Dive Brief:
- Oil revenues of nearly $1 billion per year are flowing to the University of Texas and Texas A&M, thanks to 2.1 million acres in West Texas set aside more than 170 years ago to fund public education.
- In the past five years, the endowments for the two university systems have grown by about 70%, the Dallas Morning News reports.
- Oil and natural gas revenue has nearly quadrupled in the last eight years because of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that opened previously inaccessible fields. One such oil deposit on university lands may be the second largest field in the world.
Dive Insight:
Texas university administrators can thank Mirabeau B. Lamar, a founding father of Texas who set aside the West Texas land now populated by oil wells. The fund that collects the oil revenues, the Permanent University Fund, has more than $19 million under management, distributing nearly $650 million to the university systems last year. Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on construction every year, the state universities have some of the lowest tuition rates in the country.
