We aspire to build an exceptional community of learners and scholars, leaders and innovators.

Texas McCombs aims to attract and retain outstanding faculty and staff members, cultivate excellence and ambition among our students, and engage our inspiring alumni. We’ll do this with initiatives that:

1.1 Foster a supportive culture that inspires all of our talented people to bring their varied and dynamic perspectives to the table

Completed Initiatives

• Built a Wellness Center to spark critical conversations about well-being and mental health, and to increase access to existing campus services.
  • In Fall 2022, McCombs opened our Wellness Center, the first of its kind on campus, which delivers services to students closer to where they study and learn. Over 800 sessions have been provided to 180+ students since its opening. Through bridge financing, generously provided by Bryan Stolle, McCombs was able to add a second wellness counselor, which allows the Wellness Center to have an additional wellness intern. While the initiative to launch the Wellness Center was completed this year, future operations will expand beyond the initial launch. We are currently piloting a Mind Body Lab and yoga space.
• Developed and deployed faculty and staff experience surveys in Spring 2023, with a 70% response rate, subsequently adopted by UT. We learn that mission and commitment continues to be high, in spite of constrained financial resources.

Work Underway

• Fundraising for the McCombs Success Scholars Initiative, to attract and support lower income and first-generation college students with the programming, resources, and opportunities needed to excel within McCombs and beyond. As of November 2023, MSS has received $228k in current use funds and $1.4M in endowment donations.
  • As of August 2025, we’ve raised a total of $11.2 million for MSS. Of this amount, $9.8 million endowed, $1.4 million current-use. Also, of the $11 million, $4.6 million is in planned (estate) gifts, whereas $6.4 million has already been pledged or received. Fundraising is continuing to expand the number of students as well as the years we can help them (to include juniors and seniors).
• Expand mentoring programs to a wider variety of students that guide them along the path to doing research or toward a Ph.D. As a primary execution vehicle, we have grown Undergraduate Research Assistants from 47 in 2022-2023 to 71 in 2024-2025. The URA receives about $1,500 per semester, so in fall 2024 we began fundraising for the program. As of August 2025, we have received $100,000 of current-use funding and $100,000 pledged for per-student endowments.

1.2 Create an engaged McCombs community for life

We aim to reinvigorate the pride that faculty, staff, students, and alumni feel for McCombs, a pride that has been at the core of our vision for the past century. We are bonded in our mission to transform business, education, and the lives of all who encounter McCombs’ many trailblazers.

Completed Initiatives

• Amplified the McCombs story throughout 2022 to ensure that our centennial celebrates prior successes and inspires future change-makers. A major accomplishment was the Voices of McCombs, a partnership with NPR’s StoryCorps to create 19 paired conversations between faculty, alumni, students, staff and friends.
• Used the McCombs Connect community platform to enhance alumni networking and outreach. This enabled automated, nimble connections for mentorship, alumni, career engagements and resources — and rich internal and external affinity networks for alumni, students, faculty, and staff. We are on track for 10,000 users in five years, with more than 200 mentoring connections.

Work Underway

• Enrich our Study Abroad and Global Connections initiatives in partnership with the Center for Global Business, to help transform our students into ambassadors, forging important relationships between the Forty Acres and our global alumni. Nearly 50% of McCombs students have experiences away from campus (study abroad, NY, LA). A gift by Karen and Ray Brimble to the Center for Global Business enhanced this effort.
• Plan and implement a strategy to elevate curricular instruction including classroom modality, digital content delivery for the student of the future, and professional development for faculty.
  • Office of Instructional Innovation is highly successful: AI support, rigor project, peer teaching support and remediation.
• Strengthen staff credentials, skills, and learning agility by offering more opportunities for professional development and crafting clearer pathways for promotion.
  • Our ‘Rising Leaders’ program for Assistant Director and select Directors. The program focuses on leadership development, people management and strategic planning. The third cohort is beginning its learning year.

