The University’s third regional prospective student center opened February in San Antonio, allowing area high school students to learn more about Texas A&M without traveling to Aggieland.
Regional student centers in Weslaco and Dallas opened last year.
“We want to plant the A&M flag in communities and have a presence and a place where we can work from,” said Executive Associate Provost Dr. William Perry.
The center is manned by Angelica Melendez, an A&M admissions counselor, and is housed in the Texas Engineering Extension Service South Central Texas Regional Training Center.
To keep the cost of the centers down they lease space from other A&M system members for reasonable rents, Perry said. The Weslaco center rents office space from the Texas Agricultural Research and Extension Center.
The regional centers offer many of the services available at the Prospective Student Center located on campus in the Koldus building, Melendez said, providing potential students with one-on-one admissions counseling and information on housing, financial aid and transfer guidelines.
Melendez said she will also visit area high schools and meet with community groups and school superintendents to let them know what the center has to offer.
The three locations of the regional centers are large population centers and areas where A&M does not typically have many students applying for admission, Perry said.
Opening centers around the state is an effort not only to increase admission applications from these areas, Perry said, but is part of a statewide effort to make people more aware of higher education.
“As a land grant institution we are founded on the principle of access to higher education,” Perry said.
Two more regional centers are planned, one in Houston and another in south Texas, he said.