While most of Texas’ eighth grade students graduated from a state public high school, only 1 in 4 eventually received an in-state higher education degree or certificate.
That’s according to new data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which followed 400,000 students enrolled in eighth grade in 2013-14 and tracked their outcomes over the course of a decade.
These outcomes varied significantly across demographic groups, most notably by income. Overall, 16% of students who are economically disadvantaged received a degree or certificate, compared to 36% of students who are not.
The Texas Tribune acquired student outcomes data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to get a closer look at how they differ between school districts. Notably, districts with a greater proportion of economically disadvantaged students tended to have lower rates, regardless of whether they are urban, suburban or rural.
Search for your district or school to see how they did below:
“There’s opportunity to learn from these outliers that are performing above average,” said Brian Holzman, an assistant professor at Texas A&M who has studied disparities in college and degree attainment.
About this analysis
The district-level data used for this analysis was acquired from the Texas Higher Ed Coordinating Board via a public information request. This data tracked a single cohort of students attending 8th grade in the 2012-13 school year to see if they received a higher education credential by 2023. It’s one year older than the state-level data released this week.
The Texas Tribune combined this data with other state education data we’ve collected. See our main story for more background on our methodology.
Correction, Jan. 7, 2026, 4:34 p.m. Central: A previous version of the district lookup tool listed the incorrect percentage of economically disadvantaged students for 42 of 1,208 districts. The share of disadvantaged students has been corrected for those districts.
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