HARLINGEN — Is there a “stigma” attached to kids taking an educational pathway toward a technical career?
State Rep. Eddie Lucio III thinks there is, and he’s prepared to do something about it.
“Eight-two percent of our high school graduates will not have a certificate or license or degree within six years of graduation,” Lucio told the board. “Couple that with 80 percent of the new jobs in Texas requiring a certificate license or a degree.
“So we only have 18 percent of our population qualified to support 80 percent of the new job growth,” he added. “If you look at San Antonio, for example, their Toyota plant is a thousand skilled workers deficient in being at full capacity of what they need to be.”
Lucio was addressing the Har-lingen Eco-nomic Dev-elopment Corp., and at his urging the board last week committed up to $30,000 to join McAllen, Pharr, Mission and Brownsville to establish a review of the state of technical education at high schools, community colleges and universities in the Valley.
The study will be a partnership with the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service which will canvass the region with the dual purpose of establishing strengths and weaknesses among schools as well as marketing technical education to students, parents and counselors.
“One of the things I identified as a big problem in technical education is the stigma that parents, teachers and students still have with the technical pathway,” Lucio told the board. “In my dad’s generation everyone was going to be a plumber or welder or electrician.
“And then we said — no! We need to have everybody go to college, and we overcorrected. … We need to be somewhere in the middle,” he said.
Lucio said manufacturing jobs will be there for the taking as many companies begin “reshoring” plants from Asia back to North America due to financial advantages here. But, he said, for the Valley to benefit, students need a technical training pathway now to land the jobs of the future.
“The cost savings that we used to associate with manufacturing in China are no longer as prevalent,” Lucio said. “So there’s this reshoring that is happening right now.”
The $150,000 commitment from the five Valley cities will be used as matching funds to obtain an additional $350,000 grant from the federal Economic Development Administration.
Lupita Gutierrez-Garza, chair of the HEDC, asked Lucio if this technical education study had been performed elsewhere and whether the Valley project could benefit from work already done.
Lucio said studies such as this one have been made in the medical and nursing fields, but none to his knowledge has attempted to establish the same in the field of technical education as it pertains to manufacturing.
Lucio said once the funding is in place, the study would take two years to complete.
“I don’t think it’s a waste of money,” said board member Dr. Gilbert Leal, a longtime educator at Texas State Technical College.
“The only way we’re going to attract good-paying jobs down here is if we have the skilled workforce,” he said.
Lucio said the study will be used to market the Valley to manufacturers as well as to present to his fellow lawmakers in Austin when lobbying for the region.
“I want to have a single document that I can go to Austin with and say, ‘This will tell you with certainty where we are in terms of our technical education, and where we can be,’” Lucio said.
