University of North Texas Sees Record Enrollment This Fall

[Harry]

The University of North Texas –- like the region it is named for -– is growing quickly.

There are now 39,330 UNT undergraduate and graduate students enrolled, which is the most ever. That enrollment figure represents a 3% increase from the 2018-2019 academic year, according to figures from the university.

In addition to overall enrollment being up, UNT also touts its largest-ever freshman class this fall. A record 5,522 freshman are on campus, which is an increase of 15.3% in "first time college students at the university," according to a UNT news release.

And the University of North Texas is also retaining more of its students than ever before. This fall nearly 80% of last year’s freshman class returned to UNT, according to enrollment data, which is an increase of 1.6% over the fall of 2018.

read more: 

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/University-of-North-Texas-Sees-Record-Enrollment-This-Fall-560464341.html

 

[golfingomez]

unpopular opinion... we are getting too big...

[MeanGreen13]

2 hours ago, golfingomez said:

unpopular opinion... we are getting too big...

I would tend to agree, but when I see our endowment numbers, I see the need to be huge.  After we get our endowment game up, then we can down size like UT chose to do. Granted, they are still at over 50k. 

[Wag Tag]

Frisco Campus is going to BOOM! Great move.

[DirtySavage]

Time to up that Athletics fee by another dollar with all the newbies that don’t know any better. Good programs are fed by money. Maybe we will be able to afford to keep our sweet SL savior another year. 

[drex]

Why is a university with the enrollment that North Texas has still playing in a Group of 5 Conference?

[greenminer]

6 minutes ago, DirtySavage said:

Time to up that Athletics fee by another dollar with all the newbies that don’t know any better. Good programs are fed by money. Maybe we will be able to afford to keep our sweet SL savior another year. 

I think the state caps the amount we can legally charge for the sports fee.

[Talon90]

22 minutes ago, drex said:

Why is a university with the enrollment that North Texas has still playing in a Group of 5 Conference?

Hayden Fry era (1973–1978)  After Mitchell left in early 1967, North Texas had just one conference title and three winning seasons over the next six years. In 1973, the Mean Green hired future Hall of Fame coach Hayden Fry, who had been controversially fired by rival SMU the previous season after leading the Mustangs one game shy of a Southwest Conference title. Fry's Mean Green unit won the Missouri Valley Conference in his first year despite putting up a 5–5–1 season. After a lackluster 2-7-2 finish in 1974, Fry, dissatisfied with the lack of support from students, alumni, and fans, began putting together a plan with university officials to move the program to the Southwest Conference. At the time, the SWC was one of the most prominent football conferences in college football, and besides Arkansas, all of its schools were based in Texas, with fellow metroplex schools TCU and SMU making up two of them. Fry felt distancing the program from a lower-tier conference was a good first step, so the team became a Division I-A Independent before the start of the 1975 season. His plan also included moving some home games into a more prominent venue than tiny Fouts Field could hold, so Fry began scheduling two home games per year at Texas Stadium in nearby Irving, already the home of the NFL'sDallas Cowboys and metroplex rival SMU. Fry also gave the school a complete visual makeover, adding lime green to the color scheme and introducing the infamous "flying worm" logo that became a staple of the university for years to come. Fry's new-look Mean Green went 7-4-0 in 1974 and 1975, albeit with losses coming against games against Southwest Conference and Southeast Conference opponents. The 1975 season saw a 28-0 drubbing of the SWC's Houston, as well as a close 15-12 road loss to SEC's Mississippi State. The 1976 season saw marked signs of improvement, with the Mean Green falling in close contests to all their major conference opponents (a 7-0 loss to Mississippi State was later forfeited to North Texas after it was revealed the Bulldogs used ineligible players). The Mean Green lost 17–14 against #19 Texas, 38-31 against SMU, 16-10 to the Big Eight Conference's Oklahoma State in Stillwater, and a memorable close 21-20 loss to Florida State in a rare Denton blizzard at Fouts Field. 1977 proved to be the high mark in the history of North Texas football. The Mean Green finished the season 10-1-0 while rolling off a seven-game winning streak, their only loss coming to #20 Florida State on the road late in the season. The program made the AP Rankings for the second time in school history, reaching the #16 spot prior to their loss to the Seminoles. Despite the double-digit wins, North Texas was passed over by every bowl committee. The most notable pass came from the officials of the Independence Bowl, who invited 8-1-2 Louisiana Tech just one week after the Mean Green pummeled them 41-14 at Joe Aillet Stadium in Ruston, Louisiana. North Texas would see success again in 1978, finishing 9-2-0 with their only losses coming to Mississippi State and #12 Texas, despite hanging with both teams for the better half of three quarters. During the season, reports of sponsors in the state legislature to move the Mean Green to the Southwest Conference never materialized. Though they ended the season on a four-game win streak, Fry's team was once again left without a bowl invitation. With the escalating costs associated with North Texas' SWC bid, along with still-poor attendance and what he felt was a deliberate effort by the NCAA and SMU to keep a lesser-known school like North Texas out of the postseason (the Mustangs were reportedly adamant to the NCAA that North Texas could not play any potential SWC games at Texas Stadium, which Fry had intended to do), Fry began shopping around offers from other programs. The door on the Fry era was essentially slammed shut on December 7th, 1978 when the Southwest Conference announced it would not offer North Texas a bid to join the conference. Three days later, Fry accepted the head coaching job at the University of Iowa.

