El Paso educator promotes student career gateway via community colleges

Q. What makes community colleges different from four-year schools and how do the students differ?

There are a couple of things that are unique about the community college sector versus the university sector. First, we’re open admissions; we have a 100 percent acceptance rate.

We’ll see traditional students who have just graduated from high school and are starting their academic journeys. But we’ll also see many adult students who are coming back to retool and reskill. We have a senior adult learning program at El Paso Community College, and we’ve had students in their 80s. We cover a wide gamut.

The other piece is career and technical education. This is anything from welding to nursing. We don’t necessarily think of nursing and all the allied health programs as career and technical education programs, but they are.  

Q. Are community colleges a solution to the rising cost of higher education?

I think they’re part of the solution. This is my 31st year in higher education, and I really believe in what we do. My son is a freshman at El Paso Community College. He graduated high school this past year. I told Nathan, “I need to make sure that you’re serious about higher education. Therefore, you’re going to start with me. And if you show me that you’re serious, then I’ll let you transfer anywhere you’d like.”

Community colleges are obviously much more affordable. They’re the best value in higher education, from my perspective. I’ll give an example. The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is the most affordable of any of the University of Texas System schools. And our tuition and fees are roughly 40 percent of the tuition and fees at UTEP.

There are a lot of reasons for that. Community colleges are funded through three revenue streams: local taxes, state appropriations, and tuition and fees. The university sector is funded through two: state appropriations and tuition and fees.

At El Paso Community College, we have not raised tuition in five years. We have not raised taxes in six years. I think it’s important for community colleges to try their best to be as affordable as they possibly can.

Approximately 87 percent of our first-time-in-college students are on some type of aid, of which about 98 percent is Pell Grant [a federal program for students with financial need] or scholarship. The full Pell Grant is about $7,000, or about $3,500 a semester. Our full tuition and fees run about $1,600 [per semester], so a student will receive more of their Pell Grant than the college will.

Q. There are still kids for whom college is out of reach. In recent years, there have been Promise programs to help those students. How do they work?

Promise programs became popular probably a decade or two ago. The Promise Program provides free tuition and fees. It is really a last-dollar kind of program. What I mean by last dollar is that, when a student comes in, the school applies all of the aid the student receives. If they owe anything after that, then the Promise Program will cover that.

At El Paso Community College, we’re very fortunate. Back in 2021, as we were starting to come out of the pandemic, we got notice that the Legislature wanted to see us. I hadn’t traveled for 13 months. I got on a flight to Austin and went to the capitol. While I was in Austin, I got a cryptic email. It felt like a phishing email, but I decided to reply.

About three weeks later, $30 million had been wired into the college’s account. The email was from MacKenzie Scott’s group. [Scott is a philanthropist and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.] They had looked at the data, seen the kind of success rates that we had with the students we serve and were interested in funding us. I spoke to her and the group that represented her. We got the $30 million wired into our account with no strings attached.

The [El Paso Community College] board chose to create a scholarship program. It essentially functions much like a Promise Program. I just feel that no one values free; therefore, we call it a scholarship program so that students know that they have earned the scholarship.

Q. Usually people go back to school during recessions. The last recession, during the pandemic, was unusual because wages rose and there were a lot of job opportunities. What was the effect on enrollment?

We were in a very deep recession for a period of time, and we saw record enrollment among the community college sector in the summer of 2020, despite being almost completely online.

We went from about 85 percent of our classes being face-to-face up to March 13, 2020. Two weeks later, 92 percent of our courses were online. The career and technical [classes] still had to be face-to-face, because you can’t teach someone how to weld online. You can’t teach someone how to be a nurse online.

We saw enrollment growth in the summer of 2020. So we anticipated that, based on the economy, we would see a surge in the fall. Instead, the bottom fell out in fall 2020.

Remember that in the fall, everyone was still virtual, including the school districts. So we had a lot of older brothers and sisters who graduated from high school and said, “I really didn’t enjoy this online kind of learning, so I think I’m going to wait.” That really concerned me.

We saw about a third of first-time college students not enroll that fall. There were many reasons. Not everyone got to work remotely. There were some moms and dads who had to go to work. And they then said to their older children, “We need you to make sure that your younger brothers and sisters are online for schoolwork.”

Q. What kind of outcomes do you track and how are students doing?

We have 26,000 students; more than three-quarters are part-time students. Our graduation rates are based on first-time, full-time students in a fall semester; that includes about 2,100 students. We doubled our graduation rates prior to the pandemic. We were at about a 25 percent graduation rate, and we were also at about a 25 percent transfer rate [to four-year schools].

