The University of North Texas in Denton is too overpopulated, which is actively ruining the student experience.

For the past few years, every year, each freshman class has busted previous records for the most amount of freshman admitted. While this sounds great on paper, it’s terrible for those who attend. In 2021, the number of students enrolled was 42,327. In 2022, this surged to around 44,000. And now in 2024 the population is up to around 47,000 with no new dorms since 2019. At this rate, within a few years UNT will hit the 50,000, and unless something it done about it, the issues students are facing will also get worse.

Out of around 2000 parking spaces, around 6000 parking permits are sold.

It’s getting so bad that students are forced to park in faculty parking spots, where they risk either getting a ticked or getting towed and having to pay $140 to get their car back for something beyond their control.

All upperclassmen and honors dorms are now freshmen dorms, while most upperclassmen are forced to move out into unaffordable housing, leaving many students with promising futures to have no other choice but to either dropout, pull out hefty loans, or go homeless.

While one could make the argument that this happens in every college campus to a certain extent, the extent it happens at UNT is egregious. UNT knowingly houses more freshmen than it has space for; UNT knowingly oversells parking permits. But new students don’t go to this school knowing that these are problems. Students not being able to attend class because they can’t find a spot to park, professors having to cancel class because of the same issue, and freshmen not being told that they’ll likely only get dorms their freshman year while orientation leaders talk about housing during orientation sets students up for failure. 

UNT is simply too overpopulated for its own good. The university used to have a 60% acceptance rate, but is now 80%. While other universities can get away with having such a high acceptance rate, UNT simply cannot due to how fast it’s growing. Students now strongly believe that the acceptance rate should be lowered again. Not doing so makes the college experience at UNT stressful for everyone who attends, particularly commuters and upperclassmen.