TCU is rolling out an ambitious enrollment campaign. How big will it be?

When Coleton Power applied to TCU as a senior in high school, he attended a live stream hosted by the university to learn more about the school. The stream was designed to answer questions from prospective students to help them make their college decision easier.

That call, and the insight shared by Heath Einstein, the vice provost for enrollment management, sealed the deal for Power. He knew TCU was where he wanted to spend the next four years of his life.

“[Einstein] gave probably the best possible pitch as to why students should want to go to TCU,” said Power, now a junior.

Three years later, Einstein leads an ambitious campaign to substantially increase enrollment. He and his team are assigned with reaching goal of growing enrollment to about 18,000 undergraduate students by 2035. By increasing its student body, TCU hopes to become the premier research institution in Texas and improve its national reputation.

The enrollment campaign is part of a broader strategic plan called Lead On: Values in Action. Outlined in that plan is a specific campus master plan that includes adding 25 buildings, including dorms, classrooms, parking garages and sports facilities that will be needed to accommodate a student body increase of several thousand.

Enrollment Strategies

TCU’s enrollment has already grown by 23% in the last 10 years — from just more than 10,000 in 2015-16 to almost 13,000 today. The enrollment bump also includes the freshman class of 2,754, the largest single class in TCU’s 151-year history.

“We have various enrollment campaigns that reach students and parents and high school counselors and alumni,” Einstein said in an interview with the Star-Telegram. “We’re really trying to broaden our audience little by little.”

The most important part of a successful enrollment campaign is meeting students where they are, Einstein said. TCU has six members of its enrollment team stationed across the country to reach prospective students in every part of the nation. Those recruiters are based in northern California, southern California, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and western Massachusetts. Over 14% of TCU students are from California, 5.1% are from Illinois, 1.9% are from Georgia and just over 1% are from Massachusetts, according to university data.

The enrollment team has also prioritized digital advertising and messaging, as well as building relationships with those considering attending the university before they even step foot on campus.

“We try to be reflective of the town that we’re in,” Einstein said. “People here are just so authentic and warm, and we want to bring that authenticity and warmth to our prospective students through our various enrollment campaigns.”

Another way TCU has been able to grow enrollment is by revisiting its application process and identifying how many students started filling out an application but didn’t finish. Some of those students forgot to fill out a final question, didn’t check every box or just forgot they started filling out the application in the first place, said Dean of Admission Mandy Castro.

“There were thousands of students in that pile,” Castro said. “We looked internally at what we could do to facilitate that process and there were a couple specific questions on the application that, with advice from our Common App partners, they were like, ‘If you remove this, I think that you’ll find more completion rate.’”

TCU has been able to defy a national trend of declining enrollment. The messaging from Einstein and his team allows for them to “cut through the noise” because it appeals to so many people in a variety of different ways, he said.

College enrollment numbers have rebounded in recent years but are still not as high as they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2018-19, there were 22.1 million undergraduate college students in the country. That number was as high as 23.7 million in 2014. Now, there are just under 21 million undergraduate college students in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But TCU has been able to mitigate that trend throughout its new aggressive enrollment campaign. Einstein and his team believe now is the perfect time to expand enrollment to heights the university has never seen because TCU is more desirable as a college than it has ever been.

“Demand for a Texas Christian University education continues to rise,” Chancellor Daniel W. Pullin wrote in a statement to the Star-Telegram. “This growth reflects intentional choices we’ve made as a university to increase the TCU academic and campus experience while thoughtfully growing the number of Horned Frogs who will become leaders in their fields.”

Acceptance rates still dropping

TCU has been able to carry out its enrollment campaign without sacrificing its competitive acceptance rate. Although overall enrollment numbers are rapidly growing, the school’s undergraduate acceptance rate is dropping.

In 2021, 10,606 of the 19,782 students who applied were accepted — just more than 53%. In 2024, the most recent enrollment numbers available in the university’s common data set, just 44.5% of applications were accepted.

TCU is aiming to increase enrollment by 3% in each of the next few years — a number that mirrors organic application growth in recent admission cycles. Instead of sacrificing its competitive enrollment rate, the university is able to admit more students within an already growing pull of applicants, Castro said.

“When applications were already growing by that much per year, that told us that we were already in a pretty good market position to be able to find some more qualified students, and by allowing us to admit more, we just have so many more yeses that we can give to incoming students,” Castro said.

Campus expansion

TCU has nine freshman dorms for around 5,000 students living on campus — a number that will need to increase as the university attempts to grow their freshman enrollment numbers a little bit each year over the next decade. TCU requires students to live on campus during their first two years at the school to keep the university from becoming a “commuter school.”

“If you don’t have the right order of operations, you actually could mess things up,” Einstein said. “We currently do not have the housing in place that would allow us to support more students in a way that we currently do. We already have construction underway, and we’ll have several new buildings opening in fall 2027 which aligns with sort of the anticipated spike of first-year students.”

The school’s campus master plan will also focus on improving academic facilities, medical innovation, sense of place, athletic facilities, revitalizing Berry Street, connecting the university to the Trinity River and improving the east portion of campus.

Amid TCU’s push to expand its student body have also been multiple tuition increases, pushing the total cost of attending the school for eight semesters up to over $300,000 before scholarships and other financial aid opportunities. That number includes tuition, room and board and fees.

The admissions team understands TCU may not be in every family’s budget, and acknowledged it had to part ways with some prospective students because of that. But admissions leadership has still been able to grow enrollment despite that. “Sometimes the fiscal decisions do have to be made,” Castro said. “But for somebody who is looking for a great college experience, TCU is a great investment that you know you get a good return on. We have a wonderful alumni base that extends from east and west and north to south, and they tell our story about how TCU is a great place to be.”