Following her aunt Jennie Charlotte Austin, class of 1911, in 1928 Austin and 7 other African American women students were admitted to University of Cincinnati, (UC). Historically there was limited attendance of blacks at the university - indeed the first known attendee was not even named in university records. The first significant rise in blacks admitted to the university came in the 1920s with most of those being women and limited to the college of education though that limit was increasingly dropped though there remained no black faculty and blacks could not live in the dormitories and had limited access to the university pool. Austin recalled she and the others they were brought into an administrator's office and warned to not be conspicuous, mind being members of a subject race, and to have low expectations. She reported an anecdote: