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 almost 243,000 students. Each year, U. T. System institutions award more than 67,000 degrees including more than one-third of all undergraduate degrees in Texas and more than half of the State’s medical degrees. Sixty percent of undergraduates who received need-based financial aid double their parents’ income within five years of earning a UT degree. The U. T. System is one of the largest employers in the state with more than 22,000 faculty – including Nobel laureates and members of the National Academies – and more than 93,000 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 and its medical school in 2015 and the recent combination of U. T. Tyler and U. T. Health Science Center - Tyler. In February 2022, the Board of Regents approved the creation of a $300 million endowment to fund the “Promise Plus” program at seven U. T. institution. The program will help thousands of undergraduate students earn a degree from a U. T. institution at no cost to them.
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 in 2023. 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 10.6 million outpatient visits and over 2 million hospital days in 2021.
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 $3.5 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 2023, 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. Other key revenue drivers such as tuition and state funding have largely remained flat. While institutions benefited from significant federal support provided in response to the COVID-19 pandemic during FY 2022, those funds have largely been exhausted reflecting significant declines in federal sponsored program revenue.
