As of last Wednesday, UTRGV’s preliminary numbers show 26,780 students are registered for Spring 2019, an increase of 3.78 percent, compared with Spring 2018, when there were 703 fewer students.
Of the 26,780 students registered for this semester, 3,478 are graduate, 23,147 undergraduates and 155 are enrolled in the School of Medicine.
“The big push in the spring is transfer students, because entering freshmen, they all come in the fall,” Vice President for Strategic Enrollment Maggie Hinojosa said.
Hinojosa said part of the reason for the increase in students is due to the university now being stabilized as an institution.
“In the transition, it takes a couple of years to get everything worked out,” she said. “Now, our academic policies are in place, policies related to payment with emergency loans are in place. They have been in place for a good year now, so that everybody has an opportunity … every student knows what to expect.”
According to Hinojosa, the graduate preliminary numbers show a “huge increase” compared with the past, when the numbers were in decline.
“[The] graduate [school] is seeing a huge increase, which is absolutely exciting and wonderful,” she said. “Our highest graduate number was in Spring 2016 with 3,336 and we are at 3,478 today. … [It’s] 142 more students to be exact.”
Hinojosa said now that the university has stabilized with its processes and policies, there has been an increase in transfer students as well.
“One of our goals for the spring, since we do not have a lot of incoming freshmen, it would be to increase transfer students and, so, right now we have 730 transfer students in total, and last year we had 692; that’s a 5.5 percent increase from last spring,” she said.
Dara Newton, associate vice president for Strategic Enrollment, said the goal of the Strategic Enrollment department is to find and recruit those students who are interested in attending UTRGV.
“Our goal is to help students actually get admitted to the institution and enroll and graduate,” Newton said. “We really want to help students come to our institutions and be successful.”
Strategic Enrollment provides different activities for those who are interested in attending UTRGV and their families.
“That comes in a variety of different activities,” Newton said. “It may be going to high schools, doing presentations or meeting with students. We also offer individual tours for future students and their families, so they can understand the atmosphere, the culture and the way students interact.”
The department based three recruiters in the San Antonio, Dallas and Corpus Christi areas.
“Texas is our primary audience,” she said. “It is really important to build a personal relationship, whether it is through a conversation or through marketing. We are looking at our marketing, social media and student activities.”
The university also created new programs for future Vaqueros, such as Discover UTRGV STEM, where students visited campus on a Saturday and focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics majors.
“[Students] met with the College of Science and the college helped them try to see themselves here,” Newton said. “We want [future] students to see who we are.”
For more information about the recruitment process, email admissions@utrgv.edu.
