schmellba99 said:

---

AgGrad99 said:

---

Icecream_Ag said:

---

aggiehawg said:

---

Man, I started A&M in fall of '76. I think the total # of students back then was about 27,000 undergrad.

---

I think SHSU just hit 20k for the first time last year that's a bit under double from when I started.

TAMU in that same period has gone from 35K to 70K+.

So either late genx and early geny are part rabbit, or there is a serious issue with college admissions

---

We have two flagship public schools in a State of 33,000,000 people....and we have the top 10% rule.

That is the problem.

Esp considering the disparity between High Schools

---

That apparently tu doesn't have to abide by since they are something like top 6% auto admission or thereabouts.

---

They're having to do it due to not having anywhere to put all of the students if they remained at 10% because their urban campus cannot economically grow given the price of land in downtown Austin. A&M has a much larger campus and can accept more students each year, but it seems like we may be running into a similar issue unless we continue to expand our campus, which I hope we do not.

We just gave UNT, UH, and Tech $4.5 Billion dollars in the TRUF to drag them up.

We are expanding and growing Tarleton State with a new campus in South Fort Worth and will have a presence in the Downtown Fort Worth project.

TAMU San Antonio is growing like crazy cuz of where its located and how easy it is to get commuter students.

WTAMU is an awesome small school with a great relative location to Amarillo and is growing.

The biggest issue with a lot of TAMU system schools are they are in rural areas while UT has city schools. Its a lot easier to grow when you have a ton of commuter kids.

richardag said:

---

aggiehawg said:

---

Man, I started A&M in fall of '76. I think the total # of students back then was about 27,000 undergrad.

---

I
started in 1969, enrollment was ~ 11,000. About 725 female students(re: most were professors daughters.) Needless to say every weekend the campus seemed like a ghost town unless there was a home game in football.

---

Me to. First thing we looked at was a girls left hand. It was great for the local high school girls.

aTm2004 said:

---

schmellba99 said:

---

aTm2004 said:

---

cecil77 said:

---

I do no believe you're correct in any of that.

---

Ehh...I'd say he's onto something. There's a reason schools like Arkansas, LSU, Ole Miss, OU, Okie Lite, etc have a lot of Texas kids going there when they could go to Sam, SFA, Texas State, etc for much cheaper and be closer to family and friends. Those schools all offer a college life that doesn't exist at most of the smaller schools or system schools. Texas State may be the exception as it's getting more and more popular and their athletic programs are getting better, but it's not like A&M, sip, Tech, etc. But sports, greek life, college town feel, and alumni support go a long way in being attractive to students. There have been articles written about it.

There are exceptions to that with my wife being a great example. She went to a giant 5A HS and wanted a small college, even passing up D1 basketball offers to go play at a small liberal arts school who's entire enrollment was similar in size to her HS graduating class.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/04/29/the-flutie-effect-how-athletic-success-boosts-college-applications/

---

SFA and Sam aren't podunk campuses.

They don't, however, have the sports component that an A&M, Arky, Ole Miss, etc. have. I also think they are a lot more focused on their degree offerings and as a result you see smaller, more focused enrollment and less overall growth from a student population aspect as a result.

But Sam, for example, has an enrollment over 21k right now. It isn't the small school out in the boonies it was just a decade or so ago. SFA is still a much smaller school at around 12k enrolled.

---

I'm not saying SFA and Sam are podunk campuses, but they don't have what the big state schools have when it comes to athletics and campus life, which is what Stonegateag85's point was. Huntsville and Nacogdoches are nowhere near what Baton Rouge, Oxford, College Station, Austin, Stillwater,etc are, especially on Saturdays in the fall.

If you take 100 random HS seniors in Texas and tell them they have automatic acceptance into Sam Houston State, Texas State, LSU, Ole Miss, and Texas Tech, majority will be going to Baton Rouge, Oxford, and Lubbock just because of campus life, which IMO, strengthens the alumni network as well. I do think Texas State will get there soon given their athletics are growing and getting more and more support from students and alumni.

---

Sam didn't even establish an advancement department (the equivalent of the A&M Foundation) until 2012 and they are only sitting on $112 million right now. The biggest reason students who aren't majoring in education or CJ go to Sam is the price. The lack of a big university endowment is most certainly holding Sam back from becoming more than it is.

