Texas has big goals for college completion. In places like the Coastal Bend, how to get there is still murky.

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MATHIS — This summer, Lisa Lopez was selling discount phones at the Cricket store when a friend forwarded her a Facebook ad for “Continuing Education.” It was paid for by a nonprofit group neither of them had ever heard of.

At first, she was skeptical. Her career path had already been full of twists and turns. At 33, she had doubts about whether more education could help.

“I’ve always felt like I don’t have enough time, or resources, to go back to school,” she said.

Like her, few adults have a college degree in these largely rural and mostly Hispanic counties of Texas’ Coastal Bend. That has consequences for the local economy and residents’ earning power. The demand for jobs like nursing and manufacturing has surged but few here have the credentials necessary to fill them.

And this isn’t just an issue in the Coastal Bend. Across Texas, the need to better align education and training after high school with a changing workforce has been a key focus of public policy. The state, for example, has set goals for increasing the percentage of Texans with a postsecondary credential to 60% by 2030 and tied community college funding to outcomes like awarding credentials in high-demand fields and positioning graduates for well-paying jobs.

There’s a long way to go, especially for the state’s Hispanic population. About a quarter of Hispanic adults in Texas have an associate’s degree or higher, compared with about 40% of Black adults and more than half of white adults.

In Lopez’s hometown, completion rates fall well below Texas and national averages. Less than 10% of all adults in Mathis have an associate’s degree or higher.

Many rural Texans don’t have the information they need to know what skills are required to get good jobs, or what training they need to build a lasting career without leaving their community. It’s a problem that Texas leaders and education officials have acknowledged as a barrier to reaching their postsecondary goals for the state.

“Because of distance and cost, college admissions offices aren’t as present in small towns and rural communities, and students in those areas are less likely to receive admissions and financial aid information or attend recruitment events on campuses,” read a University of Texas at Austin announcement in July saying it had received national funding to address some of those information gaps.

The issue could also have major implications for the state’s workforce goals. Half of all Texans have no education beyond high school, yet 90% of Texas jobs advertised as “requiring only a high school diploma or less” actually require additional postsecondary training, according to the nonprofit public policy research organization Texas 2036.

Research from the University of Texas Education Resource Center suggests that part of the reason students from rural communities in Texas are less likely than their peers elsewhere to enroll in college is because they have fewer local resources and class options available to prepare them for life after high school.

That certainly was the case for Lopez when she was in high school. She had few people she could turn to or guides to consult while trying to decide what to do with her life. Her dad, a grocery store clerk with a high school education, wasn’t familiar with college applications or costs. Her mom, a cafeteria worker who had dropped out of college during her first semester, couldn’t help either.

While her parents worked, Lopez helped raise her younger brother. By her senior year, she dropped out. When she earned her GED later that year, she briefly considered community college but decided she didn’t have the time or money to go.

So Lopez spent her twenties bouncing around, working at restaurants, a dollar store, a gas station, a newspaper office, a library and, during the pandemic, UberEats.

When she saw the ad this summer inviting her to take the next step in her education, she wondered if, maybe, going back to school could give her the stability she had been missing for so long.

Unanswered questions

Open Campus interviewed dozens of people across the Coastal Bend region about what would have helped them navigate life after high school. Many shared stories like Lopez’s.

Some get much of their career information from YouTube and TikTok, scrolling through “day in the life” videos about the nuances of whatever jobs they are dreaming of. Many wish they knew more about the nitty gritty stuff — not just how to score well on a test or pass a class, but also how to rent an apartment, file taxes and set a budget that allows them to pay bills. Others weren’t sure how to justify the cost of college or how more time in a classroom would help them get where they wanted.

Lopez’s brother, Cristan, now a high-school senior, said he gets a lot of unsolicited messages from colleges and his phone regularly buzzes with texts from his high school guidance counselors.

But for all the noise, he lacked answers to basic questions that could help him understand whether college was for him.

“It feels like I am getting a sales pitch,” he said. “I’d like to have more financial information. They don’t really touch on that stuff in school.”

How much, for example, would he have to pay out of pocket, and how much could he earn by going? What is rent like near campus, and what part-time jobs are available for students trying to make ends meet?

Some sources offer answers to these questions. The federal government’s College Navigator, for example, allows people to look up estimated student expenses like housing, food and books at different colleges and to see each college’s average net price by income.

Texas has a higher education database that provides information about college debt and the value of various degrees. Many colleges offer price calculators themselves. And housing costs are searchable on real estate websites like Zillow.

But students often are unaware of what is available to them and don’t know how to cobble that disparate information together.

And listening to his classmates, Cristan felt like everybody was asking similar questions. Costs and financial aid are often critical considerations for would-be college students, especially here in Mathis, where the median household income is around $31,000, less than half the state’s median income of nearly $76,000.

Helping train the region

Those types of questions and challenges are exactly what a coalition of nonprofits, educational institutions and businesses have been trying to solve the last few years.

