Category: texas

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Irving-based Fluor Corporation plans to hire 500 welders in the next year for projects in Texas. Human Resources Executive Jim Hanna says in his 33 years at Fluor, he’s never seen this kind of demand.

“There really hadn’t been a reinvestment in the skill sets within the construction industry,” Hanna says. “And you couple that with the workforces that are at retirement age, and there’s a demand within the construction workforce to give people the skill sets to meet the future demands,”

Enrollment at trade schools across the state is on the rise. At Austin Community College, Majorie LaRowe enrolled more than 500 welding students at the Riverside Campus this semester.

“As many seats as we can offer, that’s how many we usually fill,” LaRowe says. “So, since we’ve been offering more seats, adding more sections each semester, we’ve been getting larger total enrollment numbers.” But LaRowe says ACC can’t add seats fast enough.

“We get constant calls and emails asking for more students that we can churn out really,” LaRowe says. “Right now there’s a large demand for pipe welders just south of us, we’ve gotten quite a few inquiries about that.”

Construction companies need welders so badly that they’ll hire them even before they’ve graduated. Twenty-eight year old Michael Reyes is in his third semester of school.

“I actually just got hired at Austin Water Jet,” Reyes says. “It’s a shop job and it’s a decent amount of money, it’s opened up a lot of doors for me and the experience I’m going to get there as well as getting here, it’ll pay off.”

He’s happy welding around the clock for school and for work.

“Quality of life is definitely there, having a reason to wake up, better outcome for what I want to do for a living, definitely have a family to support, two beautiful kids, they’re the reason why I’m doing this,” Reyes says.

His 27-year-old classmate Michael Morrin says it feels good to be in demand even before getting his associate’s degree.

“I went around applying and I had several people offered me a job on the spot, several people wanted to get back to me, I had to turn down the guys that wanted to get back to me,” Morrin says.

The paycheck is good too. “The rates are pushing up to 38, 40 dollars an hour because the demand is so great and there’s not enough qualified welders,” Hanna says. “I see this demand over the next seven to ten years, it’s easier for me to place a qualified welder today than someone with a four year degree.”

Hanna says you might see a momentary pause in pipeline construction due to low oil prices, but most of those contracts were commissioned long ago, meaning the welding boom might be here to stay.

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More than 200,000 super-commuters make the trek between Houston, Austin and Dallas every week. Doing that by air or behind the wheel can be a major hassle. Marjorie Kimmel knows first-hand. She travels around Texas once a month to teach real estate courses.

“I tried a little bit of everything, most of the time I was a road warrior, gripping the steering wheel on 1-35 the whole time,” Kimmel says. “I also tried flying once which was a real pain because I have a lot of books and equipment when I teach, and so trying to get that shipped ahead of me to then fly took a lot of logistical planning.”

Limos can be expensive. Executives like Marjorie Kimmel don’t always see the bus as a possibility. “That’s not probably something I would have done, just because I would have felt pretty cramped and you know, I don’t know, it’s never even occurred to me,” says Kimmel.

But Kimmel is exactly the type of business traveler that Alex Danza had in mind when he started his luxury bus service, Vonlane.

“The idea for this was give people an alternative to that hassle experience of flying and the alternative of driving themselves wasn’t much better,” Danza says, “so what we’re trying to do is to give people a real first-class travel experience where they can arrive 5 minutes before departure, they get on board, they can start to work right away, they can relax, they have an attendant taking care of them, they have great amenities from complimentary wi-fi to satellite TV, satellite radio, food and beverages.”

Danza isn’t trying to compete against Grayhound or Megabus – Because he says Vonlane isn’t a bus, it’s a motor coach for executives. “Our rate is 100 dollars one way and we’re priced very competitively with flying Southwest airlines or driving your own vehicle,” Danza says.

Danza says a lot of his customers are lawyers – because riding his bus provides them 3 uninterrupted billable hours. So far, business is pretty good. Danza says the only real competition he sees is far into the future.

“I do think there’s a demand for rail, people ask me if that concerns me, I think it’s a long ways away if it can happen, but we’re definitely seeing people looking for an alternative to self-drive or the airlines,” Danza says.

A company named Texas Central Railway plans to use private investment and Japanese technology to run a bullet train between Dallas and Houston. Travis Kelly says the demand for rail is much greater than just the number of passengers on executive motor coaches.

It’s a lot of people who are making the trip now, but it’s also people who choose not to make the trip at all because to travel by air or by car is too onerous, too difficult, too unpredictable,” Kelly says.

Commuter Marjorie Kimmel says she’s ready for rail. “If they had a high speed rail system like they do in Europe from Austin to Dallas, heck yeah, I’d be the first to sign up!”

But the reality of rail is still a couple of years way.

“We hope to proceed to construction as early at the first quarter of 2017 and that would allow trains to start running in 2021 or 2022,” Kelly says.

High speed rail would cut the road commute time in half – just 90 minutes to travel from Houston to Dallas. Even in the fanciest motorcoach, it’s going take you 3 and half hours to get there.

In the meantime Danza says, at least in a bus, you’re not behind the wheel.“We get comments that say ‘I’ll never drive myself to Dallas again’, ‘I’ll never fly to Austin again’, and we’re seeing that repeatedly so it’s been very interesting to see that there is a marketplace for this,” Danza says.

The more miserable you are at security checkpoints or stuck behind an 18 wheeler on 1-35, the better for Danza’s business model – at least until you can board a bullet train.

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In 2003, The Texas Legislature voted to allow public universities to set their own tuition. Since then, tuition has more than doubled and student debt in Texas has skyrocketed.

State Senator Charles Schwertner filed a bill to cap tuition and fees at the state’s public colleges and universities at their current levels. Under the bill they would only be allowed to grow at the rate of inflation. But this bill hasn’t yet come to a vote, and there’s no indication of whether that will happen.

Lauren Asher with the Project on Student Debt says that Texas is doing relatively well compared to the rest of the nation.

“Texas had lower than average than debt compared to the national, it had the 32^nd highest and was 28^th for the share of students with loans,” Asher says.

But one of the reasons why student debt is relatively low is because Texas has a higher share of students who graduate from community colleges, which tend to be much cheaper. Among students who go to 4 year colleges, debt is still a big problem. Texas is among the top states with the highest default rate on federal student loans.

Right now a lot of students rely on Federal Pell Grants, which are about $5 thousand dollars a year. But when you add in not just tuition but housing, food and books, that just makes a dent in what it costs to go to college.

Which is why two Texas institutions are tackling student debt in their own ways. Memorial Herman, one of the biggest hospital systems in Texas, made an announcement saying that on July 1^st they’ll start paying off their employee’s student loans. Ann Hollingsworth is an HR executive there.

”We’ve long had a tuition reimbursement program for people who are currently going to school but we didn’t have anything for people who had gone through school and finished who were struggling with debt,” Hollingsworth says. “We thought, well what can we do to help the people that have just graduated who won’t be going to school anymore, but who are still paying for their education.”

The healthcare field is so competitive in Houston that it just might catch on. But there’s another novel idea in the works. Michael Sorrell is the president of Paul Quinn College, an HBCU south of Dallas. The small liberal arts college is now becoming a work college to make school more affordable for students.

“Being a work college means that every student that lives on campus is required to have a job, probably the simplest way to explain is work study on steroids,” Sorrell says.

Students can perform any job on campus, from administrative positions to groundskeeping. Sorrell says that by basically having students run the school they’ll dramatically cut costs. Between Pell Grants and scholarships, he’s vowing that no student will graduate with more than $10,000 in debt. That’s less than half the state average.