Aura Velasquez/THE RIDER
John Michael Austin, the student regent for the University of Texas System Board of Regents, spoke about offering medical Spanish in more schools during his Feb. 19 visit to the Edinburg campus.
Austin, who was appointed to a one-year term on June 1, 2023, represents the students at the board of regents meetings and speaks for their best interest.
He is a third-year medical student at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Science Center at San Antonio and has worked in the Texas House of Representatives as legislative director for the chairman of the House Insurance Committee, Rep. Tom Oliverson (R-Cypress). The committee has jurisdiction over matters on insurance and the insurance industry in Texas.
Austin’s experience has helped him prepare for his role as student regent.
“Working as a legislative staffer, you learn how things work through the Legislature, obviously,” he said. “As a student regent, that helps because one of the things that really stuck out … is that if you want to learn how things work, you need to learn how the money flows. So walking into the student regent job, I’ve been very interested to understand funding and how the schools of medicine are set up and fund themselves … and then just paying attention to how money gets spent on students.”
Austin said the five- and 10-year plans for some universities stood out to him since it is important to analyze them from the perspective of a student.
“So, the presidents will come and bring us their plans and talk about where they’re taking their universities,” Austin said. “… So, that’s been important. The other things are capital projects … the research buildings and making sure the students are going to have access to the research that’s going on there.”
He said tuition is one of the most important aspects to students in Texas and is happy that tuition costs were able to remain steady.
“We talked about tuition at my first meeting in August, so kind of really advocating for students,” Austin said. “Fortunately, the Legislature has been really generous this last biennium … and they kept all of the undergrad tuitions steady over the last few years.”
He explained keeping tuition low allows for more competitiveness in Texas since it could attract people.
“We can create a more competitive environment to keep great health-care workers here in Texas,” Austin said. “… We’re spending all this money to train physicians, and we do it better than almost any state in the country, but keeping tuition low is a way that we keep our best students here.”
He said affordability will always be a focus for students and the UT System does a good job at being affordable.
Austin said besides speaking up and voicing the students’ best interest during meetings, he also talks individually to schools to explain the advantages of keeping tuition low.
“It never hurts to have somebody come and talk about that from the student perspective,” he said.
Austin also wants to have further discussions about offering medical Spanish in more schools in the UT System.
“UTRGV is already a leader in that front and they already know how to do it,” he said. “And so, it’s like, ‘OK, if we got UTRGV down there in the Valley being super successful with this, we can just take your curriculum and plug it in.’”
