Enrollment has more than doubled as the university commits $1.5 billion to expansion
The undefeated, 9-0 football team at Tarleton State University reached No. 1 in the Football Championship Subdivision for the first time in school history this season, and the program is planning a leap to the sport’s highest level. The ranking is the most visible piece of a broader expansion: the Stephenville, Texas, university has committed $1.5 billion to campus infrastructure projects as enrollment more than doubled. “Athletics will never be the most important endeavor we embark upon,” said James Hurley, the university’s president since 2019, “but it is the most visible.”
Many of the projects are backed by the Permanent University Fund, a state endowment created by the Texas Constitution of 1876 that generates money from Texas oil fields and distributes money to some public schools. The fund makes investments and owns 2.1 million acres, much of it in the Permian Basin; the land is leased for a variety of purposes, with oil royalties the chief revenue stream. Fueled by oil revenue and strong investment returns, the fund’s assets have more than quadrupled since 2009 to $45.9 billion.
Tarleton State has tapped that growth. The fund contributed $66 million for a new building on the university’s Fort Worth campus that houses classrooms and lab space for its healthcare and teacher education programs, and earlier this year $100 million was approved for a new agricultural sciences building.
Endowment money cannot be spent on athletics directly. But the capital influx allows Hurley to rethink the university’s own budget and spend more on sports than he otherwise might, and the results have come quickly across the department.
The basketball teams, which recently completed the move from Division II to Division I, are beginning their seasons in the new $130 million EECU Center, which seats 8,000 for basketball games and opened last year. The baseball program, also Division II a few years ago, has already made the NCAA tournament for the first time and won a game. The school has produced its first Division I national champion in track and field.
The run began in earnest in 2020, when Tarleton State joined the Western Athletic Conference, now called the United Athletic Conference, and started its transition to Division I. For years the department’s headliner was its national-title-winning rodeo team, which boasts 42 individual and team titles. “We do see it as a vehicle to grow the institution,” said athletic director Steve Uryasz.
Hurley, who arrived in 2019 with a mission to spread the word about what he considered the best-kept secret in America, has spent years driving that message across the state — tens of thousands of miles, hundreds of visits with high school administrators, and more burritos eaten in his car than he would care to remember, with stops in places without cell service and towns with one stoplight. But nowhere was too small to visit if he could put Tarleton State on the radar of college applicants. Underlying the travels was a bet that more students could mean more cash from the state endowment, and that nothing would boost the school’s profile like college sports and the Tarleton State Texans.
The headliner now is the 9-0 football team, which delivered shocks to Army and Bowling Green, both FBS schools, in the past two years. Hurley describes the run as going according to plan. “We would like to be considered an athletic program that’s great, not good, but great in every sport,” he said. “We’re competing for championships.”
The surge is playing out at a school where purple saturates daily life: there is a secret spirit society named the Purple Poo, students eat purple pancakes on homecoming weekend, and the basketball arena filled last month for a “Yell Contest” in which student groups create songs about school traditions. Hurley dreams of giving them sports teams to shout about.
The school was founded in 1899 with the fortune of John Tarleton, who according to university lore walked from Tennessee to Texas before leaving money and land to establish a school in his will. Based in Stephenville, nearly two hours southwest of Dallas, Tarleton State has historically been a specialty spot for Texans to study agriculture. It now counts more than 28,000 students — more than twice as many as when Hurley took over — making it one of the fastest-growing universities in America.
The person watching the ripples most closely is Javier Garza, a former math professor who oversees enrollment. Garza admits he miscalculated just how much the visibility of the sports teams would do. “I underestimated the impact it would have on enrollment,” he said. “Everybody likes a winner.”