We aspire to help realize the unmatched potential of Austin, Texas, and become a global center for business innovation.

We seek to become a hub where students, top scholars, alumni, and business leaders connect to shape the future of business. We aim to leverage the explosive growth of Austin by creating value for national and international companies that hire our students and engage our thought leaders. We’ll do this with initiatives that:

2.1 Establish McCombs as the convening place for learners and future leaders

Work Underway 

• Fundraising, planning, and building world class facilities in Mulva Hall will connect our undergraduate student communities with faculty and staff members. Our centers and institutes can serve as a front porch where business school meets business practice, presenting the opportunity for students to experience real-world business challenges.
  • The Development and External Relations team has exceeded its $150 million goal for Mulva, raising $172 million as of August, 2025.  The “What Starts Here” campaign has approximately one year remaining.  McCombs has raised $642 million (as of August, 2025) against its campaign goal of $575 million, meeting its goal 18 months early.
• Develop and implement an event strategy that uses McCombs facilities to welcome the next generation of Austin innovators to our community of scholars and business partners. Connect those organizations moving to Austin with our programs, talent and thought leadership.
  • McCombs continues to prosper and connect through its many professional, research and extracurricular centers and institutes, each of which holds professional conferences each year.

2.2 Make McCombs an integral part of the value proposition for all companies starting, relocating to, or already doing business in Texas

Completed Initiatives

• Established McCombs as the primary hiring source and premier degree program and executive education location for top Texas companies.

• • McCombs partners with nearly 1,000 employers in the McCombs ecosystem, and supports bespoke services for McCombs students, plus two initiatives for the rest of campus: opening career fairs to all students during the last few hours, and a one-credit “The Business of Your Career” elective.

Work Underway

• Deepening corporate relationships to solidify McCombs as the essential place for thought leadership. Inspire companies to seek McCombs out for executive education, research collaboration, and curricular enhancement, including cases and speakers.
  • Successful annual Corporate Partners Forum is introducing new entrants to McCombs. We have hosted three annual events as of May 2025. Attendance continues to grow approximately 50% per year.
• Continue to enhance our branding to elevate our reputation as the “highest impact public research university.” Develop and test our brand awareness annually among Austin, Texas, U.S. and global premier businesses as well as peer universities, prospective students, alumni and media.
  • Financial Times No. 10 ranking in the world for research in 2025.
  • From Sept. 1, 2024-Aug. 31, 2025, McCombs increased its owned content for faculty research (Big Ideas) stories 21% from 42 stories the previous fiscal year to 51 stories and for McCombs News stories 30% from 56 stories the previous fiscal year to 73 stories in FY2025.
  • McCombs increased our media coverage of faculty research and school news from Sept. 1, 2023 to Aug. 31, 2025 from $18.6 million in earned media and 16.9 thousand mentions against $$16.7 million and 12.7 thousand mentions over the same two-year period from 2021 to 2023. Our share of national media mentions increased by 11.9%.
  • McCombs began sending its faculty research newsletter to faculty members and leadership at all 134 U.S. News & World Report-ranked business schools in the United States during the June 1, 2023, to Aug. 31, 2025 time period. This outreach has increased our visibility among our most important audience for ranking purposes — our academic peers.

We aspire to create transformational experiences.

Life at McCombs will be greatly enriched by co-curricular and extracurricular experiences that bring classroom education and business practice together. We aim to foster this vision of fully embedded, lifelong learning through initiatives that:

3.1 Emphasize the full arc of the McCombs journey

Completed Initiatives

Entrepreneurship fundraising and expansion. $2 million additional funding by Jon Brumley for Texas Venture Labs and the Brumley Graduate Entrepreneurship Institute. $10 million funding by John Harkey for the Harkey Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Institute. $2.5 million by Bubba Moffitt for the Harkey Summer Entrepreneurship Institute. $1million funding by Billy Freed to name the Freed Pitch Competition inside the Herb Kelleher Entrepreneurship Center. Continued annual giving by Kendra Scott for KSWELI in advance of her paying her committed $10 million endowment. Together these initiatives serve approximately 1,000 students in coursework and minors and another several thousand in web resources.

