TSU by the numbers: 2012-2025 legislative funding

Here is a look at the funds allocated to Texas Southern University by the Texas Legislature covering the years 2012 – 2025. The figures were gathered from State House and Senate General Appropriations Act documents for the 82^nd through the 88^th Texas Legislatures.

To provide context, funding figures for three other area higher education institutions are also presented, including fellow HBCU Prairie View A&M University, Third Ward neighbor the University of Houston and the University of Houston-Downtown, a school with freshman admission requirements similar to, though a little higher, than TSU.

We also included a comparison of how these dollar amounts equate to funds allocated per student by dividing the appropriation amounts from the 2022-2023 school year (87^th Legislative Session) by the number of students enrolled.

Here’s how the numbers shake out.

APPROPRIATIONS COMPARISON: 2012-2025

HOW MUCH PER STUDENT BASED ON & 87 ^th LEGISLATIVE APPROPRIATIONS

TSU BY THE NUMBERS: SOME CONTEXT

These numbers do not account for the differences in resources beyond legislative appropriations available to each school, resources that impact the overall offerings these campuses can provide for students, faculty and staff. These include things like accrued wealth (university endowments), institutional resources already on hand (libraries, labs, technology), alumni giving, grants won (research or other), institutional collaborations, media coverage slant (generally positive or negative), etc.

For example, though TSU and UH trace their origins back to the same year (1927), the amount of funding dollars has never been equal, with UH funding far surpassing dollars earmarked for TSU – whether dealing with overall amounts or amounts per student.

Thus, generationally, UH has been able to accrue an exponentially larger amount of funds in its coffers than TSU. Moreover, these raw numbers don’t provide a financial snapshot of the percentage of Legislature-appropriated dollars going toward daily/current operations versus dollars free to create more dollars (investments in infrastructure or building and program expansions). Thus, the amount appropriated per student via the 87^th Legislature numbers (TSU, $14.8K/per student vs UH $10.5K/per student) might give a false impression.

*These are estimated numbers as enrollment numbers for each institution vary depending on the source. Additionally, the numbers rounded to the nearest tenth. Also, enrollment numbers presented are from the 2021-2022 school year or the 2022-2023 school year, depending on what information was available.

Sources

88^th: HB 1 General Appropriations Act

87^th: SB 1 General Appropriations Act

86^th: HB 1 General Appropriations Act

85^th: SB 1 General Appropriations Act

84^th: HB 1 General Appropriations Act

83^rd: SB 1 General Appropriations Act

82^nd: HB 1 General Appropriations Act