UNT Is $45M in the Hole. The Growth Plan: Import More Students.

The University of North Texas is cutting more than 70 academic programs to close a projected $45 million budget shortfall. So naturally, its growth strategy involves paying a foreign company to recruit foreign students, and the newest question on the table is whether Texas taxpayers are also footing the bill for the English classes.

The shortfall is real and well-documented. UNT's president and provost told faculty the deficit was driven largely by a sharp decline in international enrollment — students who typically pay significantly higher tuition — plus reduced state funding tied to enrollment. A 45% drop in international graduate students, specifically. The response: program consolidations, faculty buyouts, vacant positions left unfilled, and courses shifted to an online-lecture format so more students can be taught without hiring more faculty.

Into this picture walked Sara Gonzales and her "Come & Take It" segment, which has been pulling the thread all week. The episode's own description lays it out: the university is spending taxpayer dollars to recruit foreign students, and the money for the recruiting is going to a foreign firm. The follow-up question, given its own chapter in the episode ("Paying for English Programs Too?"), is whether Texans are also paying for the newcomers' language instruction.

That part has a specific institutional anchor. UNT operates the Intensive English Language Institute, established in 1977, a fully accredited program with seven proficiency levels and 20 hours of instruction a week. Students who don't meet English proficiency requirements for admission but are otherwise admissible can qualify for conditional admission to UNT while enrolled at IELI. In other words, the pipeline exists: the school teaches the English, then enrolls the student.

Now, is the institute itself funded by taxpayer dollars? That's the question the segment raises rather than settles, and honesty requires saying so. But the structure of the joke writes itself regardless: a public university, bleeding money because it lost international students, is spending money to import international students, through a foreign recruiter, while running an English school for the ones who arrive not yet speaking the language. The funnel is imported. The budget hole is domestic.

There is a serious version of this story, and it goes like this: American public universities built a business model on high-tuition international enrollment, the enrollment fell off amid federal scrutiny and travel restrictions, and now the same schools are cannibalizing their own academic programs to cover the gap. UNT is phasing out its linguistics degrees entirely. Read that again: a university that needs students to learn English is eliminating the department that studies language. The satire barely has to exaggerate; the budget memo did the work.

The pattern is bigger than one school. UT-Arlington has seen a 30% drop in international graduate students and has laid off dozens of employees. The model is cracking everywhere at once. The only question is whether the fix is to recruit harder into a broken model, or to admit the model was the problem.

The underlying reporting is filed in the Evidence Locker: Sara Gonzales, "Come & Take It" (Blaze TV, Oct. 2026); Texas Tribune / Open Campus coverage of the $45M shortfall (March 2026); UNT's IELI program records.