So what I would measure as a success rate was at close to 50 percent. That’s not anywhere where I’m satisfied, but we were headed in the right direction.

We didn’t feel the impact of the pandemic until 2022, with the class that entered in 2020. We saw some slight declines in their success rates. We’re now back on the rise.

Let me also share the raw number of graduates, because I think this is really important. When I started at El Paso Community College in August 2012, we had awarded about 50,000 degrees total. The college was created in 1969, and in 43 years, we awarded just over 50,000 degrees and certificates to our community.

The data and trend analysis told me that we should be able to double that [number] by 2025. We actually doubled it in December 2023. In the first 43 years of the institution, we awarded 50,000 degrees and in the last 11.5 years, we’ve awarded over 50,000 more degrees. From my perspective, the challenge becomes, how do we accelerate that?

How do we award the next 50,000 degrees in seven or eight years without sacrificing rigor or quality? The faculty at the college knows I’ll never sacrifice that. I’ve yet to see a student rise to low expectations, so we’re going to continue to increase the rigor and the quality of our programs. And we’re going to provide the support outside of the classroom that our students need to be successful in the classroom.

About 20 percent of our enrollment is in career and technical education. Many of these are selective programs. All of the nursing and allied health programs are selective programs. They have much higher success rates. You’re looking at 70, 80, 90 percent success rates depending on the program. We also measure them based on the wages that graduates earn once they go into the workforce.

These students do very well. We’re starting nurses in El Paso at $60,000–$70,000 a year after they earn a two-year credential. It’s a game changer for their families, in particular for those who are first-generation college students.

Q. What’s the biggest roadblock you face?

I know that not everyone in our communities will take advantage of higher education. But, from my perspective, they all should be prepared. They should all have that option to pursue higher education.

I’m a big fan of economists. One of my favorite economists is Anthony Carnevale, at Georgetown University, who runs the Center on Education and the Workforce. The center just put out a report saying that, by 2031, 72 percent of all jobs in the nation will require some postsecondary education or training.

And they also provided that in the state of Texas by 2031—in about six years—64 percent of all jobs will require some postsecondary education or training.

My question always is, whose kids don’t need to go to college? I certainly understand that they won’t all go to college, but they should all have the opportunity to go because nearly three-quarters of all jobs in this nation in six years will require some postsecondary education or training.

College is the clearest pathway to the middle class. When I started my higher education journey almost 40 years ago, my parents hadn’t had the opportunity to go to college. But they said, “We want you to go so you don’t have to work as hard as we do to make ends meet.”

I did what my parents told me to do. I struggled in undergraduate school, but I made it through, happened to get a job in the field and started to pursue graduate work. It's just so important. It’s a generation-changing kind of achievement.

I’m the oldest of four children. My younger siblings all have degrees. Two of them have master’s degrees. They’ve all done well. There’s an expectation that all of our children will go to college. It really is, from my perspective, the greatest avenue toward being able to get to the middle class and get out of poverty.

And Texas continues to grow. I’m a very proud Texan. I want to make sure that we’re prepared to continue what our legislators like to call the “Texas Miracle,” that our economy continues to move forward and continues to do great work. We produce about 14 percent of the nation’s high school graduates in the state of Texas.

I did an analysis. The national college-going rate [outside of Texas] was 72 percent. The state of Texas was a full 20 percentage points behind.

We’re competing with the world. That became a specific concern for me: How do we get more Texans to take advantage of higher education?

Q. What has been the impact of community college reform approved in the 2023 legislative session?

Our funding mechanism from the state of Texas had been in place since 1973. It was an enrollment kind of funding mechanism: How many students do you have? That’s what we're going to fund.

With the reform, we went to 95 percent of the funding based on outcomes. It’s really looking at the number of degrees and certificates of value, degrees and certificates in high-demand areas. Nursing is always one of those high-demand areas.

When I got to El Paso Community College [in 2012], it took a student 102 credit hours to receive an associate’s [two-year] degree; that was 102 hours to get a 60-hour degree. Today, it takes students 74 credit hours to get a 60-hour degree. So we’re not there yet, but we’ve made significant progress.

The reform also allowed community colleges to earn resources for noncredit training. We’ve heard a lot at the federal level about short-term credentials, a clustering of courses that lead to employment. We can now receive awards from the state for producing those. It also focused on institutional courses leading to certifications that our employers need. We’ve really ramped up.

I’m only going to provide training for fields that pay at least a living wage. I’m not going to chase the dollars from the state unless it’s going to be beneficial to my students and my community.