There’s a line from Sherlock Holmes that opens this episode, about an east wind coming before anyone else can feel it. It’s a strange way to start a conversation about plumbers and electricians, but stick with me, because by the end of this one you’ll understand exactly why I used it.
My guest is Mike Reeser, Chancellor and CEO of Texas State Technical College, the only statewide public two-year technical college in Texas. TSTC trains the people who build homes, maintain the power grid, and keep water running to 12,000 to 16,000 students across 11 campuses every year. And right now, Texas alone needs 141,000 more skilled trades workers than it has.
We get into how that gap happened, and it traces back to a decision a lot of us lived through without noticing it. Shop class disappeared from high schools. An entire generation was told that a four-year degree was the only route to a decent life, and working with your hands became something you settled for rather than something you chose. Mike lived that same pitch himself, decades ago, when his own father told him the degree itself was the thing that mattered. He unpacks why that advice made sense in the 1970s and why it stopped working somewhere along the way.
What makes TSTC different isn’t just what they teach. It’s how they get paid for teaching it.
“Our public funding doesn’t trigger until one of our students goes to work in the Texas economy, and that actual student is monitored in the economy, and the earnings that they make for the first five years drive our public funding.”
Most colleges get funded for enrolling students. TSTC gets funded for what happens after graduation, and if a graduate can’t find a job in their field within six months, the college has to refund the tuition.
“There’s actually two penalties. The first penalty is if our students aren’t found working in the Texas economy, we don’t get our public funding. And then if those students cannot get a legitimate job offer in their field within six months of graduation, we’re obligated to refund their tuition.”
Mike walks me through how that single rule changes everything about how the school builds its curriculum, who it hires to teach, and how closely it stays connected to actual employers in the state.
We talk numbers too, the kind that surprised me even as someone who’s spent years around the building industry. A two-year degree at TSTC runs somewhere between $10,000 and $12,000, and for students from low or moderate income families, a federal Pell Grant can cover almost all of it.
“In the United States there’s a federal feature called the Pell Grant. If you happen to come from a low or moderate income household, one in which your family tax return falls below a certain earnings level, you get a federal grant which pays almost 100% of that cost of attendance. So essentially, you’re from a modest family and you wanna be a plumber, you can go to school for free on federal money.”
We walk through what a plumber’s actual career path looks like, from tradesman to journeyman to master, and how long it realistically takes to go from walking onto campus to owning your own company.
TSTC produces more than 80 percent of all line workers in Texas and nearly a third of the state’s construction trades graduates, despite being just one of 50 two-year schools.
“We produce more than 80% of all the line workers in Texas. The Texas grid would really begin to struggle without the graduates that we have here.”
“We lead the market in building trades. Of the 50 schools in Texas, we produce 30% of all of the construction trades. If we had a pro rata share, that would be two and not 30.”
We get into why that happened, who sits at the table when TSTC builds its programs, and why Mike believes employers, not administrators, should be the ones shaping what gets taught.
There’s a story in here about a former student named April that stuck with me long after we stopped recording.
“Recently I ran into her on LinkedIn, which is the only social media that I bother with, and she is a seasoned executive in a community-serving role today, someone who you just look at and you think, ‘I should have known that April would be the true winner that she is.’”
And a moment where Mike talks about the chairman of his own board, a man with a single technical credential who built a career that holds up against anyone coming out of a business school.
“Our chairman of the board has one college credential, a technical credential in electrical power and controls… He left in the ’80s, went to work on the shop floor as a technician, and recently retired from a large electrical contractor in the Dallas-Fort Worth area as the retiring CEO. He has no other college credentials, only one from TSTC, but he took raw talent and the opportunity that his technical skills provided him and had a career that you can hold up to anybody from a B school at any university there is.”
We also get into the numbers behind why that old college advice stopped working.
“40% of all bachelor’s degree students in America are working in jobs that don’t require a college credential because they’ve studied in a field that employers don’t value.”
We talk honestly about women in the trades, about entrepreneurship as a natural next step after mastering a craft, and about what starting salaries in these fields actually look like.
“That puts them in tall cotton, as we would say here in Texas.”
We also talk about what guidance counselors could be telling students that they currently aren’t.
Toward the end, I ask Mike for three wishes, one for the past, one for the present, and one for the future of the trades.
“The first wish is that shop class never died in school. The next would be that the people who influence young people in their choices for how to spend their career were better informed on what the career options actually were… it would be that all of education aspires to graduate people into the economy, an opportunity to be contributing members to the capitalist system that we have, and therefore live a prosperous life with a rewarding career.”
If you’ve ever wondered whether there’s a better way to think about the choice between college and a trade, or if you’ve got a kid, a niece, a nephew, or an employee standing at that fork in the road right now, this conversation gives you something real to bring to that conversation.
About Mike Reeser
Michael L. Reeser is Chancellor and CEO of the Texas State Technical College System, leading the only statewide public two-year technical college system with 11 campuses across Texas. TSTC is the state’s leader in providing a skilled workforce to critical infrastructure industries like water, electrical power, construction, advanced manufacturing, and transportation.
Under Reeser’s leadership, TSTC has become known as an innovator in higher education operations, most notably through the Returned-Value Funding Formula, a state-funding method based solely on student employment outcomes rather than enrollment, and the Money-Back Employment Guarantee, which refunds tuition to students who can’t find a job after earning a TSTC degree.
Prior to being appointed Chancellor in 2010, Reeser served TSTC in various roles including chief financial officer, college president, and dean of instruction. Earlier in his career, he worked as a banker in executive and management roles in Houston and Waco.
Reeser is married and has four children and four grandchildren. He holds a BS from Texas A&M University and an MBA from The University of Texas at Arlington.
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