like Concorde and Pima run dental hygiene programs too, and they are deliberately not on this list because you would pay full price. Since tuition is covered everywhere on this list, distance is the real price tag. Sort by it and the cheap options rise to the top.