LMCane said:

---

as we can see from this thread...

why did A&M have a campus in QATAR which is a strong ally of Iran

when there are not even enough spaces in TEXAS?!?1

WTF is going on?

---

The Qatar campus was basically paid for by Qatar and focuses on Petroleum Engineering and related fields. Essentially it teaches them how to operate their oil wells. It's a small campus. Bad optics maybe but it's really just teaching people in the Middle East to produce oil from the best school in the world for teaching people how to produce oil. It's not giving away security secrets or anything.

aTm2004 said:

---

schmellba99 said:

---

AgGrad99 said:

---

Icecream_Ag said:

---

aggiehawg said:

---

Man, I started A&M in fall of '76. I think the total # of students back then was about 27,000 undergrad.

---

I think SHSU just hit 20k for the first time last year that's a bit under double from when I started.

TAMU in that same period has gone from 35K to 70K+.

So either late genx and early geny are part rabbit, or there is a serious issue with college admissions

---

We have two flagship public schools in a State of 33,000,000 people....and we have the top 10% rule.

That is the problem.

Esp considering the disparity between High Schools

---

That apparently tu doesn't have to abide by since they are something like top 6% auto admission or thereabouts.

---

They're having to do it due to not having anywhere to put all of the students if they remained at 10% because their urban campus cannot economically grow given the price of land in downtown Austin. A&M has a much larger campus and can accept more students each year, but it seems like we may be running into a similar issue unless we continue to expand our campus, which I hope we do not.

---

I know that is their excuse, and that is all it is - but credit to them for using that excuse to keep their enrollment controlled.

Does anyone know if this 15k person cap on admissions will start with the upcoming Class of 2029 freshmen? Or the Class of 2030 admissions later this year?

Aggie Infantry said:

---

I posted this on another thread about DEI, but it could apply here. I believe that we have too many on campus. You could reduce the numbers by getting rid of degrees that have a poor ROI.

From the other thread: We, the taxpayers, are subsidizing the tuition of these little minds of mush so we should get a good ROI on our investment. No more Gender Studies. No more "basket weaving". If you want this type of degree, go to a private university.

Here is a list of Bachelor Degrees from the A&M site that could be axed:
Ag Leadership
Ag Communications
Hospitality, Hotel Mgmt, and tourism
Urban Planning
Classics
Global Studies
Philosophy
Society and Ethics
Sociology
Women's and Gender Studies
Human Development and Family Sciences
International Studies
Political Science
Cross Border Advocacy
Dance Science
Performance and Visual Studies
Theatre
University Studies

---

Ag Leadership is basically Business Lite and is a popular major. Ag Communications is similar. We are fundamentally an Ag school so getting rid of majors in Ag should be one of the last places.

BTW, Trump's Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins has a Degree in Agricultural Development which is essentially the same thing.

Hospitality is a strong major and just got a $50 million check from the guy that started Buccees.

Political Science is one of the strongest Liberal Arts Majors as A&M has a solid pipeline to law schools, high end government jobs in the CIA/FBI/State etc and maybe you missed it but we have a freaking Presidential Library on campus.

Dance Science is actually more of a health major and a lot of people who go into it are going into Physical Therapy. My son's girlfriend is looking at doing exactly that.

Some of the others are useless but they have also curtailed some of them.

Quote:

---

Political Science is one of the strongest Liberal Arts Majors as A&M has a solid pipeline to law schools, high end government jobs in the CIA/FBI/State etc and maybe you missed it but we have a freaking Presidential Library on campus.

---

I majored in political science and worked at said presidential library. Both of those served me extremely well in my career.

schmellba99 said:

---

aTm2004 said:

---

schmellba99 said:

---

AgGrad99 said:

---

Icecream_Ag said:

---

aggiehawg said:

---

Man, I started A&M in fall of '76. I think the total # of students back then was about 27,000 undergrad.

---

I think SHSU just hit 20k for the first time last year that's a bit under double from when I started.

TAMU in that same period has gone from 35K to 70K+.

So either late genx and early geny are part rabbit, or there is a serious issue with college admissions

---

We have two flagship public schools in a State of 33,000,000 people....and we have the top 10% rule.

That is the problem.

Esp considering the disparity between High Schools

---

That apparently tu doesn't have to abide by since they are something like top 6% auto admission or thereabouts.

