UTSA responds to surge of transfer students
Photo: Carlos Javier Sanchez / Contributor SAEN
After Melissa Cazares graduated from Memorial High School on the city’s West Side, she left San Antonio to attend Texas State University. But the financial toll was hard on her father. The self-employed tile worker is the sole source of income for his family of five, she said, and he was sending her money for tuition and on-campus housing.
He wanted to sacrifice because he was proud of her, the first in their family to attend college, Cazares said, but to save money, she returned home and enrolled in Alamo Colleges to complete her basic courses, planning to transfer to the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Cazares, now 22, has been diligent about mapping out her courses, said Monica Ruiz, a senior undergraduate admissions counselor for UTSA who has an office at San Antonio College and has helped Cazares make sure all her credits transfer to the university.
More than 3,000 students will transfer to UTSA this year, among the roughly 3.7 million nationally who are expected to move from one college to another, according to estimates from The National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students.
About 40 percent of UTSA’s more than 32,000 students transferred there from elsewhere, most of them from the Alamo Colleges District, the university’s president, Taylor Eighmy, has said.
