Is a college degree worth it? This question has pervaded conversations from family dining tables to corporate board rooms to political pulpits for quite awhile in the United States. However, topics such as student loan forgiveness, state support for public institutions, higher costs of attendance, and return-on-investment have increasingly amplified the asking of this question…
With the academic calendar signaling the start of a new school year, this blog post will serve as the last installment of our summer series on community colleges in Texas. Our previous posts looked at enrollment trends at community colleges, including the importance of dual credit in Texas, as well as challenges facing transfer students seeking to…
In our previous blog post, we reviewed statewide trends related to transfer cohorts from two-year to four-year institutions, as approximately one-third of academic majors starting at community colleges transfer to public universities in Texas within 6 years of first-time enrollment. This blog post will look at “enrollment funnel” data, tracking community college transfer students from…
One of the most important metrics for tracking the success of public community colleges in Texas is the number of students who start at two-year institutions and transfer to public universities. According to the Community College “Student Success Funding” formula that was directed by the Texas legislature, transfers carry the second-highest weight (3.0) in the…
One of the most prolific trends in the past 20 years has been the exponential growth of dual credit students who are earning college-level credits while still attending high school. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) reported that more than 186,000 students were officially enrolled in dual credit courses across all institutions in Texas…
Recently, the National Student Clearinghouse’s (NSC) Research Center published its “Current Term Enrollment Estimates” for spring 2023. Across all higher education sectors, total enrollment nationally fell by 0.5% from spring 2022 to spring 2023. Public 4-year institutions saw a 0.8% decline in enrollments from spring 2022 to 2023, while public 2-year institutions saw a 0.5%…
In the past two blog posts, we have looked at data that have painted the state of Texas in a very good light in terms of overall rankings for top states for business and a quality workforce. One of the areas in which Texas has not fared well has been in the “Quality of Life”…
The connection between a quality workforce and the success of a state is unquestioned. In our previous blog post, we introduced America’s Top States for Business study from 2022. Throughout the 14 years of the CNBC study, Texas has had the best average ranking of 2.2 across all years in the data. However, in the last…
As a follow-up to our previous blog post looking at broad trends in educational attainment across the United States, we wanted to zoom into the state of Texas specifically to see how educational attainment levels have changed over time. Using the American Community Survey (ACS) data, the visualizations below show data from two perspectives: the counties within 50…