My son did the UT Tyler CAP thing. He’s going into his Junior year at Texas. He got offered UT Tyler and UTEP for his CAP choices. I told him just to go to Tech and get the full college experience, but his heart was set on ending up at Texas. My concern was that he would waste a year at UT Tyler and not make the required 3.2 GPA to get into Texas. Well, he made a 4.0 at UT Tyler and was at Texas for his sophomore year. Now, I’m not the one who had to spend a year in Tyler, but the city didn’t seem too bad to me the couple of times I went up there. Looked a lot different than the brush country of South Texas. Nice pine trees and whatnot. There are also probably a lot less “distractions” in Tyler which makes achieving the required GPA a little more feasible. It was mentioned upthread, but I think the essay played a part in my son even being offered cap. He wasn’t even in the top half of his class (probably around the 75th percentile), but he still got offered CAP. He did go to a pretty good/competitive high school, but I’m not sure how much that played into it. TLDR: UT Tyler is a pretty good pathway to Texas for a CAP student.