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EDINBURG — The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in its ninth year posted the institution’s highest first day enrollment ever with 34,343 students and the largest incoming freshman class of 6,962.
Starting the 2024 fall semester Monday, the UTRGV Edinburg campus buzzed with the yearly return of college students back to school.
“We’re extremely excited that we’re having a record breaking fall,” Magdalena “Maggie” Hinojosa, senior vice president for Strategic Enrollment and Student Affairs, said. “This morning, we were at 34,343 students. Largest enrollment of UTRGV or any of its legacy institutions. So it’s truly an exciting first day of class for UTRGV.”
The jump in enrollment marks the fifth straight first day figure exceeding 32,000 students. Enrollment increased around 1,901 students from 2023.
Enrollment figures are not official until the twelfth class day.
Hinojosa said UTRGV students take the majority of their classes at the Edinburg campus. Typically, 80% of the students take the majority of their classes in Edinburg and 20% take the majority of their classes in Brownsville.
Patrick Gonzales, UTRGV vice president of University Marketing and Communications, said UTRGV has a total of 5,803 classes this fall.
Out of that total, 3,218 classes are offered in Edinburg, more than 50%, and 1,266 classes are offered in Brownsville.
The rest of the total comes from 1,159 online classes and 169 classes in an “other” category which includes the Harlingen campus or thesis and dissertation classes.
“Nobody works here who doesn’t have a commitment to students and I think we really value everyone from our faculty to our staff to our administrators,” Hinojosa said. “We really value our commitment to the success of students. And we may be a really large institution, but we are a small family and so we don’t treat our students as a number.”
Another university record set is the first year retention rates to an all-time high of 83% in 2024, rebounding from a retention rate of 72.9% in 2021.
The highest retention rate prior to this school year was in 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic which saw 82.2%.
“To increase by a percent is actually very difficult to do,” she said. “It takes a lot more students to do that … the most important part is not just for students to enroll in at the institution, but for them to continue on and graduate. We look at those retention rates closely on a daily basis as registration is happening to ensure that our students are coming back.”
Welcoming the largest freshman class, the university also had the largest class of doctoral students at 604 and first day graduate student enrollment to surpass 4,000 for the fifth straight year.
UTRGV saw an increase of 1,265 compared to last year’s freshman class being at 5,697.
“I think many of us expected to have an increase in entering freshmen, but 6,900 really has exceeded our expectations,” Hinojosa said. “We’re extremely excited about that, especially because what we’re seeing is that students prefer to stay with UTRGV, or they’re coming from the outside as well.”
The top choices that entering freshmen are choosing are Health Professions, Liberal Arts, Engineering & Computer Science and Business & Entrepreneurship.
With almost every parking lot and building on campus packed with students, UTRGV freshman Marcelo Peña and Arturo Salinas experienced their first taste of college life Monday.
Standing in a long line to get Chick-Fil-A for lunch at the UTRGV Student Union, Peña and Salinas are both from PSJA Thomas Jefferson T-Stem Early College High School.
“It feels nice coming to school and realizing that I actually have my own full schedule, not like where I have to go eight hours to school. Instead I can show up on my own time, on my own merit,” Peña, who is studying computer engineering, said.
He added that he loves how everyone is a stranger which allows him to make new friends which he did on his first day.
Salinas, a criminal justice major, said he got a little lost trying to navigate the campus on his first day but loves the freedom he has.
“I look forward to the events. We had no pride (at my high school) so, I’m looking forward to changing that with UTRGV,” he said.
Both students are looking forward to making friends and attending all the UTRGV athletic games that they can.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify Magdalena “Maggie” Hinojosa’s comments regarding the classes split between the Edinburg and Brownsville campuses. This story was also updated to include statistics of courses across the university’s campuses from Patrick Gonzales, UTRGV vice president of University Marketing and Communications.
To see more, view staff photographer Delcia Lopez’s full photo gallery here:
