Collegiate Edu-Nation (CEN): To Fight Brain Drain in Rural Texas, Local Leaders Offer Routes to Promising Jobs

A nonprofit partnership in Texas helps schools and employers offer college credits and apprenticeships

By Carnegie Corporation of New York November 1, 2024

In hopes of persuading students to stay, community elders in Roscoe, Texas, have banded together to invest in school-to-career pipelines that create jobs near home. (Credit: Carnegie Corporation of New York)

As a teenager, Tim Luna thought he’d end up working in his mother’s taco shop or doing odd jobs around his small town in rural Texas. His family and teachers urged him to aim higher.

Luna took college courses for free while in Throckmorton Collegiate High School, and then went on to Texas State Technical College to earn a certificate in wind technology. Now, at 20, he works for Oncor Electric Delivery, repairing transmission lines and doing maintenance on substations so customers can keep their air conditioners humming in the summer heat that often tops 105 degrees.

“It's a very good job and a very good opportunity for me to learn,” Luna says. One key boost came from Collegiate Edu-Nation (CEN), a nonprofit that helps schools, colleges, and employers work together to create pathways to high-demand fields. CEN covered Luna’s college fees as long as he kept up his grades and kept up his grades and held down a job.

CEN “opens doors for so many kids who think they don’t have anything to do out of high school,” Luna says.

The nonprofit started in the West Texas town of Roscoe, which sits in a flat and dusty plain full of farms for cotton, grain, and cattle. Many young people have left for the city to seek better futures. In hopes of persuading students to stay, Roscoe’s community elders banded together to invest in school-to-career pipelines that could lead to jobs near home.

By the Numbers

Collegiate Edu-Nation (CEN) serves 28 rural Texas districts that enroll more than 28,000 students.

48 percent of the students in high schools implementing the CEN model are earning college credits.

In the first CEN district, Roscoe Collegiate, 88 percent of high school students were earning college credits in 2022, and 59 percent of the Class of 2023 were earning industry credentials.

In 2009, Roscoe Collegiate Independent School District became a pioneering “Early College High School,” enabling students to graduate high school with enough college credits to earn an associate’s degree — for free. Leaders in Roscoe formed CEN in 2019 — and since then other rural districts have followed suit. Now CEN advises 28 districts in offering career-oriented courses, industry credentials, and apprenticeships, so that new graduates can move quickly into the workforce. Some pursue bachelor’s degrees as well. CEN calls this a “P-20” system, spanning from preschool through potential postgraduate education, to spur students to pursue goals over the long term.

The effort requires extensive coordination among schools, community colleges, universities, and companies hoping to fight brain drain from rural areas that have seen population declines. It isn’t easy: hurdles include turnover among district superintendents, teacher shortages, and tight funding.

This push to boost college completion comes to a state where only 18 percent of eighth graders in 2013 went on to earn a bachelor’s degree, and only 7 percent finished an associates’ degree, according to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

“In 2024, if all a student has is a high school diploma, which is necessary but no longer adequate, then basically they’re a dropout,” says Kim Alexander, executive director of CEN. By that measure, he points out, Texas is running one of the nation’s largest “dropout factories.”

Alexander, whose family has been ranching in the Roscoe area for more than a century, says that new technologies are changing the work world so fast that students must learn independent thinking and self-reliance early on. CEN districts put a premium on student-directed research. “That’s creating lifetime learners to prepare them for careers that don’t yet exist,” he says.

With a 2023 budget of $5.3 million from government grants, philanthropy, and service fees, CEN has helped organize a range of innovative partnerships. In a joint venture with Texas A&M University, students learn to artificially inseminate cattle, earning vet-tech and embryology certifications. To combat the teacher shortage, a grow-your-own initiative recruits and trains teachers to work in local schools. Other programs span fields from robotics to agriculture.

Joey Cook, now 20, says he’s grateful CEN worked with his Hamlin Collegiate High School to offer college credits in welding and to help arrange his apprenticeship with Cary Services, an HVAC repair and maintenance company.

Cook is working at Cary Services full time while finishing courses at West Texas A&M University for a bachelor’s degree. He hopes to teach as well. “I knew I was interested in HVAC but didn't know how to go about the route, or where I'd go for college or where to work,” Cook says. “They set me on a path that’s been amazing.”

This article is part of a series featuring winners of Profiles in Collective Leadership, an initiative by Carnegie Corporation of New York in partnership with the nonprofit Transcend, that recognizes outstanding local partnerships that educate youth, bolster the workforce, and demonstrate the power of working together. The 10 nonpartisan collaborations in urban, suburban, and rural areas across the country draw on the strengths of local government, education, nonprofit, business, and health care professionals to catalyze socioeconomic mobility and civic engagement in their communities. The 10 recognized partnerships in eight states have been awarded $200,000 grants and will act as exemplars, sharing what they have learned with each other and more broadly.