RIO GRANDE CITY, RGV - Dr. Shirley A. Reed, president of South Texas College, expressed her concern about a recent drop in enrollment for the college’s dual credit program in Starr County.
Speaking at STC’s Starr County Campus as part of the Starr County Industrial Foundation’s SCIFTalks, Reed discussed the college’s efforts to provide the community access to higher education. And, an 8 percent drop in enrollment for the school’s most successful program in this endeavor has Reed frustrated.
“Just because you have a college in your backyard doesn’t mean people take advantage of it. And, that’s what exasperates me,” said Reed.
Reed, who has headed STC since its founding, has strived to make the college more accessible to students for over 20 years. Under her direction, STC has grown to boast more students than UTRGV – about 32,000 – and is the largest higher educational institution south of San Antonio. Including students pursuing their GED and those in workforce training programs, the college serves about 57,000 students total.
The irony of the decline in dual credit enrollment is that Starr County residents have historically voted to raise property taxes to back STC, including the vote to establish the college in 1993. Hidalgo County, on the other hand, has repeatedly struck down similar measures to fund the school. Reed says they like the idea of educating the future workforce, but don’t want to pay for it. Now, dual credit courses are so popular in Hidalgo County, some school districts are resorting to lottery systems to fairly fill the limited class spots. Reed sees this as both a testimony to the college’s investment in access and a charge against school districts in the region.
“The choices that our school districts have to make are pretty tough. They only have so much money. They have to decide how are they going to spend their money, how they are going to invest their money, what’s important to them,” said Reed. “ … Those tough decisions have to be made, and I see decisions being made that I don’t think help improve access. Having the latest, biggest, state-of-the-art football scoreboard is not how you change the poverty and the unemployment and improve the quality of life in a community … Yes, athletics is important. A lot of things are important. But, you can’t do it at the price of academics.”
STC currently partners with 84 high schools in 23 school districts for the dual credit program, with an estimated 14,000 students participating each year. Since its inception, the university has waived over $180 million in tuition for families, but Reed says much more can be done.
“We have a long, long way to go, and we’re not going to get there unless we get greater participation from our public schools. We need more students in dual credit. We need more programs and partnerships with public schools,” said Reed. “We have academies – state of the art academies – for students that want to go [in]to medical school, engineering, computer science. And, yet our school districts are not participating in those programs, and I have to ask why.”
To demonstrate the necessity of expanding programs and public-school partnerships, Reed pointed to the statistics. Children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to drop out of high school than their non-disadvantaged peers, and only one in 10 will receive a higher education degree or certificate. There is also a direct relationship between a child’s performance in school and the educational level of their parents. At STC, 85 percent of the students are the first in their family to attend college. Of the students that start their collegiate career through the dual credit program, 40 percent do not continue after high school, despite the head start. Reed says that all of these outcomes can be attributed to the persistent poverty in the region.
“We know poverty. Families don’t have appropriate housing, so how does a college student study? They don’t have transportation. There could be hunger … If the parents never went to college or never graduated from high school, how can they provide direction to their children about the importance of going to college? And, how do you get on a pathway to going to college?” said Reed. “That is one of the major challenges we face.”
Rose Benavidez, president of the Starr County Industrial Foundation and a STC board member, said that investing in education goes beyond being able to help people earn a living wage. As head of the SCIF, she says that businesses looking to move into the Valley are more interested in whether there is a skilled and educated workforce from which to draw employees than anything else. Building up the next generation will be the key to bringing positive economic and social change to the area.
“One of the things that we struggle with is this dichotomy of attracting investment in new business and then still knowing that we live in a very overwhelmingly poverty-laden community,” said Benavidez. “And, so we’ve looked at data. We’ve looked at statistics, and we know that the only thing that works is creating a college-going culture. And, the way to do that, we have learned, … has been having students exposed to a college curriculum and a college experience at a early age because many of them are first generation, a significant of them don’t have the financial ability of looking at a university or college being at their grasp, and so we’re working really hard … trying to find a way to bridge that gap because we definitely need to get a collaboration going where this is not just an attempt to find students college credit, but to change their lives.”
Reed added, “If we don’t have access and opportunity, we’re not going to grow South Texas College. You’re not going to grow your community. You’re not going to realize the economic vitality you are hoping to achieve.”
Reed and Benavidez acknowledged that change will not be immediate, and that the socioeconomic factors are beyond one college’s ability to affect. However, they encouraged the community, as tax payers and voters, to pressure schools to open more opportunities to higher education for all students.
“We could all come together, sit down, decide on our goal – what is it that we want to accomplish – and each make a commitment to do our part,” said Reed. “We have fits and starts. We get all excited, and then we slow down. But, we’re not going to create change that way. We have to have a sustained commitment. We all have to buy in, and we all have to do our part.”
