UT Jackson School of Geosciences

The Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin is among the most established and well regarded geoscience programs in the world, uniting one of the country’s oldest academic departments of geological sciences with two world-renowned research units, the Institute for Geophysics and the Bureau of Economic Geology. The school is home to the country’s largest academic geoscience community with 4,500 alumni, 150 research scientists and faculty members, and the largest combined graduate and undergraduate enrollment of any major earth science program.

The Jackson School is both old and new. It traces its origins to a Department of Geology founded in 1888 but became a separate unit at the level of a college only on September 1, 2005. The school’s formation resulted from one of the most generous gifts in the history of higher education when the late John A. and Katherine G. Jackson bequeathed endowments and assets to the university presently valued at over $300 million.