U of A’s fall enrollment down more than 20%, sources say

As of Aug. 3, UA’s first-year undergraduate enrollment was expected to be approximately 5,800, according to the sources, who asked that their names not be used because university officials haven't authorized release of the numbers.

UA spokesman Mitch Zak said Thursday that figure is inaccurate, but would not provide numbers himself, saying they will be announced after the university’s census data is complete, which happened in late September last year. The semester starts in about two weeks. 

This would be the second year in a row of a significant decline in the freshman undergraduate class, as the UA saw a 19% decline last year — from 9,300 in fall 2024 to 7,500 in fall 2025.

In an enrollment update in May, UA Provost Patricia Prelock had said the university was expecting a smaller incoming class than last year, but didn’t give any numbers at the time.

UA officials have said they reworked their enrollment strategy to intentionally bring in smaller, “right-sized” classes. In October last year, Prelock said the UA wanted to give more access to Arizona students and those who need financial aid, and cut back on merit-based scholarships for out-of-state students. This led to them bringing in smaller class sizes without reducing net tuition revenue, she said.

UA’s Chief Financial Officer John Arnold told the Arizona Board of Regents in June that UA’s total enrollment in fall 2026, combining on-campus and online, would be down about 2.7%. He did not give projected numbers for first-year students. 

While last year’s 19% enrollment decline didn’t reduce the amount of net tuition revenue the UA earned, Arnold told the regents that net tuition revenue for fiscal year 2027 is down by 0.7%.

'Devastating to local businesses'

Oliver Swan, owner of Stone Avenue Standard, a locally owned and managed student-only apartment community, said to call these “significant declines” in enrollment right-sizing or intentional is “greatly misleading.”

“The university is in full-blown crisis in terms of its enrollment strategy,” Swan told the Star Thursday. “The further decline in first-year enrollment for 2026-27 is a deepening of this crisis. … A high percentage of the university’s expenses are fixed. It costs the same to air-condition a half-empty library as it does a full library. No university wants to shrink its enrollment and any claims to the contrary is misleading, especially a tuition-dependent university with a limited endowment.”

Swan said this “failure in enrollment is devastating to local businesses and the greater Tucson economy.” 

“Restaurants, bars, and every other business that caters to students will financially struggle in a city with limited population and nonexistent economic growth,” he said.

Lucy Ziurys, a UA Regents professor of chemistry and biochemistry and astronomy, said she thinks the enrollment declines will be a long-term disaster for the university and will affect students, faculty and staff.

“If the administration plans to go ahead with this reduction, which they seemed to have caused, the university and local communities need a clear explanation from the administration of how they expect the university to survive, and a justification,” Ziurys told the Star Thursday.

UA Faculty Chair Leila Hudson said “the new and deliberate lack of communication and transparency has left the campus questioning the competence and good faith of senior administrators.”

National trends 

Between fall 2024 and fall 2025, the drop mostly came from declines in out-of-state and international students, where the university saw a 23% drop in total out-of-state students and a 9% drop in total international students.

The drop in international students was due to the “challenging year for students unable to obtain U.S. visas,” the UA previously said in public statements.

Nationally, the number of international students arriving on visas to the U.S. declined by 28.5% in July 2025 compared to July 2024, according to U.S. International Trade Administration data in a Forbes article in August. The drop included a decline of almost 50% in students from India.

Under the Trump administration since January 2025, the Department of Homeland Security revoked the visas of thousands of international students studying at universities across the country.

Additionally, the Trump administration’s travel ban on nationals of 19 countries, the temporary suspension of visa interviews and limited appointment availability are expected to result in the decline of new international student enrollment this fall, Forbes reported.

Jenny Lee, UA’s chief international affairs officer, told the Arizona Board of Regents at a meeting in June last year that the Trump administration’s travel bans combined with ongoing visa barriers presented “a broader systemic challenge, one that can lead to a steady decline of international students over time,” across the U.S.

Speaking of more national-level trends, UA administrators have also spoken about a “demographic cliff” facing universities across the U.S., and acknowledged a need to combat that as well. The phrase refers to a steep decline in 18-year-olds in the U.S., starting around 2025, due to lower birth rates that began in 2008 after the Great Recession.

Due to this demographic change, the number of new high school graduates is expected to fall by about 13% by 2041, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in March 2025.

'Bringing in the right students' 

Also, UA officials have publicly talked about intentional enrollment declines under their new strategy, in which they want to give more access to Arizona students and those who need financial aid.

They have said the university intends to seek “academically prepared” students, with Prelock consistently emphasizing goals of increasing graduation and retention rates.

In May, Prelock said a student’s 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,” she said. “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.”

In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education in May, UA President Suresh Garimella said in the past, the UA received a large number 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,” Garimella 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.”

Starting in the fall last year, the UA also changed its admissions process and model, which some faculty say appears to have resulted in a smaller percentage of students accepting UA’s admission offer and enrolling than in past years, particularly in some colleges.