Texas universities map

Texas A&M opened at College Station in 1876 as the state's first public college, and Prairie View opened the same year. The University of Texas followed at Austin in 1883. Both flagship systems draw income from the Permanent University Fund, an endowment backed by roughly 2.1 million acres of state land in West Texas — land that was nearly worthless until oil was found on it in the 1920s. That is why the two systems could build medical schools and regional campuses on a scale no other Texas institution matched. The A&M campus at College Station is the largest university campus in the state by enrollment; UT Austin's campus sits directly north of the State Capitol on Congress Avenue's axis.

A handful of Texas towns exist mainly because of their university. College Station and neighboring Bryan, Huntsville, Canyon in the Panhandle, Stephenville, Kingsville, Nacogdoches in the Piney Woods and Alpine in the Big Bend all have student populations large enough to shape the local economy. Sul Ross at Alpine is the most isolated public university in Texas: the nearest other campus is more than 150 miles away.

The opposite pattern is Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth, where a dozen institutions share one metro. Houston alone has UH, UH–Downtown, UH–Clear Lake, Texas Southern, Rice and Houston Christian inside the city limits, plus the Texas Medical Center's teaching hospitals. In the Metroplex, UT Arlington, UNT in Denton, UT Dallas in Richardson, TCU, SMU, UNT Dallas and the University of Dallas in Irving are all within an hour of one another.

Baylor at Waco, chartered in 1845 under the Republic of Texas, is the oldest continuously operating university in the state. Southwestern at Georgetown traces its roots to a school founded in 1840. Rice, endowed by a Houston merchant, opened in 1912 and is still the smallest of the major research universities in Texas by enrollment.