Why Your College Tour Should Include A Technical School

With summer just around the corner, many families with rising high school seniors have college tours planned. Some might plan to include leafy liberal arts colleges or state flagship universities with 70,000-seat football stadiums. But I’d argue you should make stops at one or more technical colleges: schools which prepare students for careers in one of the skilled trades, often in two years or less.

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit one of the nation’s foremost technical schools: Texas State Technical College (TSTC). The eleven-campus system in the Lone Star State enrolls more than 10,000 students in associate degree and certificate programs in fields such as HVAC technology, culinary arts, and welding. My visit to one of TSTC’s campuses gave me a new appreciation for how rigorous and rewarding these fields can be—and how that rigor pays off for students when it comes time to start a career.

How a unique funding model powers TSTC’s success

TSTC initially caught my eye because of its unique funding model. Since 2011, the school’s appropriation from the state has depended entirely on what students earn after graduation. While many colleges shy away from accountability for their students’ outcomes, TSTC has embraced it. And it has paid off. After the school moved to the new funding model, it made major changes—including closing some programs—to ensure students found good jobs after graduation. The state appropriation rose from $76 million in 2015 to $124 million in 2022.

Starting salaries for TSTC graduates are competitive with four-year institutions in the state. According to data from the College Scorecard, the median graduate of a two-year degree program at TSTC starts off with a salary of $39,000—roughly equivalent to the median for all four-year institutions in Texas. In other words, TSTC delivers an equivalent economic return to a bachelor's degree for around half the time investment. Some individual programs fare even better.

Moreover, graduates’ salaries in most fields tend to grow over time as they gain greater experience and skills in the labor force. Within four years of graduation, the median salary for TSTC alumni is above $53,000.

My visit to TSTC

I visited one of TSTC’s satellite campuses in Hutto, about a half an hour north of Austin (the main campus is in Waco). On arriving, I noticed several school buses in the parking lot, which had brought prospective students from local high schools. It was a visit day, so instructors were prepared to show students what coursework would be like.

My tour began in the HVAC department. Immediately I noticed the lack of a sit-down classroom; instead, the HVAC lab was full of individual workstations for students. The HVAC department was one of the first at TSTC to adopt performance-based education. Under this pedagogical model, rather than coming to class at a set time, students learn the material at their own pace.

The HVAC lab is open daily from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., so students show up when their schedules permit. This model allows students from a variety of backgrounds to learn. In addition to many students of traditional age, I met a high school junior taking TSTC courses to jumpstart his associate degree and a gray-haired veteran making a career change after two decades in the military.

HVAC technology is an area with robust labor market demand. Despite high wages and a positive job outlook, instructor Jayme Palady told me his department can’t recruit enough students to satisfy local demand. In addition to the workforce needed to build and maintain HVAC systems in homes for Texas’ booming population, TSTC graduates also work on industrial cooling facilities for the advanced-manufacturing plants springing up all over the state.

The tour next moved to the precision machining shop, one of the technical trades’ fastest-evolving fields. This field is harder than you might expect. Instructor Apolinar Ruiz explained the process to create a single steel gear: students need a deep knowledge of chemistry and mathematics, and must be able to write hundreds of lines of code to program the gizmos that cut the gear from blocks of steel. Unlike many of my own college classes, this is certainly not a course where you can coast.

But there’s a large creative component, too. Ruiz told me that in their fourth semester, his students complete a project in which they design and build a working machine from scratch. Examples included a functioning clock and a miniature racecar. It was a strong rejoinder to those who claim the technical trades are all about practical skills with no creative outlet.

It goes both ways, though. TSTC also emphasizes bringing practical considerations into more creative fields, to ensure these pathways still pay off for students financially. In the culinary arts department, for instance, it’s mandatory for students to take business courses. The department’s capstone project sees students operate their own restaurant, which they run temporarily out of TSTC. (It’s a big hit with the local community.) Students get to create their own dishes, but they also need to procure the necessary ingredients and price out the menu to ensure ends meet.

Such business acumen gives students a leg up in the notoriously low-wage food service industry. Chasey Davis, a culinary arts instructor, told me she doesn’t let employers recruit on campus unless they pay more than $18 per hour.

My tour wrapped up in the welding department, where instructor Sam Flener gave me a crash course. Welding is one of those minute-to-learn, lifetime-to-master skills. It’s pretty simple to point the welding gun and press the trigger—which I did, to my own surprise and delight, without personal injury. But welding as a career would require far more effort: over a year of instruction, along with courses in math and chemistry.

The technical trades are hard—but rewarding

Two-year colleges are struggling with a major enrollment decline: a 13% drop in student numbers since 2019. But two-year schools with a vocational or technical focus like TSTC are doing well: enrollment is up 4% over the same period, meaning technical schools have fared even better than four-year colleges.

I asked provost Rob Wolaver whether many TSTC students transfer to four-year schools after they finish their studies. That happens, but he says that many students do just the reverse. Graduates of four-year colleges sometimes find their bachelor's degree doesn’t help them get a satisfactory job, and so they decide to learn a technical trade at TSTC instead. One student I spoke with could only find work as a waitress after earning her bachelor’s degree, so she came to TSTC to pursue an associate degree in industrial systems.

That’s not to say that TSTC is the right path for everyone. Just four in ten full-time, degree-seeking TSTC students finish their programs of study within 150% of expected time. Though TSTC has managed to make commendable headway on a challenge that beleaguers its entire sector (the national average completion rate for public two-year schools is 30%), those low completion rates mean many of students leave TSTC without earning the credential they had hoped for.

I asked about students who don’t complete. Mainly, the instructors told me, students simply stop showing up. It seems many students underestimate the rigor of the coursework and the difficulty of mastering a technical trade. There’s an unfair stereotype that technical schools are the next-best option for people who can’t succeed at a four-year institution. But technical schools are often just as demanding as traditional colleges, if not more so.

For those willing to put in the work, schools like TSTC can be a fantastic option. Students name better jobs and more money as their top reasons for pursuing postsecondary education, and technical schools can certainly offer a shorter path into a dependable middle-class job. I’d encourage all prospective college students and their parents to swing by a technical school to see what I saw, and consider whether this educational pathway could be right for them.