The following undergraduate courses are pre-enrollment requirements for the Texas MPA program. Applicants should plan to complete these courses with a passing grade before applying for admission.

• Principles of Macroeconomics
  
  Analysis of the economy as a whole (its organization and the basic forces influencing its growth and development); money and banking, national income, public finance, and international linkages.
• Principles of Microeconomics
  Analysis of the economic behavior of individual consumers, firms, and workers; special attention to the role of markets.
• Introduction to Statistics
  Training in the use of data to gain insight into business problems; describing distributions (center, spread, change, and relationships), producing data (experiments and sampling), probability and inference (means, proportions, differences, regression and correlation). (Although a business statistics course is preferred, this pre-enrollment requirement can be fulfilled with an equivalent statistics course from a discipline outside of business.)
• Introduction to Financial Accounting
  Concepts and their application in transaction analysis and financial statement preparation; analysis of financial statements.
  
• Introduction to Managerial Accounting (recommended for those starting in fall 2013; required for fall 2014)
  Introduction to cost behavior, budgeting, responsibility accounting, cost control, and product costing.
  

Applicants may complete these courses at any degree-granting, accredited 4-year university or community college, either via a traditional classroom or online course. A class for which credit was granted is sufficient to fulfill a pre-enrollment requirement, although a letter grade is preferred. Advanced Placement or CLEP credit which appears on a transcript can fulfill an economics or statistics pre-enrollment requirement.

Applicants should complete all pre-enrollment requirements before applying for admission to the MPA program. In certain cases, the admissions committee may admit a high-achieving applicant who is lacking a pre-enrollment requirement(s). In this case, the admitted applicant should complete the remaining pre-enrollment(s) before enrolling in the MPA program. Under extenuating circumstances, if a student is unable to meet all pre-enrollment requirements before enrolling in the MPA program, he/she may take the course(s) at The University of Texas at Austin at the graduate tuition rate in his/her first semester.* Please note that these courses will not count toward the MPA degree, and completing this coursework after enrolling in the MPA program will most likely extend a student's graduation date.

*Completing Introduction to Financial Accounting before applying for admission is highly recommended, and the course must be completed prior to the start of the MPA program. Students who have not completed this course at another institution will be required to enroll in ACC 311-Fundamentals of Financial Accounting in the first 6-week summer session. ACC 311 (or the equivalent) is a prerequisite to ACC 381-Financial Accounting, a graduate-level MPA core course that is offered in the second 6-week summer session.

Additional pre-enrollment requirements that do not require the completion of coursework include the following:

• Computer spreadsheet proficiency (e.g., Excel)
• Proficiency in English (if English is not your native language)

Applicants concerned with their competency in spreadsheet proficiency should consider enhancing their spreadsheet skills before enrolling in the MPA program. If an international applicant's scores on the TOEFL or other evaluation measure is below an acceptable level, he or she most likely will not be accepted to the MPA program.