Texas A&M has rapidly expanded its student body over the years. According to the 2024 Capacity Report released by the Office of the President, the university grew from 53,000 students in 2013 to around 71,000 a decade later. A&M is now moderating admissions to maintain education quality and resources.
To provide clarity on these changes, associate vice president for enrollment and management and chief enrollment officer Christopher Reed answered some pressing questions about the shift in admissions.
“It’s important to clarify that admissions will not be reduced unless you’re comparing to the record classes of 2023,” Reed said. “We are just going to cap undergraduate enrollment to stop growth while we allow our infrastructure to catch up to the needs of the current student body. Per the capacity study, we’ll be capping future classes at 15,000 new undergraduates, which is roughly equivalent to the class we brought in for 2024.”
This raises concerns about whether higher admissions standards will accompany the cap.
“If applications continue to increase, then the competition for admission will increase,” Reed said. “This is, however, no different than what we’ve been experiencing over the last many years anyway. The number of seats on campus has not grown at even close to the same rate as the application pool, so admission has become more competitive every year. It is, however, worth noting that the number of high school graduates in Texas is expected to level off and actually dip slightly in the next few years, so that should alleviate some of the strain of the rapidly rising application numbers.”
Reed also discussed whether the cap would affect in-state and out-of-state admissions.
“It won’t have much of an impact on practices at all. If applications continue to rise, then there would theoretically be a higher bar to entry in terms of admissions, but the processes and policies we follow would not change due to the enrollment cap,” Reed said.
While these measures aim to manage future admissions, students currently on campus continue to feel the effects of past growth. One of the most immediate consequences has been overcrowded classrooms, with departments struggling to accommodate increasing class sizes.
Logan Porter ‘10, Ph.D., program coordinator for Electronic Systems Engineering Technology, or ESET, has witnessed this firsthand. Porter teaches sophomore-level ETAM courses like ESET 219 and ESET 269 and said the issue has escalated since he joined A&M as faculty five years ago.
“There have been several semesters where we’ve been over capacity,” Porter said. “Usually, 180 students is the normal cap, but there have been a couple of semesters where we’ve gone up to 250. Last fall is an example of that.”
To manage the overflow, the ESET department has had to get creative.
“We have to do two in-person lectures, and the rest of the overflow has to take the section online,” Porter said. “219 is approved as an online delivery course by the university, so we had to get creative. Otherwise, we’d have 50-plus students who wouldn’t be able to take the course.”
Recently, section 269 faced similar challenges. While the department was able to move some sections online, hiring new faculty allowed them to add a third in-person section.
“We have the faculty to do that now, but in the past, we haven’t always had the faculty to do it in person, so we’ve had to find other solutions,” Porter said.
Other adjustments have included scheduling labs at unconventional times.
“We look at the times most labs take place in, and we try to move our time to adjust for other students,” Porter said. “This makes it so that there are late labs from 7:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. during the week, including days like Fridays. We sometimes have students coming in on the weekends to finish a lab.”
The impact of overcrowding extends beyond scheduling inconveniences. Some students struggle to register for the courses they need, while others face difficulties in classrooms that were never designed to hold such large numbers of students.
ESET senior Brighton Sikarskie, who has struggled with over-capacity classrooms and registration issues, said it directly affects students’ education.
“ESET is a major that requires hands-on learning experience, but there’ve been times where we have to abandon those hands-on learning projects because there is not enough material or time to do those projects,” Sikarskie said.
In addition to hands-on coursework being cut short, overcrowding has impacted the way students interact with professors. Larger class sizes often mean less individual attention, and students who need help sometimes find themselves competing for time during office hours. Sikarskie said that while professors do their best, the number of students can make it difficult to get the guidance needed for certain assignments.
Despite these challenges, Reed emphasized that this situation is temporary and that the university is actively working on solutions.
“We are looking at addressing traffic patterns, altering class schedules, adding housing and a multitude of other options to make navigating campus easier and improve the experiences of people on campus,” Reed said.
