Across Texas, a bachelor's degree can come with wildly different price tags once the dust settles and the diplomas are framed. At some flagship campuses, fewer than four in 10 graduates walk away owing on student loans. At others, especially public universities that enroll large numbers of low-income and other "at-risk" students, far more graduates borrow and carry noticeably heavier balances.
Those figures come from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board's accountability tables, which were pulled together in an April 29, 2026, package by the Austin American-Statesman. The newspaper laid out campus-by-campus rankings and quoted coordinating board spokeswoman Bobbi Kessler, who said the agency works to help students find "affordable education that leads to strong outcomes and long-term financial stability." The reporting notes that many Texas public universities now have smaller shares of borrowers than the national average.
How Texas Tracks Debt And Why It Matters
Texas links its higher education goals to both earnings and debt through the 60x30TX framework, which calls for 60% of working-age Texans to hold a credential by 2030 and caps debt relative to typical first-year wages. THECB board materials spell out those targets and show that, by recent counts, roughly 53% of working-age Texans now meet the attainment benchmark.
Flagship Schools See Far Less Borrowing
Within the University of Texas System, internal data put the University of Texas at Austin at about 37.3% of bachelor's degree recipients graduating with student loans, a rate that sits well below many peer institutions and below the federal average. A brief from the UT System also describes a multi-year slide in the share of its graduates who leave with debt at all.
Where Borrowing Remains Heavy
The picture looks very different at campuses that enroll higher proportions of students flagged as "at-risk." In the coordinating board tables, Prairie View A&M and Texas Southern show up among the universities with the largest shares of graduates holding loans and with higher average balances. The state's interactive figures list typical graduate debt at about $29,748 for Prairie View and around $32,139 for Texas Southern, with both schools reporting well over half of graduates relying on loans. The campus-level breakouts used in the reporting are available in the THECB interactive data.
For students and families, the practical takeaway is that the headline averages for an entire campus can hide big swings from one major to another. Before committing to a school and a program, it is worth lining up expected borrowing against likely early-career earnings to see whether the math holds up. The UT System's seekUT tool and the coordinating board's accountability portal provide school-specific tables that pair debt and income figures to help with that comparison. The UT System website is one place to start when weighing those tradeoffs.
