Alamo Colleges District aims to nearly double the number of students in its workforce programs from 8,000 to 15,000 over the next five years, part of an expanded commitment to workforce development, Chancellor Mike Flores said Tuesday.
That goal was one of several “moonshot milestones” Flores said the community college district hopes to achieve by 2028, along with dramatically expanding other workforce programs.
Doing so could bring the Alamo Colleges more state funding, thanks to a new “outcomes-based” approach that ties funding to measurable student-focused results like obtaining credentials in high-demand areas and transferring to four-year institutions.
Flores described the push as one of the keys to ending the intergenerational poverty that plagues San Antonio during his annual State of the District address, held Tuesday at the Betty Kelso Center at the San Antonio Botanical Garden. Flores also moderated a “fireside chat” with Harrison Keller, the Commissioner of Higher Education and CEO of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.
Keller, too, spoke of the need for community colleges to train Texans for the jobs of today and tomorrow.
“This isn’t really just about higher education,” Keller said. “This is about jobs and economic opportunities. It’s about what kind of Texas we want to live in.”
Flores said the Alamo Colleges’ five-year goal to increase its workforce enrollment will come through the development of “over 30 new high-wage, high-demand programs, 59 new certificate and skills awards.”
Seventeen of those programs will be available in fall 2024, mainly in the high-demand areas of health care, advanced manufacturing, data science and artificial intelligence, and two will train future power line workers — another in-demand skill.
By the end of 2024, the district will offer three bachelor’s degrees, in cloud computing, operations management and cybersecurity, with a fifth under development.
In 2021, San Antonio College launched the district’s first bachelor of science in nursing degree, joining the district’s licensed vocational and associates degrees in nursing. All three programs are on track to graduate 243 students in 2024, growing annually to an estimated 1,578 graduates in 2028. The Alamo Colleges District is aiming to produce 4,000 nursing graduates in the same five-year timeframe as its other moonshot goals, Flores said.
During the fireside chat, Keller pointed out that nearly 4 million Texans have some college education, but no degree or credential, while another 2 million don’t have a high school diploma or equivalent.
In an effort to help this population succeed, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board is partnering with community colleges to develop a high school diploma that would be issued by community colleges to students enrolled in workforce certificate programs who don’t already have diplomas.
For that effort, Keller said the board sought to partner with colleges “that can be leaders in developing and deploying this new diploma,” so he called Flores.
“Before I finished my pitch, Mike had already said, ‘We’re in.'”
One-fifth of San Antonians and area residents don’t have diplomas or the equivalent, Flores said, “so we definitely see the need for providing that.”
Keller acknowledged the challenge communities face in preparing their populations for 21st-century jobs. He said CEOs tell him that their companies’ workforce needs “are changing faster than they ever anticipated, especially because of how fast artificial intelligence is advancing.” He also called for “dramatically escalating” the number of “work-based learning opportunities for students” — such as internships and apprenticeships.
San Antonio is attempting to fill those pipelines through Ready to Work, the city’s $200 million taxpayer-funded workforce development program, of which the Alamo Colleges is one of four main partners. In addition to covering the cost of training programs for in-demand jobs, Ready to Work is also working to create and expand apprenticeships and high school internship programs, also known as “pre-apprenticeships,” with the help of a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.
Ready to Work has also been developing two work-based learning programs that will award businesses up to $150,000 to participate; the money is intended to defray the cost of “upskilling” existing and new employees. It will seek City Council approval to award those grants likely next month.
Flores noted that jobs in health care, IT and manufacturing average between $51,000 and $53,000 annually three years after graduation, a strong return on the investment of community college.
Keller said that in the long term, Texas still faces challenges around reducing the financial barriers to higher eduction, but said he believed “it’s within our grasp” to do so. One avenue to overcoming those barriers is so-called “promise” programs, like Alamo Promise, which began in 2019 as an initiative to cover tuition and fees for high school graduates at 25 schools in San Antonio.
The program has expanded each year since, with nearly 4,000 students participating in the third year of the program. Last year, Alamo Promise became available for any high school graduate in Bexar County, including homeschooled students.
Education reporter Isaac Windes contributed to this report.
