History Degrees in Texas

The Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863, and roughly 250,000 people held in slavery in Texas stayed in slavery for another two and a half years. On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger landed at Galveston and issued General Order No. 3, informing the people of Texas that “in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” Texas made that date a state holiday in 1979, decades before it became a federal one in 2021. Studying history in Texas means studying it where the gap between a law and its enforcement is part of the state’s own record.

Texas has 67 colleges and universities offering history degrees, with 153 programs among them: 87 bachelor’s degrees, 49 master’s degrees, and 17 doctorates.

Eleven of those schools carry history at all three levels, which ties Texas with New York for the most in the country.

Top History Schools in Texas

We scored all 67 Texas schools on the four factors we use in every state: history degree offerings and program variety (40%), student outcomes (25%), reputation (20%), and affordability (15%). North Texas takes catalog depth with 8 programs, and UT Austin, Houston, and UTEP follow at 6 apiece. Outcomes favor Rice at a 95% four-year completion rate and UT Austin at 89%. Reputation is where Texas is genuinely unusual, and it does not separate anyone: every school in the top ten below is an R1 research university, which is not true of any other state’s top ten in this series. That leaves affordability to do the sorting, and it pulls UT San Antonio at $9,011 and Houston at $9,717 up against private tuition many times higher. Here are Texas’s best history degrees.

Most Affordable History Degrees in Texas

Annual in-state tuition and fees. Every school here is public, and the whole list runs from $7,149 to $8,640. Six of these ten offer history at the master’s level as well as the bachelor’s.

History Education in Texas

Texas is close to evenly split between public and private institutions, which is unusual at this scale. Thirty-five public universities carry 92 history programs and 32 private nonprofit colleges carry 58, so roughly a third of the state’s history offering sits outside the public systems. What is not evenly split is price. The ten cheapest schools in Texas are all public and all fall between $7,149 and $8,640, while Rice and Baylor, both in our top ten, charge $64,144 and $58,100.

Doctoral study is the deepest part of the picture. Texas holds 17 history doctorates, and 11 schools carry the subject from bachelor’s through doctorate, level with New York and ahead of California’s 10. The doctorates are not concentrated in one place either: North Texas alone holds four of them, while UT Austin and Rice each carry two by running separate doctorates in history and in art history.

Art history is a substantial part of the offering rather than an afterthought. Twenty of Texas’s 150 programs carry an art history designation, and they run all the way up, with doctorates at UT Austin and Rice and master’s degrees at Houston, North Texas, and UT San Antonio.

Transfer is protected by statute rather than by agreement. The Texas Core Curriculum is a 42-semester-credit-hour general education block required of every undergraduate at a public institution in the state. Finish it at one Texas public college and the whole thing moves with you to any other, course by course, and the receiving school cannot make you take additional core coursework. The block is built from eight foundational component areas plus one option, and full details are on the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board site.

Online study is the weak spot for a state this large. Our directory lists 12 online history programs across 67 schools, 5 bachelor’s and 7 master’s, and none of the ten schools in our ranking runs one. Distance learners will find more choice looking beyond the state, and our guide to online history degrees covers that ground.

Becoming a History Teacher in Texas

Texas is one of the few states where you can be certified to teach history specifically. State rules list History: Grades 7-12 and Social Studies: Grades 7-12 as two separate standard certificates, so a history major is not obliged to pick up the economics, geography, and government coursework that a combined social studies credential requires elsewhere.

The exams are separate as well. The TExES History 7-12 exam, test code 233, runs 100 questions over five hours with a passing scaled score of 240. Its content is weighted toward what you would expect from a history degree, with one exception worth planning for.

Texas history is 20% of the exam. The remaining weights are U.S. history at 36%, world history at 30%, and foundations, skills, research, and instruction at 14%. A general history degree will not automatically cover a fifth of the test, so a Texas history course is worth taking deliberately instead of hoping electives cover it.

You can see this certificate structure reflected in the degrees themselves. UTEP offers a 7-12 History Teaching track and a separate Social Studies Composite Teaching track within its history B.A., and UT San Antonio runs a B.A. in History with a Social Studies track. Those are degrees built backward from the two certificates.

Confirm current requirements with the Texas Education Agency before choosing a program.

History Careers in Texas

Employment and wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, 2025.

Texas trades pay for volume, and the volume is the largest in the country. The state has 111,660 secondary school teaching positions and 2,030 postsecondary history teaching positions, more of each than any other state. Wages sit modestly below national in most of these roles, with secondary teaching 12% under and postsecondary history teaching 3% under.

The exception runs in both directions. Historians are the only occupation here paying above the national median, at 2% above, and there are just 130 of those jobs in the entire state. Archivists are the outlier the other way, at 22% below national across 490 positions, which is the widest gap in the table by a distance.

For anyone weighing a Texas history degree against the job market, the useful reading is that the classroom is where nearly all the demand is, and Texas has more of that demand than anywhere else even though it pays under the national figure.

History Resources in Texas

• Texas State Historical Association, the state historians’ association, founded March 2, 1897 on the sixty-first anniversary of the Texas Declaration of Independence. It publishes the Handbook of Texas, a free online encyclopedia of roughly 27,000 entries that went to print in 1952 and online in 1999, making it one of the earliest freely available digital state encyclopedias.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum, Austin, the state’s official history museum, opened in 2001.
• Texas State Library and Archives Commission, founded 1909, which holds the archival record of Texas state government and makes primary sources available to researchers.

Frequently Asked Questions