McAllen beats state, U.S. rates for bachelor's degrees or higher, according to Census Bureau

McALLEN — “Spillover” is a term all too familiar to many Deep South Texas officials.

But when McAllen City Manager Mike Perez used it, he referred not to border violence but to data that reveal his city’s residents are more educated than those in nearby cities and even the state and nation.

“A lot of people end up looking at McAllen as being a leader in South Texas,” Perez said. “But what we do in McAllen flows into Mission, into Edinburg, into Pharr.

“Everything we’ve done in the past 20 years to promote education, it’s all going to spill over,” he said.

Perez declined to claim McAllen is any “smarter” than other Rio Grande Valley cities or more established Texas metropolises. But the U.S. Census Bureau suggests just that.

According to its most recent one-year estimates from the American Community Survey, 29 percent of McAllen’s general population hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, beating state and national averages of 26 percent and 28 percent, respectively.

In the Valley, Mission hit 24 percent, with Edinburg, Harlingen and Brownsville trailing at 20, 19 and 16 percent, respectively. McAllen even outstrips Fort Worth at 26 percent, San Antonio at 24 percent and El Paso at just 22 percent.

“What’s most surprising is comparing us to outside the region,” Perez said, “especially considering a lot of people in the Valley think things are much better somewhere else.

“Comparing us to Valley communities, though, that’s not really fair,” he said.

A banking and business hub, McAllen naturally attracts more degreed professionals, said Fred Sandoval, city manager of Pharr.

The Census Bureau did not collect data for small cities like Donna, La Joya or even Weslaco. So, Sandoval’s city posted the county’s lowest higher educational attainment rate at 12 percent.

But like Perez, Sandoval said McAllen’s city limits are only so big and employers can only hire so many of its nearly 130,000 residents.

“Businesses that relocate to the county hire from all its cities, so we benefit from the proximity,” he said. “Still, this is a wakeup call for a lot of us outside McAllen to focus on what is a regional problem.

“What this tells me, most of all, is Pharr is underserved, educationally.”

‘MY OWN HOUSE IN ORDER’

School districts like Pharr-San Juan-Alamo already strive to increase college-going rates among youth, Sandoval said, noting early college high school programs abundant in PSJA.

But the low attainment rates spread throughout the Valley – only 16 percent of residents in Hidalgo County have a bachelor’s degree or higher – will not increase without the help of higher education institutions themselves, Sandoval added.

“An actual college campus in Pharr would help augment what we’re already doing,” he said. “We’ve been made aware of data like this for a while.

“Even McAllen can play a part in allowing other cities to get a campus” from either South Texas College or the University of Texas-Pan American, Sandoval said.

McAllen does hold claim to STC’s main campus and a UTPA teaching site off Expressway 83.

Perez said both definitely help his city’s education rates, but he wanted to wait before leveraging extension campuses in other cities.

“In time those will come,” he said. “But before I help you as a neighbor, I have to get my own house in order.

“And in 10 years or so, you may not even need a physical location to get those high-demand degrees.”

MEN V. WOMEN

The census data also confirmed a trend long-known to higher education officials: Young women significantly outpace their male counterparts in obtaining a college education.

In the country, 35 percent of 25- to 34-year-old women have a bachelor’s degree; only 27 percent of men do, too. In McAllen, that gap shrinks but only by 1 percentage point: 29 percent of 25- to 34-year-old McAllen men earned a bachelor’s degree, compared with 36 percent of women.

In Pharr, the male-female gap stands even wider. While a relatively high 24 percent of 25- to 34-year-old women have a bachelor’s degree or higher, only 6 percent of men do, too.

“The biggest employer in the area is the school district, and the biggest component of the professionals are teachers, and most are women. That skews the number,” Sandoval said.

He also said that’s why women don’t have great representation as city department heads. Only the recycling department has a female chief, and the city clerk is a woman, too.

“She’s actually a quasi-department head,” Sandoval said. “I don’t know how many of women’s degrees would lend themselves to municipal work” like utility, police and fire departments.

“Those are primarily male-dominated jobs, and unfortunately those departments make up the bigger chunks of my city government.”

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Neal Morton covers education and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at nmorton@themonitor.com or (956) 693-4472.

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CENSUS DATA
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