Demotion to Division I-AA (FCS), rebound to FBS, and present:

The mounting debt left over from Fry's tenure reach a point where the NCAA ruled the program could not financially compete at the Division I-A level and the team was subsequently demoted to Division I-AA status.[2] In 1982, the university recognized that the athletics program had a deficit of $1.6 million and voted to join the Southland Conference.[3] The program experienced little success in subsequent years, but in 1995, a coordinated campaign by donors to purchase large blocks of seats at Fouts Field spiked the average attendance enough for the school to enter Division I-A once again in 1995.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Texas_Mean_Green_football

Edited September 18, 2019 by Talon90

[greenminer]

31 minutes ago, drex said:

Why is a university with the enrollment that North Texas has still playing in a Group of 5 Conference?

Enrollment is not as big a factor as you think?

[Stix]

51 minutes ago, Talon90 said:

The mounting debt left over from Fry's tenure reach a point where the NCAA ruled the program could not financially compete at the Division I-A level and the team was subsequently demoted to Division I-AA status.[2]

Where the hell did this come from?

[Christopher Walker]

2 hours ago, drex said:

Why is a university with the enrollment that North Texas has still playing in a Group of 5 Conference?

 

1 hour ago, greenminer said:

Enrollment is not as big a factor as you think?

Too true. UCF has nearly 70,000 enrolled and every successful effort of theirs has just been met with derision.

[greenminer]

21 minutes ago, Christopher Walker said:

 

Too true. UCF has nearly 70,000 enrolled and every successful effort of theirs has just been met with derision.

Looks like FIU’s enrollment is 55K.

[PlummMeanGreen]

13 hours ago, drex said:

Why is a university with the enrollment that North Texas has still playing in a Group of 5 Conference?

As you would know, many have asked that question since the 70’s, JH.

Blackie Sherrod in one of his famous mid-1970’s DMN “Scattershootin’ “ columns wrote “look for NorTexSt. to be next up for the SWC.”  Fry had been at NT about 4 years when Blackie wrote that blurb.  

We are where we are because of poor leadership, a long string of poor hirings, an old track stadium we had way too long  & empty seats in that old track stadium against mostly schools that the SWC Private schools could not have drawn flies against. Those 4 SWC Private’s had built-in home attendance turnstile numbers with UT, TAMU, TTech & Arkansas traveling fans;   just as North Texas would have had (in more impressive numbers) had we had the same luxury.

✅ North Texas should still do everything UH & Boise State are doing to work toward a P5 objective.  Things just never stay the same in the NCAA so.......be prepared?

• I watched our Cal game with a Texas Tech family who said Apogee needed to be larger when the Red Raiders come to Denton—I asked him how much larger—he said about 9,000 more seats larger because his school would easily bring at least 9K to Denton.  This guy is a former Aledo Bearcat letterman & very much connected to the 🔺Texas Tech▪️football program & once played a round of golf with Seth Littrell.

Addendum:  Texas State—SM has been ahead of UNT in enrollment the past 2 or 3 years.  I don’t know their 2019 Fall numbers.

GMG!

Edited September 18, 2019 by PlummMeanGreen

[VideoEagle]

11 hours ago, Stix said:

Where the hell did this come from?

