Our Steps to Tier One
Vision articulated into a plan results in plenty of ambitious goals at UT Dallas. Read about what we will accomplish in the next few years.
Increase Our Endowment
Tier One schools must have at least $400 million in endowments. For the 2011 fiscal year, donors to UT Dallas helped shatter records for nearly every measure used to gauge private support. In addition to 50 new endowed funds, total gifts and pledges exceeded $55 million for the year, measured from Sept. 1, 2010 to Aug. 31, 2011. The endowed funds total eclipsed the previous year's 38, which was also a record. The total number of funds comprising the UT Dallas endowment has more than doubled in just the past five years, rising from 106 in 2005 to more than 250 today.
Hire More Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty
UT Dallas needs to build the size of its faculty from the current 454 to somewhere between 700 and 900 individuals, both to build the research program and to expand the academic offerings that serve students.
Attract More Research Funds
Expending over $100 million per year in research is generally considered to signify Tier One status. UT Dallas reported record annual research expenditures of nearly $94 million in fiscal year 2011—up about 15 percent from a year earlier, more than triple the expenditures of eight years ago and a key indicator of the University's progress toward joining the ranks of the nation's top research universities.
Produce More Doctoral Graduates
In the 2010-11 academic year, UT Dallas had 164 doctoral graduates.
We anticipate graduating 240 PhD candidates by 2019.
Producing 200 doctoral graduates per year is one of the criteria for accessing the National Research University Fund.
External Recognition of Scholarly Attainment
The recent addition of the Phi Kappa Phi honor society, the nation's oldest for all academic disciplines, is another milestone for UT Dallas and one of the qualifying benchmarks for the National Research University Fund.
High-quality Freshman Classes
The University has among the best-prepared incoming freshmen each year in the state. Nearly 39 percent of freshmen ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school class; 75 percent were in the top 25 percent. As of Fall 2011, the average SAT score for entering freshmen was 1248; the average ACT score was 27.
Strategic Plan Update
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board requested strategic plans from each of Texas' emerging research universities. The plans describe each institution's strategies to develop into a national research university and address specific issues and questions specified by the Board. This document presents the plan for UT Dallas.
Strategic Plan for Meeting National Research University Criteria
