Not a subscriber? Buy a Day Pass or just this story using our new Digital Wallet
Fort Worth, TX (Fort Worth Report)
As Tarrant County lawmakers prepare to kick off the Texas legislative session Jan. 14, Fort Worth Report journalists are exploring the policies set to be reshaped in Austin. Click here for more legislative coverage.
Two years ago, legislators transformed the way that Texas community colleges are funded. With the 89th Legislature set to convene Jan. 14, higher education experts expect lawmakers to make adjustments to House Bill 8, the legislation that overhauled the system.
"HB 8 really was a drastic change for community colleges. The previous formula was tied to enrollment and was pretty unstable, particularly with declining enrollment in rural colleges," said Grace Atkins, a policy adviser with Texas 2036, a nonpartisan public policy organization. "HB 8 moved to an almost entirely outcomes-based formula."
Hundreds of millions of dollars are set aside by the state each year to fund rewards for community colleges based on student outcomes.
Community colleges across the state can earn additional funding for students who attain a degree in a high-demand field or where workers with that degree earn higher wages than workers with only a high school diploma. Additional funding is also linked to transferring to a public four-year university and high school students who complete at least 15 hours of college credit in a specific academic or workforce program.
Atkins said that one proposal in the next legislative session would count transfers to private four-year universities as a reward. Right now, only transfers to public universities count. Another proposal would ensure that funding for the law and its incentives are funded each year.
"The formula itself is not automatic, in the sense that there's not a base level amount that the Legislature allocates automatically every session," said Atkins. "This is something that the Legislature will need to continue to come back and fund every session."
Tarrant County College received nearly $64 million in outcomes-based state funding for fiscal year 2024 due to House Bill 8. The allocation for fiscal year 2025 dipped down a few million to around $59.6 million, according to state data.
In most performance measures, the college's funding allocation decreased in fiscal year 2025 when compared to the previous year. The most significant decrease was for transfers to a four-year institution. In fiscal year 2024, allocation was around $21.2 million while in fiscal year 2025, it decreased to $15.3 million -- a nearly $6 million drop. There was around a $3 million decrease in funding, based on the degrees that TCC students were earning.
Rewards for students attaining dual credit shot up, from $4.3 million in fiscal year 2024 to $9.1 million in fiscal year 2025, or a nearly $5 million increase. A TCC spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on how the new funding model has affected the college system, which enrolls over 47,000 students across six campuses.
Also offered in the state law is free tuition to low-income high school students who are taking dual-credit classes. After the law's passage, Tarrant County College extended free tuition to all dual-credit high school students in August 2023.
"Moving forward, we anticipate an increase in the number of high school students taking advantage of educational opportunities at TCC," Elva LeBlanc, Tarrant County College chancellor, said at the time. "The board's decision to waive dual credit is a bold move that is beneficial to the entire community."
Once that free tuition was in place, 26% of Tarrant County College students enrolled in fall 2023 were dual-enrolled high school students. The year before, it was nearly 24%, according to data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. This year, the number of dual-enrolled students attending the college in fall 2024 is 12,500 -- or 26.4% of its enrollment, according to Tarrant County College.
"The bill itself creates a pathway, in the sense that it brings community colleges into high schools through the dual credit, as well as provides students the additional outcome for transferring to a four-year institution," said Atkins.
State lawmakers and higher education advocates will work in the next legislative session to see that HB 8 is working well to serve the workforce needs of the state.
The Fort Worth Report's Texas legislative coverage is supported by Kelly Hart. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
Shomial Ahmad is a higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report, in partnership with Open Campus. Contact her at [email protected].
The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
This story is provided as a service of the Institute for Nonprofit News' On the Ground news wire. The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) is a network of more than 475 independent, nonprofit newsrooms serving communities throughout the US, Canada, and globally. On the Ground is a service of INN, which aggregates the best of its members' elections and political content, and provides it free for republication. Read more about INN here: https://inn.org/.
Please coordinate with [email protected] should you want to publish photos for this piece. This content cannot be modified, apart from rewriting the headline. To view the original version, visit: http://fortworthreport.org/2024/12/24/texas-overhauled-community-college-funding-in-2023-now-lawmakers-will-look-to-bolster-it/