Michael HornCo-founder and Chairman, Christensen Institute

The College President Who Isn’t Afraid of Speaking Up

27 Apr 2026 · 2 min

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2:06

In this interview excerpt, the former Texas Commissioner of Higher Education explains the vision behind tying state higher‑education funding to "credentials of value"—degrees and certificates that demonstrably improve students' economic prospects. He describes how, during his interview with Governor Abbott, he pitched the idea that the state should condition educational attainment goals on the economic value of credentials. The pandemic accelerated the urgency of this approach, leading to the "Building a Talent Strong Texas" initiative, which evaluates the return on students' investment by comparing opportunity costs and typical state earnings, and excludes credentials that do not yield reasonable economic benefit within a set timeframe. This groundwork paved the way for a sweeping reform of Texas community‑college finance, now linking roughly 95% of state funding to measurable outcomes, especially the production of these high‑value credentials.

Chapters

Let's start when you were Commissioner of Higher Ed in Texas, and you pushed obviously for tying funding increasingly to degree programs that both aligned to workforce needs that were in high demand and produced measurable, you know, real student outcomes, right? And what you called credentials of value. What was the vision then, and what's the elevator pitch you gave behind this?
Yeah, so pretty radical notion at the time that the state should condition its goals for educational attainment on the value of credentials in the economy. But that was actually one of the things that in my last job interview to be the commissioner that I pitched to Governor Abbott, and we had a great conversation about, you know, the potential of moving in this direction. And so Texas became the first state to say, we don't just want to make up credentials, we want to make sure that our credentials are credentials of value in our economy. So We spent some time starting to work on that, and then the pandemic hit. And all of a sudden it became a lot more urgent 'cause we had all these people who were out of work and sometimes needed additional training just to get a similar job in the same industry. And so we leaned in and the direction we set out was called Building a Talent Strong Texas. And so again, the idea is just, Look at what students have to invest, even account for opportunity costs, look at typical earnings in our state economy, and just ask the question, are students better off? And if they're not better off within some reasonable amount of time, you shouldn't count that credential. That was really important for us to lay groundwork for other work in finance in Texas, especially as you alluded to, we did some pretty radical work to reform our whole community college finance system. So now 95% of the state funding for community colleges in Texas is based on outcomes, especially production of credentials of value.