Fort Worth College & Career Readiness Report

Fort Worth Education Partnership has released their 2026 College and Career Readiness
Report. Titled “Are Our Kids College Ready? What Texas College Readiness Indicators Show
About Tarrant County Graduates,” it looks at how Tarrant County graduates perform on the
indicators most closely tied to staying in college and finishing a degree. We also updated the
Sankey chart from last year’s High School and Beyond report to include two more cohorts and
new out-of-state data. The headlines:
Fort Worth’s college completion picture hasn’t moved.
● We followed 31,489 students who attended 8th grade at public middle schools in the City
of Fort Worth from 2013 to 2015. Within six years of finishing high school, 14% had
earned a bachelor’s degree and 5% an associate degree, the same as in our original
report.
● With the new out-of-state data, another 3% earned a degree outside Texas. Counting
every credential, including certificates, 22% earned a credential of any kind within six
years of high school.
Not all college-readiness indicators are equal.
● As required by HB 8, TEA studied the comparative value of college readiness indicators.
It found that graduates who met college-readiness criteria on the ACT, SAT, or TSIA
achieved the highest college outcomes.
● A Texas Tech University study of nearly one million Texas graduates across eight cohorts
compared students who attended the same high school in the same year. A
college-ready SAT or ACT score was the strongest predictor of earning a bachelor’s
degree within six years: students with a college-ready score were 22 percentage points
more likely to earn one. Earning an associate degree in high school was linked to a
16-point increase. Dual credit was linked to a 12-point increase.
How Tarrant County’s 25,785 graduates in the Class of 2025 fared on those measures
(TEA CCMR data):
● 93% took the SAT or ACT. 25% met the college-ready score.
● 70% Took at least one TSIA section. 23% got a college-ready score in reading, 23% in
math, and 14% met the college-ready score on the TSIA in both reading and math.
● 20% earned dual credit (3 hours in math or ELA, or 9 hours in any subject).
● 2% earned an associate degree in high school.
Note: These categories overlap. For example, a student can meet the SAT/ACT benchmark and
also earn dual credit.
Why do this analysis?
● Our college completion rates made us curious. There are many reasons a student might
not finish a degree, but we wondered what we could have known earlier about whether
students were academically ready for college.
● Many students earn the “college-ready” label under the state’s College, Career, and
Military Readiness framework. But not every measure of readiness is equally tied to
college enrollment, persistence, and ultimately degree completion.
● Starting college and not finishing, or needing remedial courses, has a real cost for
students: lost grant dollars, extra coursework, or, as Texas Tech’s Dr. Jacob Kirksey put
it, lost motivation. We also understand the importance of college degrees in students’
ability to earn a living wage.
● In the latest national parent survey from Learning Heroes, the majority of parents said
that if money were no object, they’d want their child to enroll in a two- or four-year
degree program right after high school. If that’s the goal, families should know how
students are doing on the measures most closely linked to finishing: assessment-based
indicators like the ACT, SAT, and TSIA.
● Families rely on schools to tell them how students are doing on the measures most
aligned with true college readiness. As a community, we owe them the full picture and to
support them in reaching readiness on the measures that best set them up for success.