Oil started flowing here in Alex Castillo’s hometown, and all his friends could talk about was how much money they could make straight out of high school.
Stories were circulating about pipe welders earning $60 an hour and truck drivers hauling pipes for six-figure salaries—without ever setting foot in a college classroom.
Mr. Castillo, whose father does maintenance work in the business, hopes to get an oil-field job when he finishes high school, in May. But he wants to work only part time and use his wages to pay for two years of community college and two years at a state university.
His friends have tried to talk him out of the college part. “They’re all like, ‘Dude, come to work with us,’” he says. But he’d like to be a petroleum engineer. “I want to get a college education,” he says, “and be a role model for my kids someday.”
High-school seniors are facing similar decisions across much of South Texas. A public debate has been raging in the state over the rising cost and, some say, the questionable value of a college degree. At the same time, the oil and gas boom has employers hiring people with or without one. For some students, the case for higher education is weaker, and college recruiters are scrambling to adapt.
College enrollment, while still growing, has slowed noticeably in areas closest to major petroleum-production sites. If that trend continues, educators worry, it could threaten statewide efforts to create a more highly educated work force. And if the booming oil business one day goes bust, people who opted out of college could find their opportunities limited.
In response, colleges are trying to make themselves relevant to an industry that typically trains its own workers. The colleges are doing so by starting and expanding both certificate and degree programs to produce welders, pipe fitters, truck drivers, and, at the four-year and graduate levels, engineers. Institutions are making the case that even if a degree isn’t required for a first job, it can help advance a career.
Much of the oil and gas industry’s growth since 2008 has centered on the Eagle Ford Shale, a rock formation that sprawls over nearly two dozen counties, from Gonzales, a rural town of 7,000, down to the Mexican border. Using a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, drillers are coaxing vast quantities of oil and gas from the shale, transforming once-sleepy towns into bustling clusters of RV parks, with roads now buckling under the weight of 18-wheelers.
Despite concerns about groundwater contamination, fracking is expected to continue unabated over the next decade, supporting nearly 68,000 full-time jobs in the Eagle Ford area by 2020, according to an economic analysis by the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Thousands of oil-and-gas-related jobs are now available in the region, and only about a third of them require a college degree, according to Reagan T. Dukes, an energy consultant who compiles news and job updates on a site called Eaglefordshale.com.
“Someone with a high-school education can earn $100,000 a year driving a tanker truck within a 50-mile radius,” says Mr. Dukes. “That’s pretty good money.”
Drilling contractors faced with waves of retiring baby boomers are trolling the Internet for job seekers willing to work long hours in remote locations as roughnecks and roustabouts. Those jobs can pay $50,000 a year or more.
Employers are appealing to many of the same low-income high-school students whom Texas colleges have been courting—like Mr. Castillo and his friends, who now find themselves tugged in different directions.
Slowing Enrollments
Texas is 12 years into a campaign to close educational gaps with other leading states by significantly increasing its college enrollments. And in recent years, growth was strong, with increases of 9 percent in 2009, 6 percent in 2010, and 3 percent in 2011. But this year’s enrollment gain was less than 1 percent, according to preliminary state figures.
Hispanics, who account for 38 percent of Texans, are the state’s fastest-growing and least-educated ethnic group. Right now they make up 30 percent of college students in Texas, and increasing their enrollment rate is viewed as key to the state’s economic future.
Over all, the most sluggish enrollment growth has been in major drilling regions, says Raymund A. Paredes, the Texas higher-education commissioner. Would-be college students, he speculates, are instead snatching up jobs that don’t require a degree.
“We don’t know how much of the relative decline is attributable to these kinds of jobs, but we have noticed that enrollment growth in South Texas has really slowed down, and that’s the area closest to the Eagle Ford Shale,” he says. Enrollment growth has also ebbed near the Permian Basin, a major oil-and-gas-producing region in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico.
The influx of jobs comes at a time when students are also hearing “apocalyptic accounts” of unemployed, heavily indebted college graduates, Mr. Paredes says.
“I’m certainly not going to begrudge a younger worker who sees an opportunity to go to work and make some money,” he says. But when the business inevitably slows down, he says, high school will be his or her only academic foundation to retrain in another industry.
Karen Engelhardt, a counselor at Gonzales High School, still frets about a National Honor Society student and top athlete who decided a few years ago to skip college and become an oil-field roughneck in nearby Yoakum, Tex.
“I run into him every once in a while, and I tell him, ‘You need to go to college.’ And he tells me he can’t beat the money he’s making,” she says. “A lot of these kids have never seen so much money. He bought a nice truck and earns a good living. But that kind of work can tear up your body, and what is he going to do when his knees give out and he isn’t trained for another job?”
