The Impact of the Texas Oil and Natural Gas Industry in Higher Education Essay

We all know about Texas’s rich history with oil, and we usually talk about the economic side of the oil industry’s effects on Texas culture, but what about the social changes that came with the quickly booming industry? I read 4 documents and came to the conclusion of which social changes truly mattered to Texans. The oil industry’s impact on Texas’s society can be found in the new job opportunities offered to minorities to the oil industry causing the divorce rate to sky-rocket in Texas counties.

At the beginning of the oil industry, segregation refused to let Blacks and Mexican-Americans into the work of roustabouts and oil rigs. Yet, where oil rigs were growing and producing abundant sources of petroleum, boomtowns were growing with them. The new towns needed people to handle tasks of manual labor for them, but they couldn’t find anybody to do them. That’s where the minorities came into play. The Blacks and Mexican-Americans were able to do domestic work for more money than where they originally came from. (Document C) This is best shown when it quotes Willsie Lee McKinney,” Ten dollars per week was a good wage back in East Texas. So that one dollar per hour for domestic work interested me: and I know that many others had come earlier who were just like me.” The reason this document’s information comes above the others is that oil helped people of different races get more economically stable and earn themselves a better life than they had before the oil industry in Texas.

Most of us agree that education is an essential part of thriving in society, so you can imagine how the oil industry affected the way Texas colleges and universities are now. In the early 1900s, the University of Texas began to inspect the likelihood of oil and gas underneath the University’s land. The oil rigs they set up led to the most massive discovery of oil in the Texas Permian Basin and helped fund the university. (Document A) This is best exhibited when the document says,”...the University of Texas was on its way to becoming a very wealthy school…The income was further split in 1984 when the legislature voted to include all the institutions in the University of Texas System.” The oil industry helped the college become financially richer and help students and staff be more successfully educated in the university’s system.

According to worldpopulationreview.com, the divorce rate in Texas in 2022 is 11%, but from 1926 to 1932, the divorce rate in 3 oil-producing counties was 21%. In the counties of Winkler, Ector, and Midland divorce rates sky-rocketed, because the oil industry caused men to be away from their homes, and men were mostly in the towns, so they decided divorce would be better. (Document B) They chose the oil industry over their families. Under the document, it claims,” …In Winkler County in 1932, 11 people out of every 1,000 (men, women, and children) got divorced.” The thrill of the money and travel seemed more important to those in the oil industry, so the divorce rate got higher and higher. The oil industry, though it negatively, affected those families, it is a significant factor in the social change of our Texas history.

Overall, the oil industry impacted Texas’s society in both positive and negative ways, all of which have tied into our Texas heritage and history. It makes us connect with how the people affected by the oil industry truly felt, it makes them seem like actual people and not just dusty antiques that we don’t connect with; the oil industry truly matters to our history in this great state.