$33.2 million effort led by Elisa Villanueva Beard aims to help nine Gulf Coast community colleges turn classes into careers
When Elisa Villanueva Beard got to college, she nearly didn’t make it through her first year.
She graduated at the top of her high school class in McAllen, served as student body president, and once scored 42 points in a basketball game.
Then she arrived at DePauw University in Indiana, where only about three percent of students were Latino, and found herself waking at four in the morning to study and still getting grades she had never seen before.
She called home and told her mother she might not finish.
Her mother, who came from Mexico at 17 with an eighth-grade education, didn’t soften the blow.
Her daughter was not welcome home, she said, until she had her degree.
She finished.
More than three decades later, Villanueva Beard leads Houston Endowment, the foundation Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones started in 1937.
This week she stood in front of leaders from nine Gulf Coast community colleges and told them her story.
“For my family, that degree and education was not about status,” she said. “It was about freedom.”
The occasion was the launch of a three-year, $33.2 million initiative to help more students across Greater Houston earn credentials that lead to family-sustaining careers.
Of that, $32.2 million goes directly to the nine colleges over three years so they can carry out plans they designed themselves.
Another $1 million over 18 months goes to the Texas Success Center, part of the Texas Association of Community Colleges, to coordinate the effort and coach the colleges as they put their plans in place.
The colleges are Alvin College, Brazosport College, College of the Mainland, Galveston College, Houston City College, Lee College, Lone Star College System, San Jacinto College, and Wharton County Junior College.
The numbers explain the urgency.
Together these colleges enroll more than 195,000 students, and more than half of the region’s students who go on after high school choose a two-year college.
But only 37 percent of students who start at a community college in the region earn a credential, compared with 67 percent of those who start at a four-year school.
Of the region’s high school graduates from 2014 to 2016, only one in five was earning a living wage six years later.
Most of these students already carry a lot: four in five attend part-time, and three in five work at least 20 hours a week.
“We can’t ask them to work any harder.
They’ve been working hard their whole lives,” Villanueva Beard told the college leaders.
“And so we need to make sure that they have a path that works.”
The grants are the second stage of a plan that started a year ago, when Houston Endowment gave each college and the Texas Success Center a $500,000 planning grant.
That followed House Bill 8, the Texas law that changed community college funding so it rewards students finishing rather than simply enrolling.
Over the past year the colleges surveyed students, studied their own data, and drafted strategies with help from labor-market research and repeated rounds of feedback.
They arrived at similar priorities: clearer paths from classroom to career, stronger advising, and better data to spot students who are falling behind before they leave.
Villanueva Beard’s whole career has been about that kind of path.
She joined Teach For America in 1998 as a bilingual first- and second-grade teacher in Phoenix.
She then went home to lead the organization in the Rio Grande Valley, became its chief operating officer, and spent 12 years as CEO before moving to Houston Endowment this spring.
She credits a mentor who believed in her and a Rotary Club scholarship for getting her to college. She lives in Houston with her husband, Jeremy, and their four sons.
She made it clear to the college presidents that the foundation isn’t there to give orders.
“We do not have the answers. We know that. You all have the answers. You know your communities. You know your students,” she said.
Unlike many big metro areas, Greater Houston has no single community college system. The nine colleges govern themselves, so the initiative depends on them learning from one another.
Dr. Amanda Allen, president of Wharton County Junior College, put it plainly: “You’re going to look at my bicycle wheel, and I’m going to look at your Mack truck wheel, and we’re going to figure out how to get all these wheels rolling together.”
Villanueva Beard’s goal for the region is just as practical.
“Houston, as we all know, is not short of jobs,” she said.
“What we’re missing … is we need the rungs on the ladder.” She wants Houston to be the place young people choose to live after high school because it offers credentials that lead to a living wage.
She did not pretend it would be easy.
“That one in five number—that is reality for us. That can change,” she said.
“But it will not change unless we do this together.”