---

They're having to do it due to not having anywhere to put all of the students if they remained at 10% because their urban campus cannot economically grow given the price of land in downtown Austin. A&M has a much larger campus and can accept more students each year, but it seems like we may be running into a similar issue unless we continue to expand our campus, which I hope we do not.

---

I know that is their excuse, and that is all it is - but credit to them for using that excuse to keep their enrollment controlled.

---

They could expand, but it's going to cost them A LOT of money and a couple of years in court to do so. Hopefully A&M is finally getting on board.

Precisely. As I said earlier, the big OOS publics are cleaning up the 10-25 percentile kids from Texas suburbs. Kids also most likely to donate back to their Alma mater.

torrid said:

---

akm91 said:

---

e=mc2 said:

---

infinity ag said:

---

So no more diploma mill?

---

This is a fallacy. A&M is much harder to get into now then it was in our day.

---

The university is easier to get in but colleges of engineering and business are much harder to get into than before.

---

So the system always pushes back (the generic "system"). Automatic enrollment for top 10%? Fine. However, we are going to make it very difficult to get into the preferred majors even if your kid did well in high school.

---

The Top 10% rule is lunacy in a state our size. The math simply doesn't work and the disparity in high schools is far too great. By definition you have well over 40k students per year that qualify as Top 10% which is double what A&M and Texas accept as unrestricted Freshman. Top 10% should get you into the System but not CS and Austin.

We should look at how Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida run their college systems. All make college much cheaper than here. All have much higher retention of their top students in state. All have blown past us in ratings. All with a fraction of our resources. Texas does less with more than any state in the country as A&M and Texas have the 2 largest endowments of any Public Universities in the country, we just spend it very poorly in terms of the value we get for it. Personally I think the Georgia System is the one we should emulate but Florida and North Carolina both are far superior to us as is California. Ironically we are far more socialist than any of them.

Ryan the Temp said:

---

aTm2004 said:

---

schmellba99 said:

---

aTm2004 said:

---

cecil77 said:

---

I do no believe you're correct in any of that.

---

Ehh...I'd say he's onto something. There's a reason schools like Arkansas, LSU, Ole Miss, OU, Okie Lite, etc have a lot of Texas kids going there when they could go to Sam, SFA, Texas State, etc for much cheaper and be closer to family and friends. Those schools all offer a college life that doesn't exist at most of the smaller schools or system schools. Texas State may be the exception as it's getting more and more popular and their athletic programs are getting better, but it's not like A&M, sip, Tech, etc. But sports, greek life, college town feel, and alumni support go a long way in being attractive to students. There have been articles written about it.

There are exceptions to that with my wife being a great example. She went to a giant 5A HS and wanted a small college, even passing up D1 basketball offers to go play at a small liberal arts school who's entire enrollment was similar in size to her HS graduating class.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/04/29/the-flutie-effect-how-athletic-success-boosts-college-applications/

---

SFA and Sam aren't podunk campuses.

They don't, however, have the sports component that an A&M, Arky, Ole Miss, etc. have. I also think they are a lot more focused on their degree offerings and as a result you see smaller, more focused enrollment and less overall growth from a student population aspect as a result.

But Sam, for example, has an enrollment over 21k right now. It isn't the small school out in the boonies it was just a decade or so ago. SFA is still a much smaller school at around 12k enrolled.

---

I'm not saying SFA and Sam are podunk campuses, but they don't have what the big state schools have when it comes to athletics and campus life, which is what Stonegateag85's point was. Huntsville and Nacogdoches are nowhere near what Baton Rouge, Oxford, College Station, Austin, Stillwater,etc are, especially on Saturdays in the fall.

If you take 100 random HS seniors in Texas and tell them they have automatic acceptance into Sam Houston State, Texas State, LSU, Ole Miss, and Texas Tech, majority will be going to Baton Rouge, Oxford, and Lubbock just because of campus life, which IMO, strengthens the alumni network as well. I do think Texas State will get there soon given their athletics are growing and getting more and more support from students and alumni.

---

Sam didn't even establish an advancement department (the equivalent of the A&M Foundation) until 2012 and they are only sitting on $112 million right now. The biggest reason students who aren't majoring in education or CJ go to Sam is the price. The lack of a big university endowment is most certainly holding Sam back from becoming more than it is.