The Case for College
College counselors aren’t the only ones working hard these days to make the case that a degree, while not necessary to land a job, can help someone advance and adapt to changes in the industry. The state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board is helping colleges expand training programs and design new degrees to attract students itching for high-skill jobs.
Last month the board granted $1.3-million to five South Texas community colleges to train about 800 workers in oil-field jobs. While community and technical colleges focus on skills needed for blue-collar jobs in the industry, four-year universities are introducing new degree programs.
The landscape has changed fast, says Pablo Arenaz, provost and a professor of biology at Texas A&M International University, in Laredo, on the Mexican border. “Driving up I-35 on my way to work, it seems like every day there’s a new drilling rig I hadn’t seen before,” he says. “We’re right in the heart of it.”
Enrollment growth at the Laredo campus has slowed in the last two to three years, Mr. Arenaz says. But industry analysts say that as rigs are established and drilling continues, some of the low-skill jobs that may lure young people away from college are likely to disappear.
“Over time, the more labor-intensive jobs are going to diminish, and jobs will require more skills and backgrounds to maintain the equipment,” says Mr. Arenaz. “We’re looking more long term to provide opportunities for people in this region.”
The Laredo campus is now seeking approval from the state to offer a new bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering. The college’s recruiters, who visit local high schools nearly every day, make a point of describing different career paths that open to students if they graduate from college. Meanwhile, Texas A&M’s Kingsville campus will reinstate a bachelor’s degree in natural-gas engineering that had been shelved in 2000 for lack of interest.
The biggest changes, though, are happening at community and technical colleges, which can adapt more quickly to industry needs.
Del Mar College, in Corpus Christi, has ordered new truck simulators to keep up with 54-percent enrollment growth in its intensive three-week truck-driving course, where students learn the ins and outs of safely hauling hazardous materials and maneuvering 60-foot tractor-trailers into docks and alleys.
And last year the Houston-area Lone Star College system established an Energy and Manufacturing Institute, mostly to train workers for oil and gas jobs on land and sea rigs.
“We have to build our capacity fast,” says Linda Head, associate vice chancellor for work-force development. “And industry has to drive it—not academicians.”
Six-week certification programs now train students in such skills as fabricating parts for rigs, assembling the machines, and operating them. In addition to using simulated oil-rig equipment, students learn essential skills for the industry, including electronics, hydraulics, and technical mathematics. Many students work as apprentices for petroleum companies during or after their training.
Collaborating with groups like the International Association of Drilling Contractors, the college tries to prepare competent technicians who can hit the ground running.
Recruitment on a Rig
One challenge for colleges is creating labs where students can work on the kind of massive, expensive equipment they’d encounter on an actual rig.
Just how daunting that task is became clear last month, when Ms. Head joined dozens of faculty, staff, and students on a tour of a deep-water rig docked in Corpus Christi. Decked out in helmets, goggles, and gloves, the group climbed six flights of metal stairs to the deck of the $560-million rig, operated by the offshore-drilling company Ensco.
Towering over the deck was a sober reminder of the industry’s dangers: a 50-foot-tall blowout preventer designed to avoid the kind of disaster that killed 11 people on the Deepwater Horizon in 2010, injured 17 others, and gushed millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The tour was part of a job-recruiting event for college students and their advisers, who came from the Texas A&M, Lone Star, and Louisiana State University systems, as well as maritime academies in Maine, New York, and Texas.
The energy sector, company officials told the students, is one of the few pockets of job growth in the country, and the offshore-drilling industry alone plans to spend nearly $1-billion in hiring over the next three years. While only 10 to 15 percent of Ensco’s positions require a degree, officials said, it will still need more than 100 college-educated workers to fill jobs among its 1,000 open slots.
During the tour, the group snaked through rooms whose shiny, primary-colored ramps, tubes, and wheels gave them the look of a fast-food chain’s playground. That is, until the group entered a glass-enclosed driller’s booth, with its dizzying array of instruments to hoist sections of pipe and feed them into the subsea well.
The students quizzed workers in bright orange jumpsuits and tried to imagine being in their boots.
Kyle Mathews, a petroleum-engineering student at LSU, sat in the driller’s chair and surveyed the screens that track the drill’s location as it drops beneath the ocean floor. He used to do manual labor on a rig, he says, but always knew he wanted a professional degree. Deep-water drilling “is like a new frontier,” he says. “All the easy wells have already been drilled.”
Ms. Head jotted down designs to replicate in the simulated training rig that Lone Star hopes to set up. The college is seeking a donated rig to convert for training.
After the tour, she says she has a greater appreciation of the challenges ahead to prepare workers for the industry. “This is a place where there’s no room for error,” she says. “We need to figure out how to give students experience before they ever set foot on a rig.”
