U of A expects smaller incoming class than last year's — which saw a big drop

“Although we are still accepting students and receiving additional deposits, it is likely that the incoming fall 2026 class will be smaller than the one that arrived in fall 2025,” said UA Provost Patricia Prelock in an enrollment update Monday afternoon. “Once we have more complete information about the final size of the class, we will provide another update.”

Similar to last fall, non-resident or out-of-state and international student enrollments are “trending lower than previous years across programs,” Prelock said in the Monday email. She said international students’ interest in master’s programs is declining most steeply.

“At the national level, more students are signaling that they will stay closer to home,” she said. “Additionally, fewer international students intend to enroll at U.S. universities this year. These trends are driven by geopolitical, economic and policy factors that no single institution can control.”

She said the UA is trying to support graduate international admissions by “targeting recruitment in markets aligned with our strategic research initiatives and historical enrollment success.” She said UA  colleges have received digital resources to support their outreach and are giving out tuition waivers strategically.

Seeks 'academically prepared students'

Prelock and other UA officials have publicly talked about intentionally changing enrollment strategy — and giving out less merit aid to out-of-state students — to have smaller, “right-sized” classes, giving more access to Arizona students and those who need financial aid.

In an interview with the Arizona Daily Star in October 2025, Prelock said the UA can still bring in the same amount of money with fewer students, including those from out-of-state, by being more selective in granting merit-based aid for them. Thus, fall 2025’s 19% drop in enrollment — with 23% fewer out-of-state students and 9% fewer international students — didn’t impact UA’s student tuition revenue, she said.

Prelock, since her start at the UA in May 2025, has also emphasized her goals to increase UA’s graduation and retention rates. In a September 2025 Faculty Senate meeting, she said her goal was to increase student retention by 2% each year over the next three years so the UA gets to 90%, and to increase graduation by 2% over the next five years so it reaches 65% for four-year graduation and 85% for six-year graduation.

In Monday’s email, Prelock said: “As Arizona’s flagship land-grant institution, we believe admission should be the beginning of a successful path to graduation and beyond.

“Our efforts are rooted in expanding access to Arizona students and admitting academically prepared students who can succeed and build strong careers with as little debt as possible. This is why we have strengthened admissions review, expanded statewide outreach, targeted financial aid toward our neediest students, and awarded merit-based scholarships to those who are well-positioned to graduate on time.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Monday that UA President Suresh Garimella told it the UA receives a large amount of applications he described as “unserious”  and said the university would “throw money at the applicants in the form of generous aid.” He said when those students didn’t have the merit to get into other universities, they’d “come to Arizona and struggle academically and sometimes fail to graduate.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have brought them here in the first place,” he told The Chronicle. “I want to be careful how I say it, because some of the students are here. I don’t want to say they shouldn’t be here, but I think our new approach is much more ethically responsible in terms of bringing in the right students.”

Prelock told The Chronicle that every student retained saves both the student and the university money, and for every student that can graduate in four years, it’s again a “significant financial plus” for both.

Changes to UA’s admissions process

This year, the UA changed its admissions process from a rolling admissions model to one with an early action deadline of Nov. 1 and also administered a “holistic review” of applications, in which the UA considered students' experiences, achievements and aspirations as well as grade point averages or GPAs, different than in past years.

Previously, under a rolling admissions model, UA colleges reviewed applications as they received them instead of all at once after one hard deadline. This year, the UA evaluated the applications that came in by the early Nov. 1 deadline and gave out early acceptance decisions by Jan. 15.

The UA then went on as planned to review later applications, for decisions to be made through the spring. This is known as regular decision.

According to faculty members, these changes led to the UA receiving fewer applications from prospective students due to a lack of clarity about the changes internally and externally.

However, Prelock reported in a Faculty Senate meeting in May that UA’s yield rate for Arizona residents was higher than last year’s — 45.6% in 2026 compared to 39% in 2025. Yield rate refers to the percentage of applicants who accept an offer of admission.

Some parents have told the Star that in this year’s admissions process, there was less clarity when it came to how much merit aid specific students would receive. In previous years, it was very clear that if a student had a specific GPA, they would get a certain amount of merit aid, but that wasn’t necessarily the case this year.

“It was really a GPA-based admission process,” Garimella told The Chronicle. “You have a GPA of 4.0, you get this much of a scholarship. 3.9, you get this. 3.8, you get this. The number of incoming students grew a lot over a four- or five-year period with that approach.”