Texas now has more top-tier research universities than any other state, report finds

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

---

The number of top-tier research universities in Texas jumped, according to a new report, making the state home to more such institutions than any other state.

The American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released a list on Thursday showing 16 universities in Texas have reached the coveted Tier 1 designation. Other populous states, California and New York, have 14 and 12, respectively. The three states were previously tied with 11.

Tier One universities, or R1 institutions, must spend at least $50 million on research and award at least 70 research doctorates on average per year.

Many universities seek this status because it can attract more students, faculty and resources. Increasing the number of them is also a goal of many state leaders as they are seen as economic engines for their communities.

When Gov. Greg Abbott took office in 2015, there were four R1 universities in Texas. He set a goal to double that. At the same time, the Council and Carnegie have simplified the criteria for the designation.

The news is “a testament to the quality of our higher learning institutions and the investment the state has made into education,” Andrew Mahaleris, the governor’s press secretary, said in a statement to the Texas Tribune.

“This legislative session, Texas must work to make college more affordable, expand cutting-edge university research, and simplify our admissions process, while growing career and technical education programs,” Mahaleris said. “Gov. Abbott will continue working with the Legislature to support higher education and ensure Texas students have the opportunity to thrive in our great state.”

The five new additions in Texas since the education groups last released university classifications in 2022 are Baylor College of Medicine, Southern Methodist University, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the UT Southwestern Medical Center.

From 2021 to 2023, SMU, a private university in Dallas, spent an average of $53 million on research and awarded 132 research doctorates annually.

Officials said its focus on supercomputing and data science, a growth in externally funded research and the graduate education it offers helped it reach this milestone. Specifically, multimillion-dollar gifts from the Moody and O’Donnell foundations led to the creation of its school of graduate and advanced studies and a science and research computing institute. The university partners with NVIDIA, an accelerated computing company, and manages and provides access to a high-performance computing cluster.

The university said the designation is a “game changer” that will allow it to attract even more talent to the region. It noted that more than two-thirds of SMU graduates stay in North Texas for their first job.

The designations come at a tumultuous time for universities.

They learned last week that they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds to support biomedical research under a new Trump administration policy.

The Texas Legislature has also repeatedly threatened the public universities' autonomy. Conservative lawmakers have called for ending tenure, a status of employment granted to certain professors that allows them to research and teach controversial topics without fear of reprisal. Tenured faculty and faculty on track to get tenure teach doctoral students and conduct research. Texas A&M University in College Station and the University of Texas at Austin, which spend the most on research and award the most research doctorates out of the Tier 1 universities in Texas, have thousands of tenured faculty.

The Legislature also passed in 2023 a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion offices, programs and training. University leaders told lawmakers last year that it’s been difficult to strike a balance between the state’s requirements and grant funders’ expectations. Some funders want the schools to demonstrate how they will make their fields more diverse or how their research benefits underserved communities.

Shreekanth Mandayam, the vice president for research at Texas State University, downplayed those threats in an interview with the Tribune on Wednesday. He said the Legislature supported research by creating the Texas University Fund, a $3.9 billion endowment, and giving Texas State and other public research universities in the state access to it. Texas A&M and UT have been able to tap into a much larger endowment, known as the Permanent University Fund, for this purpose for many years.

“I think what is happening federally is in my view, a reset of investments and we should make our investments in research more efficient like everything else,” he said.

Texas State, which has more than 4,000 graduate and more than 36,000 undergraduate students in Central Texas, remains in Tier 2. Tier 2 institutions must spend on average at least $5 million on research and award at least 20 research doctorates annually. Texas State spends triple the amount necessary on research to be a Tier 1, but lags behind on the number of research doctorates awarded. Shreekanth said that is because it has had fewer PhD programs than other R1 institutions. It will soon go from 12 PhD programs to 25 and it has made multimillion dollar investments in its existing programs and in scholarships to help PhD students complete their dissertations and graduate on time.

“I’m happy to say that this past year, we graduated 72 Phds. We just need to keep repeating that over the next three years, and I think we’re confident in doing that,” he said.

The four institutions to reach Tier 2 for the first time this year are Abilene Christian University, Lamar University, Texas Woman's University and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: Lamar University, Southern Methodist University, Texas A&M University, Texas Woman's University - Board of Regents, University of Texas at Austin, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and UT Southwestern Medical Center have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.