Each year, the Texas Workforce Commission publishes the Self-Sufficient Wage for Texas, a county-by-county estimate of the income a working family needs to cover its basic costs without public or private assistance. The 2026 numbers are out, and they tell a fairly straightforward story: the cost of getting by in Texas continues to climb, driven…
Note: This is Part 3 of a series on Texas 2036’s Earned but Not Awarded report. The first two posts in this series focused on who Texas’ Potential Completers are and how close many came to earning a credential. This final post examines what happens after these students leave college and outlines policy approaches that respond…
Note: This is Part 2 of a series on Texas 2036’s Earned but Not Awarded report. In the first post in this series, we introduced Texas’ Potential Completers and identified why recognizing their progress matters for the state’s attainment goals. To understand the opportunity they represent, it helps to take a closer look at how these…
Note: This is Part 1 of a series on Texas 2036’s Earned but Not Awarded report As the number of jobs requiring only a high school diploma continues to diminish, postsecondary degrees or credentials have become essential for securing stable, high-wage employment. Yet, while more than 90 percent of Texas high school students now graduate…
Last Spring, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the company behind the AI software Claude, told reporters at Axios that AI would send unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years. Last month, the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, told The Financial Times that AI could replace most white-collar work in the…
