The George W. Bush Presidential Center held an event not too long ago - in partnership with Texas 2036 - about The Future of Texas and put the video online. So here I am, writing about it. In 2036 Texas will celebrate its 200th anniversary and 10m more people are expected to call the Lone Star State home (compared to 28m now). Texas 2036, an organization led by past Bush Presidential Center President and past U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who also served as the past president of the University of North Carolina system, seeks to ensure that Texas remains "the best place to live and do business", even after the state gains in population the equivalent of another Dallas + Houston + San Antonio in less than 20 years.
For Texas to maintain its prosperity, Margaret Spellings explained that Texas must add 8m jobs by 2036, the same amount of jobs in Dallas and Houston today (combined). However, only 28% of high school graduates currently earn a postsecondary degree or certification within six years of graduating high school, while in 2036, 77% of jobs will require a 2- or 4-year post-secondary degree or certificate. In a nutshell, "Texas students are not ready for the jobs of the future." Academic performance in key subjects has slipped: from 36th state to 44th in 8th grade reading over the past decade, and from 19th to 28th in 8th grade math.
Another area of concern is road congestion. Further, 2m Texans don't have access to broadband, especially in rural areas. Population growth also puts a strain on natural resources. Air quality is strained and we are not prepared for droughts. Juliet Garcia, past longtime president of UT Brownsville now called UT Rio Grande Valley after its merger with UT Pan-American (and first Mexican-American woman to head a U.S. college or university when she became President of Texas Southmost College in 2986, gave fascinating insights into the population of the Rio Grande Valley and the unique challenges this brings. The population is younger than the Texan average and growing quickly, 91% Hispanic, and the poverty rate is twice that of Texas as a whole. Juliet Garcia spoke movingly about their enthusiasm for learning and, unexpectedly, their great love of chess. Interestingly, 87% of the Rio Grande Valley students attend "A" or "B" schools vs 65% statewide, 61% in Dallas County and 52% in Bexar County (where San Antonio is located). SpaceX was looking for a new place for its headquarters and UT Rio Grande Valley already happened to have some very strong physicists already and the State of Texas and the UT system added some incentives. The Rio Grande Valley clearly met all the requirements of SpaceX except for human capital and the community came up together to prove to SpaceX they should locate here. Young physics students made a presentation to SpaceX and convinced them the valley had enough human capital. Isn't that a wonderful story?
Someone from Anderson Medical Center also took part in the panel discussion, making the distinction between a sick care system and a health care system. Every Texan needs to have access to a primary care provider, who may not be a physician. Instead, a lot of such Texans use the emergency room to get care. 30% to 50% of cancers today could be prevented if we could deploy tools that work such as HPV vaccines. The highest vaccination rates occur in areas where we have the lowest health literacy, such as the Rio Grande Valley. The lowest vaccination rates occur in areas where we have the highest health literacy, specifically, the Highland Park area of Dallas, a super-wealthy area that has its own, super-successful public school system so that those kids don't have to attend the Dallas public school system. Texas has both a growing elderly population (mostly white), which can rely on Medicare but Medicare was designed at a time when life expectancies were much lower and is strained, and a growing young population (mostly non-white).
Then the conversation returned to Juliet Garcia, whom I love although I hadn't heard of her until I watched this video, and who said when she first became President, she asked other presidents about the most important parts of their job and the President of Miami Dade Community College answered: "Preserving the democracy of the United States" (a timely topic these days). That was because he felt that if he taught his (mostly minority) students well, they would become productive members of the United States. Then they will defend and sustain democracy and this is critical for our nation to succeed.
Back to the Anderson Center CEO Peter Pisters who talked about the 3 critical areas of strategic immigration policies (because the medical field currently relies a lot on foreign workers), massive investment in STEM fields (against, significant dependence on foreigners), use our graduate education program [GME] strategically for state needs so that students who are trained at Anderson are more likely to stay in Texas after they complete their training.
Another speaker, the CEO of Lyda Hill Philanthropies Nicole Small, talked about the necessity of building a more robust system of innovation in biotech and while Houston and Austin have done a good job on this, North Dallas has room for improvement in terms of the business side of medicine. Texas needs to have jobs to draw back people who have moved to the coasts. Texas by some is even viewed as a "Third Coast" for biotech, which is the first time I heard that name, but it is a thing, really, it is, in order to leverage MD Anderson in Houston and UT Southwestern in Dallas, as evidenced by an article in TribTalk: Perspectives on Texas and a report on Texas biotechnology and life sciences among other publications that mention it. Cancer is an example of where Lyda Hill Philanthropies use both philanthropy and investment dollars, with philanthropy going for high-risk early-stage pilot projects. The speakers provided examples of first-generation college students who rose to middle-class prosperity and the involvement of many stakeholders to make it happen.
The second panel talked about how we grow Texas's economy and invest in infrastructure. The speakers were Hunter Hunt of Hunt Energy, Brett Perlman the CEO of the Center for Houston's Future and Kelvin Walker, the CEO of Dallas Citizens Council. They talked about oil but also wind power in Texas. In fact last year wind power surpassed coal for the first time in the Lone Star State. Texas is a bit behind in solar energy. Some challenges are that Texas is the No 1 polluting state in the country and the risk of drought, which was mentioned by another speaker earlier as well. Can Texas become the low-carbon energy capital of the world? The moderator asked questions about resiliency in infrastructure and water, given that there will be floods and droughts. Floods also led to shocks and stresses to the housing stock, for instance in Houston. We have to invest more in infrastructure. According to a speaker, McKinsey estimates that we have a $50bn gap over the 25 years where Texas didn't invest enough in infrastructure so there is a huge amount of money that has to be invested in it now to catch up. This includes freight, rail, broadband and not just cars. Such amounts of money are going to involve private investments like infrastructure banks, said one speaker.
5G is going to transform the world in ways we haven't even envisioned yet because of low latency allowing for groundbreaking innovations such as autonomous vehicles. 42% of Dallas residents don't have fixed Internet to their home, meaning they do not have a subscription to home broadband, which is in part due to infrastructure. These days if you don't have access to Internet you are in serious trouble for instance for tasks like applying for a job, which is often done online now. We may miss an opportunity for the next inventor to create something in the digital economy. Overall growth and prosperity isn't shared equally in Texas. A speaker pointed out that Texas has added about 4.5m new residents over the past 10 years, which is equivalent in population to the state of Alabama. Dallas-Fort Worth gained 1m people in less than a decade. (I'm not sure how the conversation transitioned to that, frankly.) Then someone else talked about opportunities for everyone such as a free Associate's degree and another speaker advocated for coalitions. This reminded me that UT Austin recently announced it would offer free college tuition to in-state undergrads whose families make $65,000 or less. UT Rio Grande will offer free tuition to students with household income of $75,000 or less. University of Houston has a similar program for families earning $50,000 or less.
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