Policy Advisor
Grace works as the Policy Advisor for Workforce and Postsecondary Education at Texas 2036. Her work focuses on workforce development, postsecondary education, and advanced learning opportunities that begin in high school, including dual credit. She places particular emphasis on strengthening the connection between education outcomes and Texas’ evolving workforce needs.
Texas voters broadly support funding community colleges to meet the state’s workforce needs, with young Texans expressing the strongest support. Support reaches across the electorate Texas 2036’s 10th Texas Voter Poll finds that 74% of voters would be more likely to support a candidate who backs this funding, including 41% who would be much more…
The first two blogs in this series examined why Texas is considering performance-based funding for public universities and what outcomes a new model could reward. But creating a new set of incentives raises another question: Where will the money come from? That question remains closely tied to an existing source of state support known as…
The first blog in this series examined why Texas is considering performance-based funding for public universities and how other states have approached it. The next question is more concrete: What would Texas actually pay universities to achieve? At its core, the proposal would give universities additional state funding based on how well they help students…
Texas has been steadily moving toward tying higher education funding to student results rather than to enrollment alone. In 2023, the Legislature passed House Bill 8, which overhauled how the state funds community colleges by rewarding outcomes such as credentials of value, transfer to four-year institutions and dual credit completion. During the 2025 legislative session,…
Each year, the Texas Workforce Commission publishes the Self-Sufficient Wage for Texas, a county-by-county estimate of the income a working family needs to cover its basic costs without public or private assistance. The 2026 numbers are out, and they tell a fairly straightforward story: the cost of getting by in Texas continues to climb, driven…
Note: This is Part 3 of a series on Texas 2036’s Earned but Not Awarded report. The first two posts in this series focused on who Texas’ Potential Completers are and how close many came to earning a credential. This final post examines what happens after these students leave college and outlines policy approaches that respond…