When it comes to educating workers to prepare for the future, Texas lags behind much of the country, according to The Houston Chronicle.
New statistics from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board show that 350,000 kids left high school last year, including the 6 percent who dropped out. And only 145,000 students graduated with four-year degrees; that’s less than 42 percent of the number who left high school.
And that percentage is one of the lowest in the nation.
The low percentage of graduates is doing little to help the poverty rate in Texas. Which stands at 16 percent—much higher than the national average. The coordinating board has set a goal of raising the percentage of high school kids who graduate college to 60 percent by 2030.
But that goal seems like a pipe dream, given that Texas is having trouble reaching its intermediate goal of 48 percent by 2025.