For more than 135 years, The University of Texas System (the “U. T. System”) has been committed to improving the lives of Texans and people all over the world through education, research and health care.
The U. T. System is one of the nation’s largest systems of higher education, with 13 institutions that educate more than 240,000 students. Each year, U. T. System institutions award more than 60,000 degrees including more than one-third of all undergraduate degrees in Texas and more than half of the State’s medical degrees. The U. T. System is one of the largest employers in the state with about 21,000 faculty – including Nobel laureates and members of the National Academies – and more than 85,000 health care professionals, researchers and staff.
Transformational initiatives implemented over the past several years have cemented U. T. as a national leader in higher education, including the expansion of educational opportunities in South Texas with the opening of U. T. Rio Grande Valley in 2015 and the new combination of U. T. Tyler and U. T. Health Science Center at Tyler.
Creating a healthier Texas is a fundamental mission of U. T. institutions, which award more than 15,000 health-related degrees annually. The U. T. System is poised to open its seventh medical school in Tyler within the next several years. U. T.-owned and affiliated hospitals and clinics – supported by thousands of doctors, physician assistants, nurses and other health care providers – accounted for more than 9.2 million outpatient visits and over 1.8 million hospital days in 2019.
In addition to world-class patient care, U. T. researchers are on the front lines of advancing treatments and therapies for deadly and debilitating diseases. Life-changing and life-saving research and invention of new technologies regularly place U. T. institutions among the top 10 world’s most innovative universities, according to Reuters and the National Academy of Inventors. Total research spending across the 13 U. T. institutions exceeds $3 billion annually, and the U. T. System is No. 1 in Texas and No. 2 in the nation in federal research expenditures among public higher education systems.
For FY 2022, changes in the operating budget are largely driven by growth in health care activities primarily related to hospital patient income and professional fees charged by U. T. faculty physicians and contractual arrangements with affiliated hospitals and health care systems. In addition, institutions have benefited from significant federal support provided in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as an increase in state appropriations going into the new biennium.