That's not the reason at all. The NCAA passed a retroactive rule about classification based on attendance, stadium size and conference classification. The rule was retroactive meaning after it passed there was nothing anyone could do to stop their reclassification - they would have had to have done it before. The NCAA did "offer" to grant waivers, but no school was granted such a waiver. Cincinnati threatened to sue but agree to drop the suit with the NCAA that if they could get their attendance up within a year they would get to stay 1A. They did. 

I'm also not sure of the whole "SMU said we couldn't use Texas Stadium" bit either. Tex Schram WANTED us to use Texas Stadium more! I'm not sure how SMU would have any say in the matter.

[SilverEagle]

Enrollment has never been an issue. We've always been somewhere in the top five in enrollment in Texas since the 60's. Do I need to go over this again? Where we were decades behind everyone else was the issue of fund raising.   Put plainly, we not only hadn't been fund raising like just about all the other schools in D-1 football, it was NOT PART OF OUR CULTURE TO GIVE BACK TO THE UNIVERSITY.

And that was because our previous Presidents either strongly discouraged it,  or forbid it. When Hayden Fry became the head coach he asked who was in charge of funding raising for the athletic department. The response was "what?". Hayden Fry started the Mean Green club, along with other cultural changes regarding athletics.  Hayden correctly assessed the situation as being a CULTURAL ISSUE. And one of the biggest needs in culture change was fund raising. Fund raising was in it's infancy at North Texas when he arrived, but it had not spread to the Athletic Department. He set out to change that.  But not without resistance from old nesters still ensconced in the administration. 

The first president to discard the no-fund-raising tradition was John Kamerick, but this cultural momentum was temporarily interrupted when Kamerick was forced out by the Governor of Texas because of Kamericks anti-Vietnam war sentiments. 

The next President to be hired to change the funding culture was C.C. "Jitter" Nolan. The word out on him was that he was not even remotely an academian (much to the dismay of all the aforementioned "old nesters").....he was a FUND RAISER. He hired Hayden Fry and then went about trying to raise funds for the University.  I worked for the University on a moving truck prior to enrolling at NT. And one time we went over to the Presidents home to set up some sort of fund raising event. I was sent to the garage to get something that we needed and while there I saw inventory stacked up that would have been the envy of just about any liquor store in the area. I just chuckled at the stark difference in Dr. Matthews and "Jitter Nolan".  I thought to myself "boy! have things changed". 

I don't know exactly when our endowment fund was set up, but I'm guessing it was around the Kamerick/Nolan administration. 

addendum:

Just as I thought.......

Quote

 

History of the UNT Foundation

The University of North Texas Foundation, Inc. was chartered in the State of Texas in 1972 as the North Texas State University Educational Foundation, Inc. Its articles of incorporation became official on June 27, 1972. 

 

....and that is why our endowment is a pathetic 190 mil.  By comparison, the endowment for Rice University (established in 1912) is 6.2 Billion.  

 

The University of Houston's (established in 1927) endowment is 942 Million.

 

 

Edited September 18, 2019 by SilverEagle

[CMJ]

https://blog.prepscholar.com/the-biggest-colleges-in-the-united-states

 

Plenty of big schools on that list that don't play in "big time" conferences.  Enrollment, like was said above, doesn't always mean what people assume it does.

[Harry]

What really blows my mind is even back when I was in school back in the dark ages they had major issues with not having enough dorms on campus to allow for full time student to live on campus!   So fast forward to now and it's like WTF?  Do we have some sort of mental block because they have been predicting this growth for the area and the school for decades now. 

The good news in my mind is that more students are electing to stay on campus and at UNT for all four years.  That was a BIG problem in the past.  Students would attend and then initially and then transfer out to other schools.  My sister was an example.  There was no effort to retain anyone,.  Looking back it was really quite pathetic.

I am pleased to see the growth and retention.  Now we need some damn politicians fighting for our funding at the state in kind.  Instead of trying to be best pals with the politicians that represent UNT at the state we need to start holding their feet to the fire for results.

[MrStrange18]

24 minutes ago, CMJ said:

https://blog.prepscholar.com/the-biggest-colleges-in-the-united-states

 

Plenty of big schools on that list that don't play in "big time" conferences.  Enrollment, like was said above, doesn't always mean what people assume it does.

