Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center

Lubbock won its long campaign for a medical school in May 1969, when Governor Preston Smith signed legislation creating one under Texas Technological College; within months the college had become Texas Tech University, and the new school carried the university's name. Its purpose was to ease a severe shortage of doctors across West Texas, where at the time there was roughly one physician for every 1,300 residents. Sixty-one students, most of them first-year and the rest transferring in as juniors, started classes in August 1972, and the first M.D. degrees were conferred less than two years later, in May 1974. Rather than concentrate everything in Lubbock, the school built regional academic health centers in Amarillo, El Paso and Odessa so that students could finish their clinical training closer to the communities they would serve. By 1979 its scope had grown enough that it took the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center name, and schools of nursing (first students in 1981), allied health (1983) and pharmacy (organized in the mid-1990s and based in Amarillo) followed. The El Paso branch grew into its own university, TTUHSC El Paso, in 2013, while the Lubbock-based center kept expanding with campuses in Abilene, Dallas and the Permian Basin. Today it is one of the Texas Tech University System's five universities, having awarded thousands of medical degrees and anchoring rural health-care education across more than 100 West Texas counties.

Sources: en.wikipedia.orgtshaonline.org