Texas A&M is helping Tarrant students become engineers — and saving them money, too

Becoming an engineer isn’t easy. It takes intelligence, hard work and real grit.

But it doesn’t have to be unaffordable.

We’ve proven that at Texas A&M University through the success of our Engineering Academy Program, which allows kids who have the intelligence and drive to become an engineer — even if they can’t afford to leave home for a dorm room in College Station after high school.

More than 2,300 kids from Fort Worth, Austin, Brenham, Dallas, Houston, Midland, San Antonio and Bryan-College Station have taken advantage and enrolled in the academy program since its launch in 2015. And they are saving a ton of money in the process.

Getting this done wasn’t rocket science, and this program’s success can be replicated.

Here’s how it works: We send top-notch engineering professors from Texas A&M to community colleges, where students take their first two years of basic courses before transferring to the College of Engineering at Texas A&M in College Station to finish up. We have plans to expand this opportunity to other partner institutions soon, broadening the reach of this ambitious effort.

One of our partners is Tarrant County College.

Most of these kids stay at home, with the support of their families. That saves them tens of thousands of dollars in expenses.

The statistics on the kids who have taken advantage of this program are encouraging: 33% of them are the first generation in their family to earn a college degree. Nearly one-fifth are female, and 40% are Hispanic.

Of course, we were roundly criticized when we started this. They said, “You’re going to flood the market with engineers. None of these kids are going to get jobs. You’re going to get inferior students.”

None of that has proven to be true. In fact, these students have done great. The 256 students who have earned their Texas A&M engineering degrees via our academies have a cumulative 3.2 grade-point average, as good as that of our traditional engineering students.

A whopping 81% of our engineering academy students remain in the program three years after taking their first class. They’re not washing out. And upon graduation, they get high-paying jobs.

That’s because earning an engineering degree from Texas A&M can be a ticket to a better life. It’s one of our best degrees, and our graduates typically get hired right out of school.

That’s no surprise. The need for talented engineers is constantly growing. Just look out the window and you can see why: Everything you see was either made by God or by an engineer.

Thanks to the success of our Texas A&M Engineering Academy at Tarrant County College, more of them will be made by an Aggie engineer.

This story was originally published November 22, 2022 at 6:17 AM.