Work Underway

• McCombs is the front door for Texas Entrepreneurship. With our leaders, we continue to evaluate how we can leverage our brand, venture partners for mid-stage student and alumni funding, and bespoke selected curriculum enhancing students and in-process businesses.
• Expand experiential learning and thought leadership around energy through the Global Sustainability Leadership Initiative (joint with Moody College of Communication) and the Kay Bailey Hutchison Center (joint with Law, Engineering, and Geosciences). Together these initiatives bring business measurement, analysis, and discipline to energy security and sufficiency while exciting stakeholders about world-changing sustainability solutions.
• Expand our Real Estate Center into a bold new Real Estate Institute, which will offer cross-disciplinary education and research toward solving global housing challenges in the post-pandemic world.
  • The Real Estate Center obtained a commitment in Summer 2023 from Ben Friedman to initiate the Friedman Fellows, designed to recruit individuals with expertise in engineering, architecture, and urban policy to work with McCombs to create the intellectual content that will become the basis of new classes in real estate. We are also using part of this gift to support student fellows to help with research around the intersection of real estate and other disciplines on topics like transportation, urban design, architecture, public policy, etc.
  • The dean’s office continues to cultivate an alumnus for an eight-figure gift to fund the proposed Real Estate Institute.
• Prepare students to lead the future of work by enhancing co-curricular experiences; providing coaching and advising; elevating student experience on campus through enriched student services; credentialing skills and experiences with badges across programs, including Texas Executive Education.
  • We are enhancing co-curricular experiences through mentoring, community groups, alumni connections, and employer recruiting.
  • The MBA program led creating Artificial Intelligence badging for students with collaboration among faculty and program staff.

 3.2 Model nimble processes

Completed Initiatives

• Led the way in faculty management practices at UT by adopting best-in-class workforce tools.
  • McCombs launched Watermark for tracking faulty productivity and workload, and UT is planning for adoption. We continue to work with UT to influence their planned adoption of Watermark to maintain first-in-class features.
• Developed and awarded badges for micro-credential learning achieved through co-curricular experiences and Texas Executive Education courses.
• IT Excellence at McCombs requires hiring a CIO, building an integrated systems/data strategy, and delivering dashboards and information to assist key decision-makers.
  • The information technology department has hired a CIO and reorganized. We adopted a new name, McCombs Technology Solutions.
  • We have implemented a robust strategy in information systems for strong systems governance and system enhancements to produce data-driven decisions throughout McCombs.
  • Hundreds of legacy systems have been retired, reducing technical debt and organization risk.
  • McCombs Technology Advisory Council (MTAC) meets quarterly to discuss technology issues and establish priorities. The MTAC includes representatives from operations and administrative departments, including BBA, Career Management and Corporate Relations, Development, Graduate Programs (M.S. and MBA), Instructional Innovation, Financial Affairs, Marketing, and Communications.

 Work Underway

• McCombs 360 is the organization’s enterprise operations management application that will enable critical business processes, support communication with strategic partners, and track key data points that provide a comprehensive view of McCombs’ operations and the experience of our students. Future phases of this project will continue the assessment of McCombs functional operations needs, and the design and implementation of application components. Planned focus areas include marketing, program operations, development, career and alumni relations, and centers/institutes. These technology solutions will help harness customer relationships and improve experience to drive demand for McCombs offerings.
  • We are currently in the process of gathering requirements and building the roadmap for the next phase of McCombs 360 to pursue phase 2 of Salesforce/Marketo.
  • Continuous web improvements are underway following a content management system conversion to WordPress from Terminal 4.

