Non-resident undergraduates at Texas public universities now pay roughly four times what Texas residents pay, a gap the state has widened by holding resident rates flat.
The Legislature has frozen resident undergraduate tuition at the University of Texas at Austin for 2025-26 and 2026-27. Non-resident rates carry no such freeze.
At UT Austin, a Texas resident pays between $10,858 and $13,576 a year in tuition, depending on which college admits them. A non-resident pays between $42,554 and $51,106, according to the university’s published 2026-27 cost of attendance. Neither figure is a single number: UT charges differential rates by college, with surcharges for engineering, business and natural sciences.
The pattern holds elsewhere. At the University of Houston, non-resident undergraduates on the university’s fixed-rate plan pay between $27,292 and $31,301 a year for the 2026-27 academic year, depending on program, with nursing at the top. At Texas State University, a non-resident taking 15 hours a semester pays $25,099 a year in tuition and mandatory fees combined, or $22,061 in tuition alone. At Texas A&M, non-resident tuition and fees for 2025-26 ranged from $36,016 to $41,138 a year across the university’s three differential tracks, according to the university’s published non-resident schedule.
Whether those prices are changing where students enroll is a separate question, and one Texas has not published data on. A 2020 study by economists Phillip Levine, Jennifer Ma and Lauren Russell found that applicants respond to published sticker prices even when financial aid means they will not pay them — though that research examined in-state students applying to their own state flagship, not non-residents.
How many graduates stay in Texas is also less settled than it appears. The most-cited figure comes from Higher Education Pays, a 2013 report by College Measures, funded by the Lumina Foundation and built on graduation records held by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board matched against Texas Workforce Commission wage records. It found that 70 percent of Texas public university bachelor’s graduates turned up in the state’s wage database. That is a match rate, not a retention rate — it cannot see graduates who enrolled in graduate school, went into the military, became self-employed or took jobs in other states. The report makes the point directly about UT Austin, where only 57 percent appeared: the shortfall is “likely the result of a large proportion of their students—likely many of their most successful ones—choosing to go on to graduate training or to seek employment outside the state.” The data cover students who finished between 2006 and 2010.
Mark Schneider, then president of College Measures, wrote in that report that “by measuring the percentage of graduates who remain to work in the state after graduation, a state can see which campuses and programs are contributing the most toward improving the economic prospects and quality of life of state residents.”
Texas 2036, a nonpartisan policy group, wrote in a recent newsletter that “Texas enrollment is growing slower than its population, and direct college-going rates remain below where they were a decade ago — a signal that affordability and value-perception concerns are still constraining the state’s higher ed pipeline.”
Private universities price differently. Rice University charges the same tuition regardless of residency — $71,140 for 2026-27 for students who entered in 2024 or later, plus $984 in mandatory fees — and offsets it through The Rice Investment, which covers full tuition, fees, room and board for families earning under $75,000 and full tuition for those between $75,000 and $140,000.