---

It's really not that much cheaper. It was like 6 or 7 years ago my mom asked me to go meet with a lady in her office whose son was a senior in HS to talk with them about schools and the financial aid side of things. They were legit trailer park people who had zero clue about navigating all of this, so I tried to help them as much as I could. The first thing I asked when I got there was what colleges did he apply to and if he had any acceptance letters, and he had been accepted to A&M, Sam, Austin College, Trinity, and some other private school that I can't remember.

I asked them which of those was he most interested in, and they all said "Sam Houston because it's the cheapest." I asked why Sam over A&M and they told me A&M was "too expensive." I pulled up the tuition for each and they were shocked that A&M was like $1500 more. They thought A&M's tuition was like $30k/yr. I then went onto explain that A&M is a public school and similarly priced to Sam. Same with Texas, Texas Tech, etc. Looking at it now, taking 12 hours and living on campus at each, A&M is ~$16k/yr while SHSU is ~$12k/yr. I attempted to explain to them the cost difference between A&M and Sam is nothing in the long run and that A&M would set him up much better in life with the alumni network and name, but in the end, they still chose Sam. I went through on loans, so I get the financial side of things, but damn.

Also, I can't remember if it was Austin College or Trinity that wanted him to play football for them and offered him an annual "academic" scholarship that brought their total out-of-pocket to like $10k/yr. I told him if he loved football and wanted to play, to consider that offer as well because it was a much much better school than Sam.

Today the difference is about $2500 per year in tuition and fees alone. However, the total cost of attendance at A&M is significantly higher due to the high cost of living in College Station.

ETA: For reference, tuition and fees for 12 hours per semester for the 2024-25 year at SHSU is $10,011.40.

Yeah, I put links for estimates for each school (on campus) above, and it is more to go to A&M but not enough to warrant going to somewhere like Sam or SFA, IMO, unless you specifically want to go into CJ or something.

But hey, that's my $0.02 and it's worth what you're paying for it.

schmellba99 said:

---

Aggie Infantry said:

---

I posted this on another thread about DEI, but it could apply here. I believe that we have too many on campus. You could reduce the numbers by getting rid of degrees that have a poor ROI.

From the other thread: We, the taxpayers, are subsidizing the tuition of these little minds of mush so we should get a good ROI on our investment. No more Gender Studies. No more "basket weaving". If you want this type of degree, go to a private university.

Here is a list of Bachelor Degrees from the A&M site that could be axed:
Ag Leadership
Ag Communications
Hospitality, Hotel Mgmt, and tourism
Urban Planning
Classics
Global Studies
Philosophy
Society and Ethics
Sociology
Women's and Gender Studies
Human Development and Family Sciences
International Studies
Political Science
Cross Border Advocacy
Dance Science
Performance and Visual Studies
Theatre
University Studies

---

FIFY.

The ag degrees, hospitality, urban planning and poly sci are good degrees. The rest are pretty much garbage IMO that aren't producing anything of substance in terms of graduates. They are all pretty much Mrs. degrees.

---

Performance and Visual Studies is the department that trains students in game design and animation. There are quite a few successful graduates working in industry.

There were 25 former students who worked on "Incredibles 2;" 16 on "Toy Story 4."

https://spirit.txamfoundation.com/summer-2020/did-you-know.aspx

We should all be careful in calling out other majors as "useless."

Random thoughts:

* I arrived on campus fall '73 and left fall '80. Went from two way streets all over campus, to one way streets, to no streets. No shopping mall. Bryan was the "big" town. But.. starting with my class there were really plenty of females on campus.

* The vaunted "campus experience" we speak of is a challenge w/ 60K undergrads. It's just not the experience for everyone.

* The top 10% rule should be guaranteed acceptance to A state school, not ANY state school.

* My '12 daughter's PoliSci degree led to Yale Law School - so yeah she's doing just fine.

aggie93 said:

---

torrid said:

---

akm91 said:

---

e=mc2 said:

---

infinity ag said:

---

So no more diploma mill?

---

This is a fallacy. A&M is much harder to get into now then it was in our day.

---

The university is easier to get in but colleges of engineering and business are much harder to get into than before.

---

So the system always pushes back (the generic "system"). Automatic enrollment for top 10%? Fine. However, we are going to make it very difficult to get into the preferred majors even if your kid did well in high school.

