Texas A&M International University
Table of Contents
Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) officially launched as a four-year degree-granting university in 1995, with a mandate to improve the lives of people living in the border region through teaching, service, and research. Administrators, faculty, and staff employ an asset-based approach to deliver on their mission
As a regional university, nearly all TAMIU students come from local border town communities where both Spanish and English are spoken. A large percentage of faculty and staff either attended TAMIU or grew up in the region—or in some cases, both. They know the local schools, small businesses, and families. When admissions and development teams head out into the community, they are frequently engaging with people connected to their families, sometimes for generations. This thorough understanding of the community—its assets and its challenges—fuels the university. There is an enormous sense of pride among faculty and staff and a strong sense of accountability for delivering on TAMIU’s mission to improve the lives of people living in the region. Today, less than 30 years since its enabling legislation, TAMIU enrolls 8,500 students and is a key contributor to essential regional sectors, including health, education, energy, government, and law enforcement—and to wealth-building for individuals and their families.
TAMIU’s service to the region begins with its careful consideration of accessibility and price. Any student with an annual family income of $100,000 or less can attend the university at no cost. All colleges within the university share a pricing structure. The goals are simplicity and clarity.
Factors contributing to TAMIU’s success include a strong culture of collaboration and problem-solving and an asset-driven orientation placing student success as the university-wide priority. TAMIU invests significantly in recruitment and retention and keeps institutional expenses low through lean budgets and multi-functional offices and departments. Design and allocation decisions, regarding curriculum, physical plant, technology, and every other domain, are data-informed and oriented toward actively supporting students and removing barriers to student success.
At a glance: the numbers
Building confidence and removing barriers
Relationship building begins in the community and in regional high schools. TAMIU takes advantage of its considerable “homegrown employee” base to capitalize on institutional knowledge and responsiveness to build and strengthen relationships. It’s a labor-intensive process, with a goal of creating a sense of belonging for whole families, not just students. Student support and enrollment staff are thoughtful in connecting with families in their native languages, investing time in understanding what keeps caregivers up at night, and building policies and programs that respond to their needs.
With support from a dedicated allocation from the Texas Legislature, TAMIU has implemented a two-semester first-year course as part of the required core curriculum. The framework is organized to support students to achieve three goals, documented through e-portfolios:
- Connection (to other students, to resources, to faculty, to the university)
- Growth (trying new things–e.g., taking advantage of tutoring services)
- Empowerment (emphasis on independent decision-making—e.g., changing majors, conducting career research)
During the first-year course, instructors focus on building “cultural capital,” helping students to understand that their cultural and linguistic competence are valuable assets. Faculty are deliberate about incorporating non-Eurocentric approaches into their teaching; some incorporate both Spanish and English language into syllabi and coursework, especially for upper-level Spanish literature courses.
The second semester curriculum includes connecting students to the local community through experiential service-learning projects. This pedagogical approach further emphasizes the value of community and student knowledge and helps students articulate and demonstrate the value of education to themselves, their families. and the local community. Community-based learning creates opportunities to engage families and local community members for mutual support, understanding, and connection.
Beyond the first-year curriculum, faculty in all colleges offer Saturday and evening classes. Occasionally, when childcare issues arise, faculty allow students to bring their children to class. Faculty teaching the first-year course are particularly focused on their role as mentors, helping students to understand and navigate the university landscape and to try to make their initial year in college a positive experience.
TAMIU has developed an integrated strategy and culture of academic advising. It is reflected in everything, including the number of advisers, the physical space advisers work in, and the information resources supporting their work.
With the infusion of legislative funds for the first-year course, TAMIU was able to invest resources into advising and consolidating services into a physical “one-stop shop,” to make resources like the Writing Center and Student Advising more visible. Student advisers are located in a common space divided into cubicles that feature a restaurant-style booth rather than a desk. This layout eliminates the barrier between student and adviser posed by a traditional office set up and also provides space for children or other family members to slide in next to students during advising sessions.
Faculty office areas are designed to maximize visibility and reduce barriers for students to seek out faculty in their offices. These design choices are physical manifestations of a commitment to student success, signaling the availability of resources, destigmatizing help-seeking, and encouraging collaboration among student-serving professionals.
Working within a shared space under Student Engagement, the Registrar, Career Services, Student Conduct, and Student Support function as one unit to keep students enrolled, on track, and working toward their career goals. The TRIO programs are a key coordinating mechanism for providing a safe place for students to connect with faculty and peer mentors who share academic pathways. The goal is to foster a sense of belonging and to build a culture of pride in first-generation college attendance. Peer mentors are low-income, first-generation students who provide academic support and raise awareness of the resources available for meeting basic needs, such as food, housing, and gaining access to emergency grants. Each unit is aligned toward the goal of student engagement—working to pull “parking lot students” out of their cars in-between classes and into community-building programs that connects them to the university and to one another. TAMIU’s staff understand that a lack of communication comes with a cost to students, so they share information freely, actively seeking out new resources for helping students and collaborating to resolve challenging student situations.
Almost all academic advisers are TAMIU alumni and each student is assigned an adviser. Advisers play an active role, checking in with students multiple times across the semester to forge a connection; intervention specialists meet with students every two weeks to assist at-risk students. Advisers contribute to building a positive culture of student success, emphasizing their own experiences as first-generation college students, directly addressing “imposter syndrome” issues, and helping students to identify where they need support and empowering them to seek it out. Advisers invest a significant amount of time helping students understand the university infrastructure and how to navigate their new environment.
"When you see people like you who are succeeding and the support is there—that combination builds success."