We aspire to teach our students to change the world.

We aim to help students face the complex business problems of today and prepare them for the jobs and economies yet to come. We’ll do this with cutting-edge teaching and initiatives that:

4.1 Educate our students to shape and lead future industries 

Completed Initiatives

• Evaluated the resources needed to grow McCombs’ undergraduate enrollment from the 2019 baseline to support UT strategy.
  • McCombs proposed a plan to grow both resident and non-resident enrolled undergraduates, with revenue-sharing of non-resident tuition between UT and McCombs to support increase in enrollment. UT evaluated and rejected our proposal in 2023. Thus, we reduced our enrollment to the 2019 baseline of approximately 950 students for Fall 2024.
• Successfully launched programs and curriculum to prepare students for careers in business analytics, energy solutions and sales, while continuing our competitive advantages in developing leaders and critical thought within core disciplines.
  • We received a $20 million gift from Mindy Hildebrand to name the Hildebrand MBA. The majority of this gift will provide a matching fund for a first-ever push to raise MBA scholarships, allowing us to compete better for top students and raise the program’s reputation. To date, we’ve secured $2 million in scholarship funding with $8 million in matching funds remaining. A portion of the gift will enhance our leadership curriculum and co-curricular activities to boost our MBA students’ ability to change the world.
  • Texas Executive Education launched two new programs in energy and environmental, social, and governance (ESG).
  • Three programs launched during the strategic plan window, the Business Analytics major, Analytics and the Business of Sports minor, and Sales minor. Our Sales minor has enrolled 181 undergrads since its inception.
  • The Center for Global Business attracted $2.5 million from the Brimble family to expand our global leadership education and study abroad experiences.

Work Underway

• Reinvigorate our process to manage our portfolio of minors, majors, and degree programs that best equip students for the future of work. Develop metrics to retain, discontinue, or launch programs.
  • Since 2021, our Accounting, IROM, Management, and Marketing department chairs reviewed and refreshed aspects of their curriculum. The Accounting Department refreshed its curriculum to broaden the appeal beyond the traditional accounting roles of audit and taxation. The IROM department quadrupled enrollment in its new undergraduate Business Analytics major. The Management Department prioritized the concentrations in consulting and entrepreneurship and its minor in entrepreneurship for refreshes.
  • We initiated an academic portfolio review process for McCombs centers and programs, including the development of metrics to assess center and program health. Analysis of the process to launch or discontinue programs is ongoing.
• Develop refined measures of assessment, rigor, and content excellence in the classroom to inform peer reviews and supplement course instructor surveys.
  • Over Spring of 2024, MOII completed and tested deliverables. Next step is broader implementation.
    • Syllabus statement, student communication materials, student surveys, faculty guide (M.S. programs, STA 309, ACC 312)
    • Faculty/course evaluation rubric (tested with six faculty/classes)
    • Employer survey verified use of core competencies as outcome/impact measures for this work
      • Problem-Solving and Critical Thinking
      • Evidence-Based Decision Making
      • Adaptability and Agility
      • Resilience
      • Emotional Intelligence
      • Effective Communications
      • Collaboration and Teamwork

We aim to foster excellence in instruction and to meet the growing demand for high-quality degrees and lifelong learning opportunities. We’ll do this with initiatives that:

4.2 Optimize instructional modalities and technology for future-focused learning

Completed Initiatives

Designed the curricula and launched the MSBA working professionals’ program, which has broken even as of 2024-2025 and is on track to be profitable going forward.

Work Underway

• Expand online program management programs for high-volume certificates and short courses through Texas Executive Education (TEE) where market conditions predict significant margins for McCombs.
  • TEE expanded bootcamps with Great Learning for a “Cloud Computing” camp last year. Bootcamps also incorporated a face-to-face opportunity extending across all 6 Great Learning titles.
  • Our Health Informatics and Health IT (HIHIT) program developed and launched asynchronous content delivery to enhance flexibility within the program.