The kids down the street, TCU only have an enrollment just north of 10k

[Legend500]

There was a discussion about 10 years-ish ago as to whether UNT would pursue growth at all costs to get an impressive size, or whether we would up admissions standards to get better future donors, and shunt the students to UTA, UNTD and UNTF. 

I was firmly on the "standards" end, because the quality of student you attract is directly related to their buy-in to the university as a whole. Note this only holds for admission, and not performance thereafter - pretty much every development pro will tell you that your best donors tend to be B-C students. I also supported it because I like what the Texas system does to bolster their @ schools, and would like to replicate it with Dallas and Frisco (and eventually MSU and... that other university in Denton, once the blue hairs defending both leave the Lege). 

Home campus needs to cap at 40k to allow the other campuses a chance. 

[MeanGreenTexan]

4 minutes ago, Legend500 said:

There was a discussion about 10 years-ish ago as to whether UNT would pursue growth at all costs to get an impressive size, or whether we would up admissions standards to get better future donors, and shunt the students to UTA, UNTD and UNTF. 

I was firmly on the "standards" end, because the quality of student you attract is directly related to their buy-in to the university as a whole. Note this only holds for admission, and not performance thereafter - pretty much every development pro will tell you that your best donors tend to be B-C students. I also supported it because I like what the Texas system does to bolster their @ schools, and would like to replicate it with Dallas and Frisco (and eventually MSU and... that other university in Denton, once the blue hairs defending both leave the Lege). 

Home campus needs to cap at 40k to allow the other campuses a chance. 

There's no such thing as "UNTF".   Those students are students of UNT Denton.   Maybe eventually it will break off to be its own University like UNT-D.

But I agree with your sentiments.  Especially acquiring MSU & TWU into the NT system.

[keith]

6 hours ago, SilverEagle said:

Enrollment has never been an issue. We've always been somewhere in the top five in enrollment in Texas since the 60's. Do I need to go over this again? Where we were decades behind everyone else was the issue of fund raising.   Put plainly, we not only hadn't been fund raising like just about all the other schools in D-1 football, it was NOT PART OF OUR CULTURE TO GIVE BACK TO THE UNIVERSITY.

And that was because our previous Presidents either strongly discouraged it,  or forbid it. When Hayden Fry became the head coach he asked who was in charge of funding raising for the athletic department. The response was "what?". Hayden Fry started the Mean Green club, along with other cultural changes regarding athletics.  Hayden correctly assessed the situation as being a CULTURAL ISSUE. And one of the biggest needs in culture change was fund raising. Fund raising was in it's infancy at North Texas when he arrived, but it had not spread to the Athletic Department. He set out to change that.  But not without resistance from old nesters still ensconced in the administration. 

The first president to discard the no-fund-raising tradition was John Kamerick, but this cultural momentum was temporarily interrupted when Kamerick was forced out by the Governor of Texas because of Kamericks anti-Vietnam war sentiments. 

The next President to be hired to change the funding culture was C.C. "Jitter" Nolan. The word out on him was that he was not even remotely an academian (much to the dismay of all the aforementioned "old nesters").....he was a FUND RAISER. He hired Hayden Fry and then went about trying to raise funds for the University.  I worked for the University on a moving truck prior to enrolling at NT. And one time we went over to the Presidents home to set up some sort of fund raising event. I was sent to the garage to get something that we needed and while there I saw inventory stacked up that would have been the envy of just about any liquor store in the area. I just chuckled at the stark difference in Dr. Matthews and "Jitter Nolan".  I thought to myself "boy! have things changed". 

I don't know exactly when our endowment fund was set up, but I'm guessing it was around the Kamerick/Nolan administration. 

addendum:

Just as I thought.......

....and that is why our endowment is a pathetic 190 mil.  By comparison, the endowment for Rice University (established in 1912) is 6.2 Billion.  

 

The University of Houston's (established in 1927) endowment is 942 Million.

 

 

If people want to help and they shop at Amazon (who doesn't buy stuff at Amazon), STOP and make your purchase at https://smile.amazon.com instead.  All the same stuff is available.  It's not much, but Amazon contributes 0.5% of your purchase price to the charity of your choice.  Just think if all 300K or whatever alumni did this. 

Here's mine....