The Facebook ad Lopez’s friend shared with her came from that coalition, called UpSkill Coastal Bend. It was founded in 2018 to better train the workforce for new high-demand jobs, prompted by a resurgence in the energy, petrochemicals, manufacturing and construction sectors in the region. Suddenly, employers were desperately searching for homegrown talent.

That search has stretched further out as workforce needs persist. In 2022, UpSkill added staff to share information about education and career opportunities to Coastal Bend residents in the region’s three most remote counties: Jim Wells, Duval and Brooks. Those last two counties were in particular financial straits, with 40% living in poverty — and all three counties saw 16 percent or less of their residents earn a degree or credential after high school.

Local and regional organizations like UpSkill have been using their collective resources and expertise to help fill workforce gaps across Texas for years. Now the state is pitching in, with those workforce needs motivating state lawmakers to pass Texas House Bill 8 last year, a $683 million investment that rewards community colleges that produce better career outcomes with more funding.

UpSkill has tried a range of approaches over the last few years to make a difference in Coastal Bend counties. In Duval, the group persuaded the local judge to let people convicted of minor offenses take adult education classes in exchange for reduced sentences. In Brooks, it helped turn a shuttered Dollar Store into an economic incubator, creating a space for students and entrepreneurs to work collaboratively in a county that otherwise has few public spaces available to them.

Postsecondary institutions are more incentivized to work with groups like Workforce Solutions Coastal Bend and UpSkill since the passage of Texas House Bill 8 in 2023, a $683 million investment that rewards community colleges that produce better career outcomes with more funding. In Falfurrias, UpSkill Coastal Bend worked with the city council to transform a shuttered Dollar Store into an economic development incubator, creating a central space for small businesses and community leaders to come together. Credit: Nick Fouriezos/Open Campus

One consistent factor has been the collective’s reliance on “navigators,” on-the-ground career coordinators who support students in different ways. They do everything from giving career advice at the local housing authority to handing out free school supplies at back-to-school fairs. They tend to come from diverse backgrounds, like David Salinas, a former car salesman and pawn shop manager, or Aaron Trevino, a city alderman whose hometown of Falfurrias is known for its famed tribal healer and an infamous border control checkpoint.

When Lopez responded to the ad from UpSkill Coastal Bend, she soon received a call from Armando Castellano, a navigator who serves seven counties from his office in Mathis. Over months of texts and calls, they crafted a plan for Lopez’s post-secondary journey, together.

“I was blowing up Armando’s phone every day,” Lopez said.

Originally, Lopez wanted to do cosmetology, then changed her mind after shadowing a friend who did nails. Castellano suggested a six-week phlebotomy certificate course at Coastal Bend College. Sticking others to draw their blood somehow stuck, even though she hates needles herself.

“It’s harder for me to drop out now because people are telling me what I need to do and checking up on me,” she said.

Next, she said, she wants to enroll in a program to become a medical assistant. The path may be tricky, but Texas could use her. The registered nurse vacancy rate in Texas has struggled to recover since it nearly tripled during the COVID-19 pandemic. Medical assistants became the hardest position to recruit, according to a 2021 national poll of medical practices by the Medical Group Management Association.

For Lopez, being a medical assistant would mean potential earnings of up to $39,000, according to Indeed.com. That’s more than double the median non-family household income in Mathis of under $19,000, though still low when compared with the median across Texas, which is $46,000.

Still, after more than a dozen years of job hopping just to survive, Lopez finally felt like she had found a career.

A journey together

As Lopez pursues new career options, her brother Cristan is trying to sort out his future after high school.

A passionate cook, he told her he wanted to leave the state and go to culinary school. Lopez wasn’t so sure.

“He would tell me, ‘Oh, I saw this video,’ and suddenly he would be talking about culinary schools in New York or California,” she said. “I’m like, “OK, well, let’s just reel it in a bit. Let’s start small.”

Looking back, Lopez wished the adults in her life had given her more practical advice about her options after high school. She hopes she can give better guidance to Cristan now that they are both applying for postsecondary programs this fall.

“I’ve already told him that as soon as applications are open, we’ll do them together, because I had to learn all that stuff by myself,’” she said.

As he gets further into his senior year, Cristan is increasingly turning his attention closer to home as he debates whether to go to college at all.

“I’m not sure I can afford it. I may want to take a break and just try to work for a year,” he said.

He is considering attending the Culinary Institute of America, and is looking into housing options near its San Antonio campus. He is also considering Del Mar College, a community college half an hour away. He visited last year and liked that it had an entire building with modern equipment dedicated to its culinary program.

Sure, it’s not in some exciting new place far away. But it could help him realize his dream of attending college with his sister, who is considering applying to Del Mar’s medical assistant program.

“Her journey definitely pushed me more to get through high school and pursue college. It’s been inspirational,” Cristan said.

The motivation is mutual, Lopez said.

“I’m doing this for my brother as much as me,” she said. “I want to prove to him that he can do it, too.”

Nick Fouriezos reports on the role of college in rural America for Open Campus, which partners with The Texas Tribune on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: Facebook, Texas 2036 and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.