pay day

This Houston university pays best for new graduates, says new report

Rice rises to the top again.

If you're looking for a Texas college or university where your education will come with an impressive paycheck, look no further than Houston's Rice University.

A new study from personal financial website SmartAsset shows the average starting salary for a newly minted Rice grad with a bachelor's degree stands at $72,400. No other college or university in Texas passes the $70,000 mark for starting salaries.

A report from PayScale.com indicates the $72,400 average salary for a Rice grad ranks 39th in the nation. Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, claims the No. 1 spot ($91,400).

The salary ranking is part of a broader SmartAsset study that examined five factors — scholarships and grants, tuition, student living costs, student retention rate, and starting salary — to determine the best-value colleges and universities in Texas. Rice also appears at No. 1 on that list.

"Rice is frequently rated as one of the nation's best values among private schools because its tuition tends to be lower than its peer research universities," the school noted in a March news release, "and its financial aid policies are regularly reviewed to keep its exceptional education affordable to students from a wide variety of cultural and economic backgrounds."

For the salary component of the study, the University of Houston ranks 10th in the state, at $57,500. Overall, it earns the No. 3 spot for best value in Texas.

Here's the list of the top 10 schools in Texas for starting salaries of new grads:

Rice University in Houston, $72,400
University of Texas at Austin, $62,100
Texas A&M University in College Station, $61,200
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, $60,800
Southern Methodist University in Dallas, $60,600
LeTourneau University in Longview, $59,900
Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, $59,500
University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson, $58,900
Texas Tech University in Lubbock, $57,600
University of Houston, $57,500

Here's the list of the top 10 schools in Texas designated as "best value":

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2026 jobs forecast

Houston's health care sector will drive job growth in 2026, report predicts

Photo by simonkr/Getty Images

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Buoyed by the growing health care sector, the Houston metro area will add 30,900 jobs in 2026, according to a new forecast from the Greater Houston Partnership.

The report predicts the Houston area’s health care sector will tack on 14,000 jobs next year, which would make it the No. 1 industry for local job growth. The 14,000 health care jobs would represent 45 percent of the projected 30,900 new jobs. In the job-creation column, the health care industry is followed by:

Construction: addition of 6,100 jobs in 2026
Public education: Addition of 5,800 jobs
Public administration: Addition of 5,000 jobs

At the opposite end of the regional workforce, the administrative support services sector is expected to lose 7,500 jobs in 2026, preceded by:

Manufacturing: Loss of 3,400 jobs
Oil-and-gas extraction: Loss of 3,200 jobs
Retail: Loss of 1,800 jobs

“While current employment growth has moderated, the outlook remains robust and Houston’s broader economic foundation remains strong,” GHP president and CEO Steve Kean said in the report.

“Global companies are choosing to invest in Houston — Eli Lilly, Foxconn, Inventec, and others — because they believe in our workforce and our long-term trajectory,” Kean added. “These commitments reinforce that Houston is a place where companies can scale and where our economy continues to demonstrate its resilience as a major engine for growth and opportunity. These commitments and current prospects we are working on give us confidence in the future growth of our economy.”

The Greater Houston Partnership says that while the 30,900-job forecast falls short of the region’s recent average of roughly 50,000 new jobs per year, it’s “broadly in line with the muted national outlook” for employment gains anticipated in 2026.

“Even so, Houston’s young, skilled workforce and strong pipeline of major new projects should help offset energy sector pressures and keep regional growth on pace with the nation,” the report adds.

The report says that even though the health care sector faces rising insurance costs, which might cause some people to delay or skip medical appointments, and federal changes in Medicare and Medicaid, strong demographic trends in the region will ensure health care remains “a key pillar of Houston’s economy.”

As for the local oil-and-gas extraction industry, the report says fluctuations and uncertainty in the global oil-and-gas market will weigh on the Houston sector in 2026. Furthermore, oil-and-gas layoffs partly “reflect a longer-term trend as companies in the sector move toward greater efficiency using fewer workers to produce similar volumes,” according to the report.

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This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.