True college is not for everyone so gotta do what's right for your future

[theking]

These rural Texans opted out of a degree. The community college down the street wants them back.

To survive, Texas community colleges have to prove their worth. But residents of this rural north Texas town are questioning what's right for them.


The sun was not out yet but, across the street from the town’s community college, order numbers were already piling in on the display monitor above Nikki Murray. The McDonald’s cashier slipped in one-liners with waiting customers while she wrapped their Egg McMuffin breakfast sandwiches. Her grin was contagious.

She tried to ignore how her back hurt. Work at the fast food chain can get exhausting — there is always another customer ready to order or another table to wipe down. She wouldn’t get a break until she clocked out.

Murray, who makes $10 an hour, often wonders if she would be in a better place if she’d finished college.

In the early 2000s, she spent her days in the same part of town, enrolled at Vernon College. Murray, now 49, knew a degree meant she could make more money for her kids, but the stress and demands of family life weighed too heavily on her, and she dropped out.

Two miles east, off Vernon’s main retail street, Krystal Fancher Smith worked out of her mother’s desk, in her mother's leather chair. She has been training for nine years to take over her family’s business, Fancher Electric.

Smith, 41, also went to Vernon College for a while and was 10 credit hours short of graduation. The classroom was never a good fit for her, she said, and somewhere along the way, college stopped feeling worth the effort. She dropped out and has no plans of going back.

Murray and Smith, both lifelong Vernon residents, represent the kind of students that community colleges in Texas and across the country have struggled to keep. The two entered Vernon College young, wide-eyed and enticed by higher education’s promise to pave a path to a better life. But Murray and Smith grew and changed, their plans shifted with them and, for different reasons, the idea of college lost its luster.

In this low-income, rural northwest Texas town on the border with Oklahoma, most residents don’t have a college degree and say they don’t need one to make a decent living wage. The town’s bacon production plant and hospital both hire young people right out of high school.

Here and across the nation, young people and their families have become increasingly skeptical of the benefits of college as they face pressure to enter the workforce to make money right away. For students who do enroll in college, barriers including high costs and family obligations can get in the way of finishing, putting them in debt without any of the benefits.

“The purpose of community college is for someone to improve their life … We provide that opportunity,” said Dusty Johnston, the president of the college. “Not everybody is ready to take advantage of that opportunity.”

This skepticism has become an existential challenge for many Texas community colleges. Drops in enrollment numbers after the pandemic meant community colleges received less state funding, threatening their operations. Vernon College lost one in four of its students, or about 800 students, one of the largest declines in the state.

Community colleges such as Vernon were thrown a temporary lifeline when state lawmakers changed the funding formula this year to move away from an emphasis on enrollment. Colleges are now funded based on student outcomes.

Schools like Vernon College must still reexamine their recruiting tactics and the programs they offer if they want more students to enroll and graduate. To survive in the long run, they need to prove their relevance to the people they mean to serve.