The University of Houston has enrolled more than 7,000 freshmen for the first time in its nearly 100-year history, even as its Board of Regents just voted to strip more than 45 percent of courses from the school's core curriculum. The twin developments, unfolding in the same late-August stretch, capture a university simultaneously expanding its reach and narrowing its academic offerings under new state mandates.
UH received nearly 39,000 completed freshman applications this cycle, an increase of more than 4,600 compared with 2025, according to Chron. It marks the third consecutive year UH has set a new freshman enrollment record, a run that lines up with what Community Impact describes as UH's third straight year of record freshman enrollment. The freshman acceptance rate actually dipped nearly two percentage points to 75.8% for fall 2026, even though that figure still sits above almost every year of the past decade, per Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board data cited in the same report.
A Curriculum Overhaul Lands the Same Week
On August 20, the University of Houston System Board of Regents unanimously voted to remove 133 courses from its core curriculum list for the 2026–27 academic year, cutting general education options from 280 classes down to 147. The move brought UH into alignment with Texas Senate Bill 37, which passed in June 2025 and took effect that September, requiring public university governing boards to review core curricula at least once every five years and certify that surviving courses are foundational and necessary for civic and professional life, according to LegiScan.
Administrators have stressed that the removed classes are not gone entirely — they remain available as electives — but faculty members and student groups have raised concerns about diminished course variety in interdisciplinary topics, the outlet reports. Hoodline previously covered the draft version of this plan in UH's Core Purge Draft Plan, when the university was still proposing to trim roughly 40% of core courses ahead of the regents' formal vote.
Where the New Cougars Are Coming From
California accounted for more than half of the roughly 100 companies that have relocated to Texas since 2020, and UH received more incoming freshmen from California than from any other state, Chron reports. Louisiana and Illinois supplied the next-largest groups of out-of-state freshmen, while international newcomers arrived from Vietnam, Canada and India. The university has also leaned on renovated buildings and new facilities to draw in prospective students, part of a broader effort to shed its old reputation.
UH was long considered a commuter school, a label the university is actively working to shake as it courts students from beyond Houston. Former Cougars quarterback Case Keenum has referred to the campus as the home of the “Third Ward Cougars,” a nod to the school's identity even as its student body grows more national and international.
Mentors, Money and a Bigger National Profile
To help incoming students adjust, UH launched a peer mentoring program that recruited more than 500 mentors for its launch year, according to reports cited by Chron, with plans to eventually serve between 3,000 and 5,000 incoming students. High-profile men's basketball and football programs have also helped raise UH's national visibility, and merit scholarships awarded to incoming undergraduates climbed 18% in 2026 compared with 2025 — up 51% since 2024 — according to the UH Newsroom.
That scholarship growth has coincided with UH's 2023 entry into the Big 12 Conference, after which home football attendance rose 45.3% across its first two seasons, per The Cougar. A department-record 55 student-athletes earned Academic All-Big 12 honors in 2026, the same outlet notes. UH leadership points to that heightened national brand visibility, alongside expanded scholarship funding and backing from the $3.9 billion Texas University Fund endowment approved by voters in November 2023, as key drivers behind three straight years of record freshman classes.
Housing Crunch Fuels a Campus Building Boom
UH's total enrollment hit an all-time high of 48,972 students in fall 2025, pushing campus housing to 97% capacity and prompting the university to advance plans for Centennial Hall, a 1,000-bed freshman residence set to open in 2027 as part of a push toward 10,000 total campus beds. That residential expansion follows an earlier capital investment detailed in Hoodline's report on UH's $179M freshman dorm project. Ahead of its 2027 centennial, UH is also executing a $35 million campus transformation designed by landscape architecture firm OJB, which includes a new Centennial Plaza and the conversion of University Drive into a pedestrian pathway meant to further distance the campus from its commuter-school past.
Growth is not confined to the Third Ward campus. UH's suburban instructional sites saw rapid expansion in fall 2025, with enrollment at the Katy campus surging 73% year-over-year to nearly 1,000 students and Sugar Land nearing 5,000 students, alongside plans for a 40-acre Industry Partnership Zone there. Hoodline covered that suburban push in UH's suburban Katy and Sugar Land push, and a related capital project at the Hobby School of Public Affairs was detailed in Hoodline's report on the Hobby School's $42.8M campus upgrade.
UH's surge is not happening in isolation. Total postsecondary enrollment across Texas public and private institutions reached an all-time high of more than 1.6 million students in 2025, according to preliminary numbers from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board cited by Community Impact, while the University of Texas separately received more than 100,000 undergraduate applications for the fall semester and began its first day of classes earlier in the week, per Chron. Together, the figures point to a statewide surge in demand for Texas higher education even as new laws like SB 37 reshape what students find once they arrive.