---

The Top 10% rule is lunacy in a state our size. The math simply doesn't work and the disparity in high schools is far too great. By definition you have well over 40k students per year that qualify as Top 10% which is double what A&M and Texas accept as unrestricted Freshman. Top 10% should get you into the System but not CS and Austin.

We should look at how Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida run their college systems. All make college much cheaper than here. All have much higher retention of their top students in state. All have blown past us in ratings. All with a fraction of our resources. Texas does less with more than any state in the country as A&M and Texas have the 2 largest endowments of any Public Universities in the country, we just spend it very poorly in terms of the value we get for it. Personally I think the Georgia System is the one we should emulate but Florida and North Carolina both are far superior to us as is California. Ironically we are far more socialist than any of them.

---

I can certainly tell you one thing that is different about NC. They only have ONE university system. Rather than having different systems in competition with each other, they centrally plan and administrate state university resources.

torrid said:

---

aggie93 said:

---

torrid said:

---

akm91 said:

---

e=mc2 said:

---

infinity ag said:

---

So no more diploma mill?

---

This is a fallacy. A&M is much harder to get into now then it was in our day.

---

The university is easier to get in but colleges of engineering and business are much harder to get into than before.

---

So the system always pushes back (the generic "system"). Automatic enrollment for top 10%? Fine. However, we are going to make it very difficult to get into the preferred majors even if your kid did well in high school.

---

The Top 10% rule is lunacy in a state our size. The math simply doesn't work and the disparity in high schools is far too great. By definition you have well over 40k students per year that qualify as Top 10% which is double what A&M and Texas accept as unrestricted Freshman. Top 10% should get you into the System but not CS and Austin.

We should look at how Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida run their college systems. All make college much cheaper than here. All have much higher retention of their top students in state. All have blown past us in ratings. All with a fraction of our resources. Texas does less with more than any state in the country as A&M and Texas have the 2 largest endowments of any Public Universities in the country, we just spend it very poorly in terms of the value we get for it. Personally I think the Georgia System is the one we should emulate but Florida and North Carolina both are far superior to us as is California. Ironically we are far more socialist than any of them.

---

I can certainly tell you one thing that is different about NC. They only have ONE university system. Rather than having different systems in competition with each other, they centrally plan and administrate state university resources.

---

True, and each state has different needs and different systems in place. A&M and Texas are separate systems but we do actually work together on a lot of things. We compete as well but in the end we work together more than apart though. Georgia Tech is part of the UGA System as well. Main advantage to that is they complement each other more but that's starting to shift. UNC is trying to do more Engineering as is UGA for instance but NC State and GT are clearly the big Engineering schools. In California you have the UC and Cal State Systems that work in cohesion with each other. Florida and FSU are part of the same system but they make a clear distinction that UF is the "preeminent university".

Lack of resources isn't really the issue with Texas and A&M but there is a lot of bad blood that will make it so that they will never partner to the same extent some of those other states do. Our lack of a large and comprehensive plan for public universities as a whole makes for a lot of inefficiences though.

On your third note, that was the case for my niece. She started the college process thinking she wanted either tu or A&M. She visited both and was very overwhelmed by the size of both. Michigan was her other school but the reality of how far it was, was too much. She ended up at a small private school and is very happy. They did a good job of providing aid to make it less than what she would have paid at either big school.

Love stories like your last note. Congrats to you and your daughter.

Ryan the Temp said:

---

Quote:

---

Political Science is one of the strongest Liberal Arts Majors as A&M has a solid pipeline to law schools, high end government jobs in the CIA/FBI/State etc and maybe you missed it but we have a freaking Presidential Library on campus.

---

I majored in political science and worked at said presidential library. Both of those served me extremely well in my career.

---

Username checks out.....

Teaching space at TAMU is at a premium, even with the new teaching resources available.

Who?mikejones! said:

---

Interesting development. Have we gotten to big?

---

Not only too big, but we've also failed at teaching grammar.

aggiehawg said:

---

Man, I started A&M in fall of '76. I think the total # of students back then was about 27,000 undergrad.

---

Class of 2010, freshman 06, enrollment was 36k.

Athanasius said:

---

Who?mikejones! said:

---

Interesting development. Have we gotten to big?

---

Not only too big, but we've also failed at teaching grammar.

---

Apparently reading TOO since that joke has already been addressed by a different grammar nazi