TAMIU has invested in developing a technology infrastructure that enables advisers to spend nearly all of their time with students, focusing on substantive issues rather than schedule construction. The university relies on the Banner system for data management, pulling data from admissions, financial aid, the registrar, and academic departments. Advisers regularly review academic data for indicators of students slipping below a 2.0 (a flag for intervention), build focus reports for seniors, and monitor progress in courses to help students access supplemental support, as necessary. Each Monday, the enrollment management team meets to review data on course registration, retention, and academic progress, providing a weekly touchpoint for student success measures and an opportunity for collaborative decision-making and action.
In addition to hiring advisers and providing them with the data they need, TAMIU has built a culture that respects academic advisers as professionals and leverages their unique positioning at the intersection of the institution’s structures and students’ lives. For example, advisers are central to the development of course schedules, a domain frequently insulated from input from anyone other than faculty. Advisers identify conflicts, monitor course offerings and rotations, and coordinate across majors with advisers in other disciplines to ensure students can graduate on time and have the courses they need, when they need them. They interface with department chairs and deans to make adjustments as necessary and with the registrar to make registration more seamless. For certain classes, advisers are empowered to provide permissions for registration. Faculty partner with advisers on scheduling issues to relay early alerts about challenges students are facing and to share positive feedback about student performance. They are part of the curriculum review (the Import and Export major is the result of adviser feedback) and are involved in complying with Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board mandates.
"We are the reason people do or don’t graduate. We are the instrument to make or break an individual. We are strategically intrusive. We are trained and raised that way—cross-training and brainstorming."
Distinctive priorities
TAMIU’s financial model is designed for accessibility without debt and relies on low price points for tuition, room, and board. This is achieved through the application of several principles:
- Budget conservatively all the time. Prioritize student success.
- Keep operations lean through integration. Student services are bundled within offices and departments, streamlining access to resources and facilitating a holistic approach.
- Build reserves for downtimes. Invest when you can. A 2009 legislative investment in the first-year program freed institutional resources for a simultaneous substantive investment in student advising and peer mentoring.
- Invest in technology that enables more staff time to be spent on the “human side” of student advising and support. TAMIU leaders estimate that streamlining enrollment systems and investing in scheduling software resulted in a 5 percent jump in graduation rates.
- Create predictability in financial aid.
- Incentivize and accelerate progress toward graduation.
- To qualify for institutional aid, students need to complete 30 hours per year.
- TAMIU’s Path to Academic and Student Success program provides supplemental instruction for upper-level gateway courses.
- Innovate. Through federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security funding, TAMIU provided students with digital books at no cost. The institution maintained the resource post-COVID because of its success in keeping costs low and ensuring students had materials when classes began, eliminating a barrier presented through the purchase of textbooks.
"Community pays the light bill—not students."
TAMIU’s small executive team meets weekly to talk cross-functionally about what’s sustainable, what’s not, and how to solve for it. Collectively, they examine reasons behind flagging indicators of persistence and identify any barriers to student success and graduation. “Figuring it out” is a cultural approach shared across the university and embedded as part of students’ individual and collective Mexican-American identities. A large proportion of university employees are alumni or are from Laredo.
Many faculty, staff, and administrators shared that they believe in the institution and want to be part of the change, having personally experienced TAMIU’s impact on their own lives and families. There is a pervasive value of the relationship with local communities and the cultural knowledge and wealth they hold. Understanding where students come from is vital to student success. Creating an institution filled with people who have community connections—or who want them—guarantees TAMIU’s positive impact. Commitment to mission, service, and students is prioritized in hiring.
"The goal is to decrease the number of first-generation students because it would indicate we are doing a good job."
A shared cultural connection creates a sense of ownership and pride among students, faculty, staff, and administrators. People in a wide variety of roles at TAMIU singled out cultural commonality as a powerful basis of trust, easing communication and serving as a lubricant to enable the smooth functioning of the university’s bureaucratic elements for the good of students. More specifically, student-facing staff members identified shared culture as enabling them to feel safe expressing their opinions to senior administrators, who themselves recognized and valued the same dynamic. The intimate ties to the region, its communities, and its families provide a positive source of accountability. As one administrator describing their decision-making aptly put it, “These are my neighbor’s children. Who is this impacting? Who do I know? All decisions are made that way.”
Special thanks
We appreciate the time and generosity of those who participated in our interviews and focus groups, including:
- Pablo Arenaz, President
- Daniel De la Miyar, Instructional Assistant Professor, University College
- Hayley Kazen, University College; Faculty Senate President
- Puneet Gill, College of Education
- Kaitlyn Chacon, Department of Humanities
- Juan Castillo, Vice President for Finance and Administration
- Nicholas Hudson, Program Director, P14, Department of Student Orientation
- Jonathan Martinez, Instructional Assistant Professor, University College
- Alejandra Gonzalez, Program Director, Outreach and Pre-College Programs
- Claudia San Miguel, Provost
- Ariadne Gonzalez, Associate Provost
- Rosanne Palacios, Vice President for Institutional Advancement
- Rosalinda Garcia, Vice President for Student Engagement
- Alfredo Ramirez, Dean, University College
- Triana Gonzalez Valdez, Registrar, Office of the Registrar
- Yelitza Howard, Director, Career Services
- Mayra Hernández, Director, Office of Student Conduct and Community Engagement
- Maria Leticia (Leti) Cruz, Director, Student Support Services
- Juan Balderas, Academic Success Coach, University College
- Maggie Blasco, Academic Success Coach, AR Sanchez, Jr., School of Business
- Claudia Garza, Intervention Specialist, College of Arts and Sciences
- Arcelia Gonzalez, Academic Success Coach, College of Education
- Erika Noyola, Academic Success Coach, College of Arts and Sciences
- Felipe Rodriguez, Academic Success Coach, Dr. FM Canseco College of Nursing and Health Sciences
- Juan “Chelelo” Garcia, Vice President for Academic Success