• Assess Texas Executive Education. Evaluated open enrollment portfolio relative to peer and aspirant schools and trimmed the TEE portfolio.
  • Notable new titles include “Winning!” in collaboration with the Circuit of the Americas track, “AI and EQ,” and “Investment Banking Bootcamp.”
• Plan and implement a strategy for optimal mix of online and in-person classes, enhancing digital content for the student of the future.
  • We developed an initial portfolio innovation strategy and are socializing it with key stakeholders.
  • In spring 2024, we evaluated market conditions and school aspirations for an online MBA with the MBA program office and reviewed findings with the dean’s office. Future offerings, such as AI micro-credentials and online MBA prep courses for external audiences, have been identified and prioritized to create a roadmap to possible online/hybrid subsequent opportunities.
  • In spring 2024, we evaluated market conditions, school aspirations, and TEE constraints to design, build, and maintain boot camp-like programs for career accelerator programs within TEE as potential replacements to third-party boot camp programs currently offered.

We aspire to discover the future of business through ambitious leadership.

Our research should upend the status quo of business practice and education. We’ll explore novel theories, methods, and analyses through initiatives that:

5.1 Support top-tier, high impact research

Completed Initiatives

• Received a transformational commitment from Billy and Rozanne Rosenthal to name the Rosenthal Department of Management to support research, teaching, and faculty initiatives and to support our ability to recruit and retain talented faculty.
• Achieved a near-term increase in Annual Discretionary Fund research resources for faculty on merit list, and prioritized resource deployment from revenue programs for best-in-public school-class research.
  • Deployed $250 thousand per year (for the next five years) from Neal Aronson’s discretionary gift to enable high-potential research grants and research in sports analytics and management.
  • Hired full professors in management and finance to strengthen research leadership.

Work Underway

• Seek material funding increases and stability for research funding through pursuit of additional department naming gifts ($25 million, $30 million or $35 million) and other discretionary research funding donations, and planned allocation of strategic growth in executive education profits.
  • In January 2024, we delivered a proposal to a family who is considering naming the Department of Finance. That conversation is ongoing.
  • In Spring 2025, we delivered a proposal for naming the Department of Accounting. That discussion is in process and may close soon.
  • In Summer 2025 we began verbal discussion for naming the Department of Marketing. The conversation is in early stages.
  • The Development and External Relations team continues to plan for and have department naming discussions with eligible donors, as these gifts have profound impact on faculty research, among other things.

We aim to have organizations and scholars around the world seek us out for our expertise and experience. We’ll garner that prestige through initiatives that:

5.2 Elevate our thought leadership and impact

Completed Initiatives

• Launched brand and promoted McCombs cutting-edge research through media channels.
• Develop automated mechanisms to share McCombs research among professional track faculty, students, and staff with the long-term goal of making this research a point of pride throughout our organization.
  • Through a team of undergrad research assistants, the associate dean for research, and administrative support, in 2023-2025 have used off-the-shelf large-language model (LLM) AIs to create a one-page summary of each faculty publication in a way that maintains fidelity to the papers’ main ideas and findings, while also making the summaries’ writing accessible to anyone with a high school education. These summaries are now accessible to all faculty via Canvas to facilitate use in classroom teaching across the college.

Work Underway

• Measure and highlight scholarship viewed as high-impact in the academy. Disseminate this research to a more extensive set of stakeholders to improve the visibility of McCombs externally.
  • Financial Times No.10 worldwide research ranking.
  • Developed and deployed multiple channels for research dissemination, including the McCombs newsroom, Big Ideas newsletter, internal research newsletter, and increased emphasis on social media (LinkedIn) promotion of research.
• Optimize cooperation between and among McCombs centers and UT institutions to elevate research and evidence-based business discussions, inviting academics published in the top journals, fostering research opportunities, and attracting top faculty. This is ongoing.