Highlights from our interview with Ray Martinez, President & CEO of the Texas Association of Community Colleges.

Lone Star Standard: What is TACC and what does the organization do for its members? 

Martinez: That’s the focus of what we do. The TACC is an umbrella organization that also encompasses an association representing our trustees in regions across the state that govern our community colleges. So our 50 community colleges have an elected governing board. The size of the governing board varies from college to college and is usually 7 to 9 elected officials that get elected to be trustees. 

Some of our colleges call their governing board members regents. So either a trustee or regent that is elected to a four year term or something like that. And they then provide the governance, oversight of the community colleges. So within TACC, we have an association that is part of our association that helps to get the perspective and information out to our governing board members, trustees and regents across the state. Overall, there’s something like 530 elected regents or trustees that govern our community colleges across the state. TACC is the umbrella organization or trustees association. 

Then the other entity that exists within TACC is what we call our Texas Success Center which has been around for a little over a decade. What we do there is work directly with practitioners. So we have folks that help to put strategies and policies in place that help to improve student success. What we don’t want to happen is for students to enroll in a community college and swirl around not knowing exactly what they want to do and accumulate college credits that may or may not actually mean something toward a credential down the road. It’s okay for students to come in not knowing what they want to do. That’s pretty standard. I’ve got two kids in college right now. Both of them are still trying to find their way through their experience. That’s okay. 

But we don’t want students to just pay money and collect college credits that may not mean something toward the credential that they want to obtain or decide to obtain. Our Student Success Center works with academic advisors, coaches on campuses, faculty members, and our administrators to put what are called Guided Pathways in place to make sure that we light the runway for whatever path is chosen by a student.  It may be a workforce education credential. It may be an academic credential. We want to light up the pathway for them so that they know the courses that they need to take to be able to achieve that particular credential. 

Lone Star Standard: What is the role of community colleges in Texas? 

Martinez: The second thing that’s worth emphasizing is the academic degree and workforce education credentials. So the role of community colleges is to ensure that we offer excellent quality education, opportunities for those students who aspire to transfer to another university or maybe just aspire to achieve an associate level degree and then go to work, for example, in the nursing industry or in the medical industry in some capacity. 

All of that is part of what community colleges do. And it’s a big part of what we do. But we’re also about workforce development. Many of the credentials that we offer will be workforce education credentials level one, level two certificates. In other words, these are credentials  where a student does not need to stay and complete 60 semester credit hours which is required for an associate degree. It may be more like 45 semester credit hours to achieve a level one certificate or a level two certificate in automotive technician or in HVAC training or something in the healthcare industry. Those are workforce education credentials that are very valuable that lead to, in many cases, high-paying jobs.

Good, strong economic mobility over the course of a person’s career is also part of what we do as community colleges. So the second is academic and workforce education credentials. The third is around what we do increasingly for dual credit enrollment. We’ve seen a large upswing in enrollment over the past decade, in particular, in dual credit enrollment. Some states refer to it as just dual enrollment. We call it dual credit enrollment here. And that is students who are still in high school, but who are also dual enrolled as a student at a community college, taking 1 or 2 courses that will count toward their community college experience if they matriculate into a community college or even a four year college. 

Those college credits are transferable usually. So, increasingly, we have a strong footprint across the state of Texas in dual credit enrollment. In fact, recent statistics I’ve seen show that a little more than 90% of all dual credit offered in the state of Texas emanates from a community college. So, it’s either community college that has faculty at a high school that’s offering those dual credit courses or it’s a community college that actually has physical space at their campus and high school students come on a regular basis to the campus to take dual credit courses on the college campus. 

Lone Star Standard: How does the new outcomes-based funding work for community colleges? 

Martinez: The outcomes are measured through, instead of enrollment, now we look at performance and outcomes and it’s the following. It is the conferring of credentials of value and a credential of value is a term-of-art that is defined by the Coordinating Board. We don’t define that. It is up to the state agency that oversees higher education to define a credential of value.

The basic approach  is, all right, let’s look at a level one certificate in automotive technician. That certificate, what is the value of that credential over a three, five, and ten year period. They take into consideration what the student paid to obtain the credential and compare it to a student that is just a high school graduate who does not have that credential. And then they look over a three, five, and ten year period at the wage outcomes for those two particular individuals if you will. If the wage data shows that credential leads to a higher wage on average over a three, five, and ten year period than it is a credential of value, because you’re gaining economically from that credential. You are able to make more money on a year-to-year basis because you obtained that credential than somebody without that credential that has just a typical high school diploma. 

So, first is credential of value as defined by the Coordinating Board. The second metric that is fundable is transfer. For every student that enrolls in a community college and does at least 15 semester credit hours at the community college and then transfers to our public four-year universities in Texas, that is a fundable outcome for the community college. You got them 15 semester credit hours, you got them successfully transferred over to a public four-year university here in Texas, that becomes fundable. 

So that’s the second credential. The value is first. And in fact, credential value for a high demand field gets a slightly higher payout under this formula because we know we need more STEM focused careers. For example, we need more nurses in Texas. So the more we do in high demand careers, the more we get paid under the credentials of value, fundable outcomes. 

 

Ray Martinez is the President and CEO of the Texas Association of Community Colleges, providing leadership to advance state policy, institutional practices and research in support of Texas Community Colleges. Ray discusses the role that community colleges play in Texas Higher Ed, workforce alignment in Texas' Building a Talent Strong Texas plan, changing the funding mechanism for community colleges, and more.

This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Listen to the full discussion here: https://texas-talks.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-41-ray-martinez.