What You'll Actually Pay
Price after grants
$12,457 to $24,622 a year for in-state students, depending on income.
College Scorecard 2024 estimate · in-state rates
See the price at your income ↑Sticker price
Full cost before aid: $27,443 a year in-state.Aid and debt
Not reported by this school: share receiving need-based grants, average debt, merit aid.
Getting In
Key dates
Test scores
SAT, middle 50% of those who submitted: 1110–1260 · 35% of the class submitted
ACT, middle 50% of those who submitted: 23–28 · 11% of the class submitted
25% were in the top 10% of their high school class.
What they value
- Very important
- Course rigor (AP/IB)
- Class rank
- GPA
- SAT/ACT scores
- Important
- Personal essay
- Recommendations
- Extracurriculars
- Special talent
- Character
- Volunteer work
- Work experience
- Considered
- First-gen status
- Where you're from
- Demonstrated interest
- Not considered
- Legacy status
- In-state residency
What this means for you
Texas Tech rates course rigor as Very Important, and your essay, your recommendations, and your activities as Important.
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Rigor means AP, IB, and dual enrollment carry real weight — make sure your mix of AP or IB courses is strong. A strong essay can differentiate an otherwise average application. Recommendations matter here too — a recommender who knows you well helps. And depth and leadership in a few activities matter more than a long list.
Texas Tech rates demonstrated interest 'Considered' — it can tip a close decision, without being decisive.
Source: Common Data Set 2025–26, Section C7 (admissions factors)
Texas Tech just showed you what it values in an application. Use that to write a Why-Texas Tech essay that's actually about you — not a template.
Get sourced starting points for your essayStudent Life
33% of Texas Tech classes have fewer than 20 students.
33%
under 20 students
46.6%
20 to 49
20.4%
50 or more
Every class section counts, labs and seminars included; first-year courses tend to be larger. Texas Tech CDS 2025–26, I-3.
21:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus life
8%
first-years from out of state
24.2%
live on campus
12.4%
of men in fraternities
15.9%
of women in sororities
Who attends
- White49.7%
- Hispanic31.7%
- Black6.4%
- Multiracial4.5%
- Asian3.5%
- Unknown / other1.3%
Enrolled undergraduates; international students are counted separately and not included. Texas Tech CDS 2025–26, B2.
Popular majors
Will They Graduate?
50.6% of Texas Tech students graduate in 4 years.
50.6%
finish in 4 years
Entered fall 2019
69.7%
finish in 6 years
Entered fall 2019
85.4%
return after first year
Finishing late means paying for extra semesters, so the 4-year rate is the one that shows the cost.
Students with Pell Grants
63.3% finish in 6 years, against 69.7% of all students.
A 6.4-point gap: Pell Grant students finish less often than students overall.
City & Culture
Beyond the data — what it's actually like to spend four years in Lubbock.
Lubbock is a city of about 270,000 on the flat, dry, windy High Plains, and it calls itself the Hub City because it is genuinely the economic, medical and retail centre of everything for a couple of hundred miles in any direction.
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That cuts two ways. It is big enough to have its own life away from campus — the Depot Entertainment District downtown, the Buddy Holly Center in the restored 1928 railway depot, and a wine country on the plains north of town that supplies most of the grapes in Texas — and small enough, and cheap enough, that a student can actually afford to live in it. What it is not is close to anything. Dallas is about five hours by car, Austin nearly seven, and Albuquerque about six; there is no professional sports team and the airport flies domestic routes only. First-year students are required to live in the residence halls, which front-loads the campus experience, and the university stays the centre of gravity long after that.
The City
Mid-size city
Lubbock, TX
Best For
Notable alumni
Notable Alumni
Edward E. Whitacre Jr.
Ran SBC and then AT&T as chairman and chief executive for seventeen years, rebuilding the company that had been broken up in 1984 into the largest telecom in the United States, and was brought in as chairman and then CEO of General Motors after its 2009 bankruptcy. He took an industrial engineering degree here in 1964 and started as a facility engineer for Southwestern Bell in Lubbock; the university's engineering college is named for him.
Class of 1964
Rick Husband
NASA astronaut and Air Force colonel who flew twice — as pilot of STS-96, the first shuttle to dock with the International Space Station, and as commander of STS-107. He and his six crewmates were killed when Columbia broke apart returning to Earth on 1 February 2003. He took a mechanical engineering degree here in 1980.
Class of 1980
Patrick Mahomes
The Kansas City Chiefs quarterback and the defining NFL player of his generation. He started for the Red Raiders from 2014 to 2016, led all of college football in passing yards and total touchdowns as a junior, and entered the 2017 draft rather than come back for a senior year — Kansas City took him tenth overall.
