Texas Has A Poorly Educated Workforce

There is one thing about our modern society that is beyond debate -- that education is becoming ever more important for a person to make a decent living. This is reflected in the Labor Department's official unemployment statistics, where the unemployment rate is only slightly below 7% while the unemployment rate for those with a Bachelor's degree is around 3%.

That made me wonder -- just how is Texas doing? Does the state have an educated workforce? We know that Texas leads the nation in both the number of and percentage of workers who are working for minimum wage or less. Is that just due to corporate greed, or is the state complicit by not producing a highly educated workforce?

The chart above (made from Department of Education data) shows us the first problem. The state is only graduating about 78.9% of the students entering high school -- which means that 21.1% of those students don't get a high school education. This is inexcusable in a society where education is necessary to survive, and the state should be doing something about it. Unfortunately, our GOP state government has chosen instead to cut funding for schools, increase class sizes, and refused to adopt national standards for education. They seem to be happy to keep churning out low-wage workers for the corporations (who are more than happy to pay low wages for uneducated workers).

But the problem is worse than that. Even a high school education is not enough anymore to guarantee a person can make a livable wage in this society. It is now critical for a worker to increase his/her value by getting some kind of education beyond high school -- either a vocational certificate giving them a marketable skill or an education degree (Associate's, Bachelor's, Master's). So, how are the high school grads in Texas doing? Are most of them getting an advanced degree or certificate to increase their marketability?

Unfortunately NO, most of them are not doing that. The Texas Tribune (with help from the Houston Endowment) examined this question. It turns out that only 19% of the eighth-graders in 2001 have gone on to get any kind of degree or certificate beyond high school -- a truly pitiful number. This percentage is slowly climbing (up from 17.7% for 1997 eight-graders), but is still far too low.

And the state government has to accept some responsibility for this. By deregulating state college tuition rates, and then cutting funding for those colleges, they have been responsible for the huge increase in college costs -- costs that have priced many poor and even middle class students out of the ability to get a college education (unless they want to saddle themselves with a crushing debt).

Texas has too many low wage workers. The corporations have to take their share of the blame for being willing to pay less than a livable wage (and lobbying to keep that ability), but the government must share the blame -- by underfunding schools, oversizing classrooms, and pricing college out of reach. Texas government and the corporations seem to be in a conspiracy to keep Texas workers uneducated and underpaid.