Enrollment across most of San Antonio colleges and universities increased this fall, with more than 166,000 students attending public and private institutions in the city.
Our Lady of the Lake University was the only institution to report a loss in student enrollment of nearly 12% since last fall, landing at 1,550, total students this fall.
Alamo Colleges District and its five colleges — San Antonio College, St. Philip’s College, Northwest Vista College, Northeast Lakeview College and Palo Alto College — saw the largest growth this fall reaching 101,714 students enrolled as of Friday across the district and surpassing the 100,000 student mark a few years earlier than expected.
“Since we’ve added over 40,000 students in the last five years, we want to make sure that we can continue to provide a quality undergraduate experience,” said Alamo Colleges Chancellor Mike Flores said last week. “So that’s our challenge.”
This is only the second fall for the University of Texas at San Antonio since experiencing a major boom in student numbers linked to its 2025 merger with UT Health San Antonio.
This year, UT San Antonio officials reported having more than 44,000 students enrolled, adding nearly 5% more students since fall 2025. UT San Antonio President Taylor Eighmy credits this combination with creating momentum in enrollment and tangible results.
“We do pulse surveys across Texas and our various markets, in the [Rio Grande Valley], in Austin, in Houston, in Dallas, Fort Worth and in Bexar County, and the recognition about the merged state of our new institution is very prominent in the surveys that we do,” Eighmy said in an interview last month.
Across the state, competition for students has intensified over the last decade, officials said. Texas has not experienced the steep decline in the number of college-age young adults that some experts have warned about.
Students graduating from Texas public high schools are expected to increase by 24.6% between the academic year 2012-13 to 2026-27, going from 301,390 to 375,520 graduates, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
“I feel like, honestly, we are playing offense and defense in Texas,” said Justin Doty, dean of admissions at Trinity University. “There now are close to 200 regional [representatives] that are living, working, recruiting, in Texas. Seventy percent of them, their college is not in Texas.”
Ten years ago the number of out-of-state recruiters was closer to 50, Doty added.
Trinity University, a small, private liberal arts university that had experienced a decline in enrollment during the coronavirus pandemic but started regaining students in 2023.
This fall, Trinity started the academic year with a total of 2,616 students, up about 1% from fall 2025 and the largest increase since the pandemic dip. This fall’s freshman class of 654 students is mostly made up of students from the state’s major metros — including Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio.
Year-over-year the university saw a 12% increase in students from Texas, Doty said.
“We don’t take our backyard for granted,” he said. “ Texas cities are just exploding in growth… So we’re seeing new high schools popping up, really strong applicants.”
For Texas A&M University-San Antonio, this heavy competition comes at a time when the 17-year old institution is growing and finding its footing. But Brandy McLelland, vice president for enrollment at TAMUSA, said the university can still be nimble in their growth strategy as these challenges arise.
This year, TAMUSA enrolled 7,697 total students, including its largest first-time-in-college class of 1,322 students. About 99% of all students are from Texas, and 75% from Bexar County.
“Our heart is in South San Antonio, that’s who we are. That’s why we were created, McLelland said. “But also, we are a regional institution for the A&M system, and we are really working to be a regional institution.”
In fall 2024, TAMUSA’s enrollment peaked at 7,912, but declined by 3.5% the following fall. Part of this decline was due to changes in federal financial aid processes, McLelland said, which have practically come every year over the past five years.
The university’s total enrollment increased again by nearly 1% this fall. But this year brought new challenges with more changes to federal financial aid disbursement and federal loan limits that delayed award letters and led to students getting less clear answers on funding.
“We’re very concerned this year about the impact that the loan limit implications will have,” McLellan said. “We are watching that really closely. We’re trying to plan for it. We’re trying to educate students so they can plan for it, but I think it is going to be difficult for a small population of students.”
The San Antonio Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
