Texas A&M University has announced plans to build a $ 350 million satellite campus in downtown Fort Worth. Our region needs such investments in education.
The proposed campus will be “a center for collaboration between key Fort Worth industries and the cutting-edge research, education and employee training resources of the Texas A&M system,” according to the university’s website. Officials say it will offer accredited courses and education for the Texas A&M system, including the Texas A&M School of Law, the Texas A&M Health Science Center, and Tarleton State University.
Laylan Copelin, Vice Chancellor of Marketing and Communications for the A&M system, told us that the campus will be “heavily research-focused”. There will be no student housing and there probably won’t be many students on campus.
“It will be a real hybrid of a campus,” said Copelin. “There will be some people who are already employed and need additional training or an additional certificate. There will be many young professionals and young professionals. “
Representatives of several employers in North Texas attended the campus announcement last week, including AT&T, Bell and Lockheed Martin. Copelin said industry needs will influence academic and research programs.
At the moment the whole plan is preliminary. The university system, the city of Fort Worth, Tarrant County, and a group of companies called Fort Worth Now have all signed a non-binding memorandum. Nobody has signed on a dashed line yet.
But there is no doubt that this is a positive development. As we wrote earlier, Texas needs to invest in education to build a stronger, smarter workforce. According to Public Policy Think Tank Texas 2036, by the time we are 200th birthday, 71% of jobs in our state will require a post-secondary degree. But only 32% of Texas high school graduates earn one within six years of graduating from high school. Starting transplants in California can help a little, but Texas needs serious investments like that from Texas A&M to develop its native workforce. We do not see this as an encroachment on the Texas Christian University area or any other colleges in the area. There are plenty of Texans to be educated.
The project investment here – $ 350 million – is substantial. We welcome this step and hope that the project will be successful. We’d love to see a similar investment near downtown Dallas, where the University of North Texas and Dallas College are growing.
We’ll give a note of caution. All of these efforts are rightly focused on research and human resource development. That’s good for a satellite campus. But we don’t want our flagship universities to lean in that direction and exclude traditional humanities education. A degree from a Texas university should bring real value to the market, but also connect students with more platonic ideas about what is good, beautiful, and true in the world.
If everything goes according to plan, construction could start in summer 2022 and the campus opened in 2023. We cheer – uh, scream – about the success.
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