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With UTRGV being named the top university in Texas by Washington Monthly college guide and ranking for the second consecutive year, President Guy Bailey said it reflects the work put into the university over the last decade.
“I hope our students understand how important it is for them because they’re going to a university that’s recognized for the quality of its output and performance,” Bailey said. “There are a lot of negative stereotypes about the Rio Grande Valley and they’re undeserved. We hope this helps dispel some of those. We think our students are as smart as students anywhere. We think they’re harder working than students anywhere.”
The Washington Monthly college guide and ranking system evaluates four-year schools based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories which are social mobility, research and providing opportunities for public service.
“You see a ranking and you think of it as current, you know, this is what’s happening, but this is really the product of the work of a lot of people over a 10-year period,” he said.
Other rankings systems use measurement of wealth, exclusivity and prestige.
“They’re based on objective data,” Bailey said. “Something like U.S News & World Report, all that data is self reported … The rankings really reflect our values. They’re focused on things like the performance of Pell Grant students, your graduation rates, the net price. They also include things like research expenditures. They also include service to the community. So they’re actual performance based rankings are not prestige rankings.”
UTRGV ranked number one in several categories such as lowest net price of attendance, social mobility, and top performance by Pell Grant students.
“This is particularly gratifying to me, because the promise of American education was always that you can better your own future and that of your family if you get additional education,” Bailey said.
Being a first generation college graduate himself with his mother never graduating from high school, he said higher education profoundly affected his entire future and his family’s.
“And that role of higher education and social mobility is something that gets lost, I think, especially among prestigious institutions,” Bailey said. “But universities like ours really understand that we are the primary vehicle for social mobility in our areas.”
Almost two-thirds of the approximately 29,000 undergraduate UTRGV students receive Pell Grants.
With the vast majority of the student body on Pell Grants, Bailey said their performance is crucial to UTRGV and its future.
“We want all of our students to succeed, but if our Pell Grant students don’t succeed, we can’t be successful as a university. We understand that that is fundamental to our success,” he said.
UTRGV’s top performance of Pell Grant students also ranks second among national public universities.
Ranked number one in lowest net price of attendance, UTRGV is also ranked number five among national public universities.
“That’s absolutely crucial when you live in an area that’s not very wealthy,” Bailey said. “If higher education is not affordable, then you’re not going to pursue it.”
UTRGV also ranked number one in communications disorders, nursing and social work master degrees in the state.
“Yale’s (nursing program) cost four or five times as much as our program yet our graduates actually made slightly more money,” he said. “When you pay less and make more, that’s pretty hard to beat and we have nursing faculty that offers a very high quality program too. So if you think about that, think about the need for nurses, and the fact that this nursing program in the Rio Grande Valley is among the top six in the United States, that’s quite something to say about it.”
