University of North Texas administrators say they will turn their recruiting attention to the Dallas-Fort Worth region in the immediate future.
It’s not that the university has overlooked the Dallas Fort-Worth area. The system has a new campus in Frisco and continues to develop partnerships with companies in the region to strengthen the pipeline from its campuses in Denton, Dallas and Fort Worth to the DFW workforce.
UNT President Harrison Keller, who has just finished his first year on the Denton campus, said the administration is paying close attention to enrollment changes as Keller implements a vision that will put considerable resources into student retention and success. Keller intends to get more students across the commencement stage and into the workforce. But the leadership has to keep enrollment on the radar, too.
“Last spring, the leadership did make a strategic decision to tap the brakes on enrollment growth and sort of reevaluate how the institution should grow. The timing of that was poor for us ... on two fronts,” Keller told the Board of Regents last week. “One is we were just about to go into the base year that drives the state appropriations. Also, nobody could have envisioned what was going to be happening in international student enrollments.”
Keller’s strategic plan has unfolded against a backdrop of galloping growth in North Texas — and a dynamic economy in the region — that has helped fuel enrollment growth at UNT for about a decade.
“So if you look at over those last 10 years, how did UNT grow? We grew about 3,500 undergraduates over the last 10 years. We grew about 130 doctoral students, and we grew 5,500 master students,” Keller said. “And a significant number of those master students, particularly in some fields — data science, computer science — were international master’s students.”
Keller said the number of undergraduates and doctoral students increased slightly between 2023 and the fall of 2024. The picture was different for the university’s enrollment in master’s programs, however.
“We were down more than 1,300 students in our master’s programs because of different market issues and also geopolitical issues around visas,” Keller said.
The administration is predicting for a bigger drop in the numbers of international students enrolling in UNT master’s programs.
“We are anticipating that international master’s students in particular could decline somewhere on the order of 25% for this next fall,” Keller said. “That’s not unusual for UNT. When I talk to colleagues across the state, this is part of a larger trend that we’re seeing now.”
Texas universities didn’t escape the Trump administration’s recent dragnet to revoke student visas, which threw the status of thousands of international students studying at American universities into uncertainty. UNT, Texas Woman’s University and North Central Texas College all reported the revocation and eventual reinstatement of student visas.
UNT was most affected of the three, and international students have shown increasing interest in the programs that highlight the university’s status as a Tier 1 Research Institution.
A study by the National Foundation of American Policy reports that if international students aren’t considered in higher education planning, enrollments at U.S. colleges and universities could drop by 5 million by 2037. Across the country, leaders in higher education and lawmakers are sounding the alarm about a coming demographic cliff: American birthrates are dropping, meaning fewer people will pursue college degrees.
When universities lose international students, they lose funding, because in order to qualify for student visas, prospective students have to be able to pay tuition and living expenses. Because of enrollment softening, UNT was down about $32 million for the legislative biennium in the state’s instruction and operations formula.
Keller said the expected dip will have “a significant impact on our budget forecast.”
“It’s also one of the reasons that our work on student retention, student success, creating new transfer pathways, creating new enrollment pathways, and new offerings for UNT is so important right now,” Keller said. “So this is an important inflection point for UNT.”
UNT Chancellor Michael R. Williams told regents that the shift means that UNT needs to “take full advantage of our location because we’re in the metroplex.”
The enormous growth in Texas, and the mushrooming population in North Texas, means that Texas will likely feel the effects of the expected demographic cliff later than other regions.
“If you pay attention for the last five to six years to the number of university systems that have moved into the DFW metroplex because they recognize what we continually need to tap into, and own this space,” Williams said. “I hate to use the word, but it’s kind of like battle lines are drawn. I mean, that’s where recruitment lines are drawn. ... We cannot be so heavily weighted to one area of the world. We have to continue to be more diversified in how we approach our international growth. We don’t want to turn anybody away that’s qualified, but at the same time, we need to broaden our view.”