John Denver
The singer-songwriter behind Take Me Home, Country Roads and Rocky Mountain High, and one of the best-selling recording artists of the 1970s. He enrolled here in 1961 as an architecture student, played local clubs and sang in a campus folk group, and left three years later for Los Angeles, where he took his stage name.
Alumni selected for name recognition and range of fields. Not from the Common Data Set.
Traditions
Traditions
The Masked Rider
A student in a black mask and cape rides a black horse onto the field at the head of the football team before every home game, one hand raised in the Guns Up sign. It started in 1936 as a dare — the rider circled the field and vanished, so people called it the ghost rider because nobody knew who it was — and became the official mascot in 1954, when Joe Kirk Fulton led the team out at the Gator Bowl.
Carol of Lights
On a night in early December the campus turns off the lights in the Science Quadrangle, and more than 30,000 lights on the surrounding buildings come on at once. Students began it in 1959 and it now runs to its sixty-eighth year, with a carillon concert, the combined choirs and trombone choir, and a torchlight processional led by the Masked Rider, Raider Red, the High Riders and the Saddle Tramps.
Wrapping Will Rogers and Soapsuds
The bronze of Will Rogers on his horse Soapsuds has stood at the centre of campus since 1950, and the Saddle Tramps wrap it in red crepe paper before every home football game. Campus legend says the statue was turned 23 degrees east so the horse's backside pointed at Texas A&M. It gets wrapped in black crepe instead to mark national tragedies, which is when students find out the tradition is not only a joke.
Weekend escapes from Lubbock
Weekend Escapes
Within driving distance from Lubbock
Palo Duro Canyon and Amarillo
2 hours 15 minutesStraight up I-27 to the second-largest canyon system in the United States, up to 800 feet deep and cut into ground that looks completely flat until you are standing at the rim. The nearest real day trip, and the only one under three hours.
Ruidoso, New Mexico
4 hours 30 minutesPine forest, mountains and the nearest skiing at Ski Apache, in the Sacramento Mountains. This is the standard West Texas winter escape and the closest place to Lubbock that is neither flat nor dry.
Dallas–Fort Worth
5 hoursThe nearest very large metro, the nearest professional sports and the nearest major airport hub. Long enough that it is a holiday drive or a three-day weekend rather than something you do on a Friday night.
Getting there and game days
Getting There & Game Days
Nearest airport
Lubbock Preston Smith International (LBB)
15 minutes from campus
For international flights: Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) — about 5 hours by car, or a short connecting flight.
Pro sports nearby
- Amarillo Sod Poodles MiLBAbout 2 hours 15 minutes away
- Dallas Cowboys NFLAbout 5 hours away
- Texas Rangers MLBAbout 5 hours away
- Dallas Mavericks NBAAbout 5 hours away
Internships and jobs nearby
Career Proximity
Lubbock is the hub of its region rather than a satellite of a larger one, so the work is here rather than an hour down a highway — but it is concentrated in a few industries. Health care is the largest: Covenant Health and UMC Health System anchor the metro, and the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center sits directly beside the main campus, which is why Lubbock is one of very few places in the country with an undergraduate university, a law school and a medical school on the same ground. Agriculture is the other pillar — this is one of the largest contiguous cotton-growing regions in the world, and the Davis College of Agricultural Sciences works in it directly. X-FAB has run a semiconductor wafer fab in Lubbock since 1999, the Permian Basin oil fields and the High Plains wind farms are both about two hours away, and the university itself is one of the metro's biggest employers. What Lubbock does not have is a large corporate market; the nearest one is Dallas–Fort Worth, roughly five hours by car.
Top Industries Nearby
Major Employers
- Texas Tech University
- Covenant Health
- UMC Health System
- Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
- X-FAB Texas
Downtown Lubbock — about 3 miles east of campus, a 10-minute drive; the nearest large corporate market is Dallas–Fort Worth, about 5 hours away
Who thrives here
Who Thrives Here
Texas Tech admits 69.1% of applicants and enrolls 34,021 undergraduates across 1,839 acres, one of the largest contiguous campuses in the country, and the scale shows in the classroom: 21 students per faculty member and 33.0% of sections under 20. It is overwhelmingly a Texas school — 90.3% of first-years come from in state. Greek life is a real presence without running the place: 12.4% of men and 15.9% of women join. Only 24.2% of undergraduates live in university housing, because first-years are required to and nearly everyone moves off afterwards. The numbers families should weigh hardest are the completion ones: 85.4% come back for a second year, but 50.6% finish in four and 69.7% within six. Lubbock is a five-hour drive from Dallas, which is either the appeal or the objection depending on the student.