Our Lady of the Lake University is starting the 2026-27 academic year with the lowest total student enrollment yet after losing nearly 12% of students since fall 2025.
A total of 1,550 students are reportedly attending the university this fall, down from 1,756 total students enrolled at the same time last year, according to the university.
But the decrease is even more pronounced when looking back at the last five years, as the university lost 44% of its overall enrollment since fall 2020, when OLLU reported having 2,771 students enrolled.
An enrollment decrease for any institution typically translates into revenue loss.
Between the fiscal years ending May 2021 and May 2025, Our Lady of the Lake lost more than $14.7 million in tuition and fees revenue, according to the university’s tax documents. But university officials point to a new strategic plan and a leadership role intended to help redirect enrollment efforts.
“In this very crowded and saturated higher-education marketplace, which is a fact, we have to own who we are,” OLLU President Abel Chávez said when asked about this latest decrease. “If we own who we are… and we say, ‘This is who we are. This is how we do and how we care for students,’ we will be alright.”
This week, OLLU hosted the 40th anniversary of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, which focused on the impact and role of Hispanic Serving Institutions — a designation that was birthed on OLLU’s campus and now includes 645 institutions across the country.
“The work is far from over,” Chávez said following that event, declining to say whether he was worried about continued enrollment declines. “We have to continue to tell our stories. We have to continue to say yes. We have to continue to push and pull.”
Last year, OLLU cut 15 academic programs that they deemed economically unviable for the future of the university. The cuts were the result of a two-year evaluation of all programs, and it resulted in the loss of faculty members linked to those programs.
Teresa Niño, OLLU’s vice president for marketing and communications, said the university is looking ahead. She pointed to the hiring of Shobi Sivadasan as the new vice president for enrollment and revenue as a reason to “disqualify any suspicion that we’re closing down.”
Sivadasan joined the university full-time in July after working as an enrollment consultant there since May. She arrived at OLLU with a three-year vision and strategic plan to stop enrollment declines.
Part of this plan was announced over the summer when the university launched a three-year degree plan option called “Lake Express.” The degree plan allows students to finish a bachelor’s degree in six semesters by focusing on essential courses and doing away with electives.
“Students and families are asking different questions about higher education today — about cost, time to degree, career outcomes, and return on investment. We are responding with new leadership, three-year degree programs and sophisticated data-informed recruitment,” Chávez said in an announcement at the time.
The loss of students is of course a challenge, Sivadasan said, but she added that the university experienced a few wins this year, including a steady number of first-year college students since fall 2025, and growth in the number of new students that transferred to OLLU.
“This year, that incoming class, the new class, was flat, which means we are turning that corner with our enrollment,” Sivadasan said in an interview last week. “If you look at [2025 to 2026] the new students, we grew 20% on transfer students this cycle.”
Applications to start this fall were up this year, Sivadasan said. University officials reported receiving a total of 3,731 applications for the 2026-27 academic year, up from 3,263 for the 2025-26 year.
The university admitted 62% of applicants this fall.
Retention of first-time-in-college students was down slightly from last fall when 74% of the students who had started their journey in fall 2024 returned to OLLU. This fall, 68% of the first-time-in-college students who started in 2025 returned.
“It not just the recruitment piece, it’s also retention… so that if we are bringing students, we are keeping them here,” Sivadasan said.
Before moving to San Antonio, Sivadasan worked at St. Mary’s College of California as vice president of enrollment management and prior to that she was vice provost of enrollment at Missouri University of Science and Technology.
Throughout her career, she learned to recognize Texas as the state that was expected to buck the student demographic cliff — which is the expectation that states will see steady decline of college-age residents over the years linked to lower birth rates.
Students who are Hispanic — a growing demographic group in the U.S. — are perceived to be a cushion against the eroding student population, but they also often face bigger barriers to attend college, Sivadasan added.
“When I was in California, when I was in Missouri, at former institutions, we were [recruiting] in Texas because we saw Texas as the Market,” she said. “I told everybody on campus, ‘We need to increase our Hispanic population.’”
Sivadasan said OLLU, a 131-year-old institution, needs to become more agile in promoting and updating their offerings to attract and retain students.
“Your competitors are doing more every day, so how do you stay ahead of them?” she asked. “This is what enrollment management is … it is not about growing enrollment, but looking at the whole piece.”
More evaluations are likely to happen on an annual basis to assess which programs are resonating with students and the market, Sivadasan added.
Losing more students due to program cuts and large graduating classes was expected, she said.
But as she builds her goals and predictions for 2027 and beyond, Sivadasan predicted that despite the trends, fall 2026 will be the last year of overall enrollment losses.
“I would say definitely for [2027] we will have growth,” she said. “I can say that with a straight face and I told our president that. There’s no question about that because we’ve seen a piece of this [2026] in the incoming class.”
The San Antonio Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
This story first appeared in the San Antonio Report.
