The Houston Chronicle’s latest story about the University of Houston prompts me to wonder when the local newspaper is ever going to sit up and take notice of the far more important story that impacts Houston’s primary public university in particular and financing of Texas’ public universities in general.
The latest Chronicle story is a slapdash effort that discusses a UH initiative to increase its entry requirements told through the prism of a suburban student’s visit to the UH campus. As is typical of most Houston suburban high school students, UH is a third choice behind the University of Texas and Texas A&M University, and nothing in the visit to the UH campus related in the Chronicle article changed the student’s mind.
However, the Chronicle inexplicably continues to ignore the far more imporant story. Given the relative contributions of UT, A&M and UH to the welfare and economy of the State of Texas, does it really make sense for the University of Houston to have an endowment that is only 4% the size of the University of Texas endowment and only 10% the size of Texas A&M’s? As discussed in this prior post, that is one of the absurd legacies of the obsolescent Permanent University Fund on higher education in Texas, and it is not even mentioned in the Chronicle’s story on UH.
Frankly, rather than dismissing UH as an unattractive choice compared to UT and A&M, a more accurate analysis is that UH is providing far more “bang for the buck” in furnishing a quality educational resource for Houston and Texas at a fraction of the endowed capital of UT and A&M. That the system of funding Texas public universities unfairly deprives UH of the capital that would facilitate a jump to Tier I status is the real story that the Chronicle should be pursuing.