I am quite surprised this bit of news hasn’t gained much traction in national media outlets, but get a load of this flash.

The University of Texas has just announced that any student who enrolls at the system’s flagship campus in Austin gets his or her tuition paid in full if the student comes from a family earning $65,000 or less annually.

This a huge! The UT System Board of Regents voted to spring $160 million from the system’s endowment to help cover the cost of tuition for about 8,600 undergraduate students at UT-Austin.

While many Democratic primary presidential candidates have talked about making public college education free for all students, the University of Texas System is moving ahead with a bold initiative of its own toward that end.

The Texas Tribune reports: “Our main focus at the UT system is our students. That’s it, that’s what we’re in the business for is to provide an affordable, accessible education for our students,” board chair Kevin Eltife said … after the vote. “We all know the struggles that hardworking families are having putting  their kids through school. What we’ve done here is repurposed an endowment into another endowment that will provide tuition assistance to a lot of the working families of Texas.”

This is huge news coming from one of the country’s most well-known, highly regarded and wealthiest public universities.

I am quite certain a lot of families throughout the state are full of smiling faces as their young people prepare for the upcoming academic year.

The endowment funds won’t pay for all students, to be sure. It merely helps those students whose parents need a hand.

Well done, UT regents.