University of Alabama

Overview

The University of Alabama is growing on purpose — slowly, and on purpose. Fall 2026 enrollment reached 42,431 students, a new record, but the increase over fall 2025 was just 71 students, a figure the university presents as discipline rather than drift (University of Alabama News). Behind the flat top line sits a sharper move: enrollment of Alabama residents rose 3.6 percent to 18,652, part of what 30th president Peter Mohler calls a “future-ready flagship” vision — a university that measures itself, in his words, not by the size of enrollment but “by the impact of our students when they graduate” (The Tuscaloosa News). None of the standard reference pages about the school have caught up with this pivot; they still describe the growth story of the last two decades, when enrollment more than doubled from the roughly 20,000 students it held between 1989 and 2003 (The Tuscaloosa News).

The in-state push runs through a program called Crimson Compass, which reaches Alabama high schoolers before they apply — free ACT prep through Tide to Success, a summer residential program called UA ACTivate, and Early College credit earned from students’ home communities (The Tuscaloosa News). Selectivity is tightening alongside access: first-time freshmen arrived with an average high school GPA of 3.86, and the class included 280 National Merit Scholars joining more than 1,200 already on campus (University of Alabama News). The six-year graduation rate for the 2020 cohort hit 75.5 percent, the highest since the university began tracking the measure in 1988 (University of Alabama News).

Burned, rebuilt, and reluctant about change

Alabama’s flagship has been destroyed and rebuilt more than once, and its history reads as a series of slow surrenders to the modern university. The General Assembly created it in 1820 as the University of the State of Alabama; it opened April 18, 1831, under Alva Woods with four professors and 52 students (Beacon Journal). In April 1865, Union troops burned nearly the whole campus — the President’s Mansion, the observatory, the Round House, the Gorgas House, and a handful of faculty homes were all that stood afterward (Beacon Journal).

Football arrived in 1892 when student William G. Little introduced the sport to campus, and the first women — Anna B. Adams and Bessie Parker — enrolled the next year (Beacon Journal). The Crimson Tide’s 1926 Rose Bowl victory brought the first national championship; the on-campus stadium, opened in 1929 as Denny Stadium, was renamed Bryant-Denny in 1975 for Paul W. “Bear” Bryant, whose 1979 Sugar Bowl win delivered back-to-back titles and the sixth and last championship of his career (Beacon Journal). In 2024 the field itself was renamed Saban Field at Bryant-Denny Stadium for Nick Saban, who won six national championships across 17 seasons before retiring (Beacon Journal).

The civil-rights chapters are the ones the university least wanted. Autherine Lucy became the first Black student in 1956 and lasted three days of classes before removal and expulsion; official desegregation came in 1963 when Vivian Malone and James Hood enrolled while Governor George Wallace’s threatened “stand in the schoolhouse door” proved symbolic and stopped nothing (Beacon Journal). Later milestones came faster: Judy Bonner became the first female president in 2013, the Carnegie R1 research designation arrived in 2019, and the 2020 football title was the program’s 18th national championship (Beacon Journal). The April 27, 2011 tornado that tore through Tuscaloosa killed six students, a loss the campus still marks (Beacon Journal).

The alumna in the briefing room

The university’s most visible recent graduate works in Washington, not Tuscaloosa. Kaitlan Collins graduated from Alabama in 2014 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science and journalism, then started at the Daily Caller as an entertainment reporter before becoming its White House correspondent at the start of the Trump administration (UA College of Communication & Information Sciences). She moved to CNN in 2017 — the network’s youngest White House correspondent at 28 — covered the 2020 election, and now hosts the nightly The Source; her alma mater notes her TIME100 Next induction and Forbes 30 Under 30 recognition with open pride (UA College of Communication & Information Sciences).

What this profile does not claim

It does not give a reopening year after the 1865 burning, because a campus marker says 1868 and other accounts say 1871. It does not date the burning to a specific day in April 1865, since sources split between the 4th and the 5th. It does not report endowment, research-spending, or faculty totals, which were not verified in fully-read sources. And it treats the enrollment and graduation figures as the university’s own fall-2026 census claims, independently confirmed by The Tuscaloosa News but not audited beyond that.