Opinion

San Antonio a 'college town' without the name

Celina Flores of Orange Grove moves into her dorm at the University of Incarnate Word. Despite having about 114,000 higher education students, the Alamo City is not known as a college town. Celina Flores of Orange Grove moves into her dorm at the University of Incarnate Word. Despite having about 114,000 higher education students, the Alamo City is not known as a college town. Photo: Kin Man Hui, San Antonio Express-News Photo: Kin Man Hui, San Antonio Express-News Image 1 of / 6 Caption Close San Antonio a 'college town' without the name 1 / 6 Back to Gallery

When people are asked to list the nation's top college towns, they spout off locations like Austin or Boston, College Station, Berkeley, Calif., or State College, Pa.

Sure, some of these locations are cities rather than towns. But the public perception is that of a student stronghold, where backpack-bearing learners pack cafes and libraries, or iconic college football teams rate high in the hearts of the masses.

There's one name that doesn't come up as often — San Antonio.

San Antonio is home to two public universities, four nonprofit private universities (members of the Independent Colleges and Universities of Texas association), five public community colleges and a public health science center.

Of the city's college students, about 85 percent go to public schools and about 15 percent to private universities.

So, the numbers are there but there are reasons why San Antonio hasn't historically been viewed as a higher ed hotspot.

For one, college attainment levels lag behind the nation's other largest metropolitan areas. Leaders in the community and higher education also point to other possible reasons for San Antonio's low spot on the totem pole: The city isn't home to a flagship institution, the college population is dispersed across the area with more than half attending community colleges, the universities' football teams are just budding, and other industries dominate the landscape.

The area ranked a lowly 24th among the 25 most populous metropolitan areas in terms of the percentage of adults with at least a two-year degree, based on U.S. Census data through 2011 and compiled by the Lumina Foundation.

San Antonio ranked a slightly better No. 15 — smack in the middle of the pack of mid-sized metros — in the American Institute for Economic Research's 2012 College Destinations Index. San Jose, Calif., took home the No. 1 mid-sized metro ranking, followed by Austin.

Those rankings take into account academic environment, quality of life and professional opportunity, said institute spokesman Jon Sylbert.

San Antonio was a teacher's pet in some categories and the class clown in others.

In terms of academic environment, San Antonio's student concentration and research capacity was lower than many other mid-sized metros, according to the index.

If earning a grade, the city's quality of life offerings might have landed it a “C” for accessibility and cost of living. And it would have earned an even lower grade for both the percentage of creative types — from designers to restaurateurs — in the workforce and for the number of arts, entertainment and recreation establishments per 100,000 residents.

In the professional opportunity category, Sylbert said San Antonio ranked low in terms of earning potential, but fared better in terms of unemployment rate, entrepreneurial activity and “brain gain,” which is the year-over-year ratio of the population with a bachelor's degree, using 2010 Census data.

Richard Butler, Trinity University economics professor, said “to get a reputation as a college town, that's not easy and it's only loosely connected to reality.”

Butler helped found the Alamo Academies, a partnership among cities, the Alamo Colleges, universities and other groups to train high school students for jobs in industries such as aerospace and information technology.

He said the reality of being a college hub is important because it drives workforce development and, therefore, the city's economy. But perception, which can be boosted by a powerhouse school and “an occasionally fabulous football team,” can help move the needle, too.

Why does that matter aside from bragging rights?

“If you're trying to lure a company to come to your city, if their impression is that there isn't much higher ed here, that's a harder sell,” he said.

But Butler said he was concerned that “when people talk about the college-going culture, they jump to the notion that that's about getting a four-year degree. I'm here to tell you that's a terrible idea.”

Research has found that a large percentage of job openings will require skills that can be learned through one- or two-year college programs, he said.

Butler and others said changing the perception of the city will be difficult, unless the University of Texas at San Antonio pulls off the transformation to the Tier One research university status that it covets — a dream that may be decades in the making.

UTSA's overall Tier One effort includes growing research programs and a university endowment, raising the profile of its faculty and expanding doctoral offerings, among other aims.

The school enrolled about 28,800 students this fall, and it pumps an estimated $1.2 billion into the local economy. UTSA estimates it would increase that figure by more than $2.5 billion, and add more than 9,500 jobs associated with the additional research, should it achieve the status of an elite research institution along the lines of UT Austin or Texas A&M University in College Station.

Texas A&M University-San Antonio President Maria Hernandez Ferrier compared the rapid growth at both UTSA, founded in 1969, and A&M-San Antonio, founded 40 years later, to Harvard University. Last fall, Harvard enrolled about 7,200 undergraduates and about 23,800 total students, according to the National Center For Education Statistics.

“Think of the hundreds of years that it's taken for (Harvard, Yale University and Princeton University) to get that reputation even though they have many less students than we have here in San Antonio,” she said.

A&M-San Antonio, still only an upper-level university, has experienced the fastest enrollment growth in the state since opening and enrolls about 4,500 students, Ferrier said.

Overall, San Antonio was home to about 114,000 students last fall compared to Austin's 101,000, according to data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

While San Antonio's sizable population of nontraditional college students may not spawn the creation of a party strip as famous as Sixth Street, Ferrier said she sees San Antonio's enrollment of older and first-generation students as a positive.

The average age of an A&M-San Antonio student is 31, and 74 percent are first-generation college-goers, she said.

“Because the first person in that family goes to college, their kids are right behind them,” she said.

UTSA President Ricardo Romo said oftentimes smaller municipalities make for the “classic college town” because the institution dominates the landscape.

“In College Station, what else is in College Station? A university,” Romo said. “You say, 'What else is in Houston besides the University of Houston?' Well, a lot.”

Alamo Colleges Chancellor Bruce Leslie, who oversees the area's five community colleges, said the location of a school such as UTSA plays a role, too, because it doesn't dominate the downtown area in the same way that UT Austin does.

“You just don't have that sense that it's a university town in terms of physical dominance and, of course, community colleges don't count, unfortunately,” Leslie said.

Robert Zeigler, president of San Antonio College, which opened in 1925 and is the oldest public two-year college in the state, said many of the great college towns grew up around the universities.

“San Antonio grew up around other things,” Zeigler said. “We grew up around the Missions. We grew up around the military. We've always been big on tourism. But we didn't have one single identifiable college in San Antonio that would make us 'a college town.'”

But the city and the institutions are working to turn those degree-attainment numbers around, and the community's higher-ed image could get a boost in the process.

As part of a citywide vision called SA2020, spearheaded by Mayor Julián Castro, who has touted building a “a brain-powered community,” San Antonio is pushing to enroll 80 percent of high school graduates in two-year, four-year or technical colleges by 2020.

In 2010, the city and the San Antonio Education Partnership launched the Café College resource center to assist students in achieving their education goals. For three years, the city, the partnership and other organizations such as Generation TX San Antonio, which promotes a college-going culture, have also hosted a week of events promoting higher education — from workshops to service projects. They've tried to spread the message across the community, for instance, by pushing everyone to wear a college T-shirt on a specific day.

Mari Aguirre Rodriguez, Generation TX San Antonio's executive director, said in the past couple of years she's noticed a change in attitude among students with whom the nonprofit works — they increasingly see the area's schools as a good fit.

But there's still a ways to go, said former Mayor Henry Cisneros.

“Frankly, the truth is that each of the institutions needs to get stronger in its own right, and then I think people will think of San Antonio as an aggregation of very good schools that makes it a college town,” Cisneros said.

jlloyd@express-news.net