Law & politics

• Bill Archer (attended), United States Congressman
• Mitch Bainwol, 1983, former chair, Republican National Committee
• Karen Padgett Davis, 1965, president of the Commonwealth Fund
• Alberto Gonzales, 1979, U.S. Attorney General
• Kate Goodwin, 2007, actress and daughter of Doris Kearns Goodwin
• William P. Hobby, Jr., Lieutenant Governor of Texas (1973-1991); former chancellor of the University of Houston system; former president and executive editor at The Houston Post
• John Kline, 1969, United States Congressman

Business

• Karl ten Brink, 1937, former president, Texaco
• George R. Brown, 1920, founder, Brown and Root; he built it into the world's largest construction and engineering giant
• John Doerr, 1973, influential venture capitalist at Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, CEO of Silicon Compilers and co-founder of the @Home Network, on the Board of Directors of Intuit, Amazon.com, PalmOne, Sun Microsystems, Google, and Segway, among others
• Dell Butcher, 1934, former president, American Commercial Lines
• Charles Duncan, 1947, former president, Coca-Cola; former Secretary of Energy under Jimmy Carter (1979 - 1981)
• Robert L. Clarke, 1963, Senior Partner of Bracewell & Patterson LLP; U.S. Comptroller of the Currency under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush; consultant to the World Bank
• Steve Jackson, 1974, founder of Steve Jackson Games
• Terry Koonce, 1960, president of ExxonMobil
• Burton McMurtry, 1956, influential venture capitalist in the Silicon Valley, helped fund such ventures as Microsoft, Sun, Compaq, Adaptec, Altera, and Synopsys .
• Hector Ruiz, 1972, President and CEO of AMD
• William Vaughn, former president, Eastman Kodak
• Sam Reed, CEO of Keebler Company
• Wylie Bernard Pieper, 1946, former president, Brown & Root
• Ken Kennedy, 1967, founder of Center for Research on Parallel Computation, the High Performance Fortran Forum; co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee with Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems
• James Treybig, 1963 and 1964, founder of Tandem Computers
• Charles Tandy, 1939, founder, chairman, president of Tandy Corporation

Athletics

• Lance Berkman, 1997, All-Star Major League baseball player for Houston Astros
• Fred Hansen, 1963, gold medalist in pole vault at 1964 Olympics
• Heather McDermid, 1991, silver medalist in women's 8 at 1996 Olympics
• Frank Beall Ryan, 1958, PhD 1965, NFL quarterback, textbook author, Yale athletic director, appeared on cover of Sports Illustrated, Jan. 4, 1965.

History, literature, journalism, art & music

• Ron Bozman, 1969, Executive Producer of Silence of the Lambs, Beloved, and Philadelphia
• William Broyles, Jr., Founder of Texas Monthly, former editor in chief at Newsweek and screenwriter of Apollo 13, Cast Away, Unfaithful
• Carol Flake, 1969, founding editor of reborn Vanity Fair
• John Graves, 1942, Nature Writer
• Mary Johnston, 1941, editor of Fortune, responsible for origination of the Fortune 500
• Larry McMurtry, 1960, Pulitzer Prize Winning Author
• S. I. Morris, 1935, architect of Astrodome, Houston Public Library, One Houston Center, and Wortham Theater
• LeAnne Schreiber, 1967, first woman sports editor of a major daily (New York Times)
• Vivian Vahlberg, 1970, first woman president of the National Press Club

Television & film

• Candace Bushnell (attended), author of Sex and the City
• Howard Hughes (attended), Writer/Director/Producer/Actor/Aviator/Billionaire
• Jamie Story, 2002, SRC, 2004 Miss Texas

Science & technology

• Dave Hyatt, browser developer at Netscape and Apple
• Jim Newman, 1982 and 1984, NASA Astronaut