The majority
Texas's future workforce is Hispanic. Its pipeline isn't ready.
Hispanic students are the largest group in Texas schools, and fewer than four in ten clear any of the state's tested college-readiness bars.
Talk about underrepresentation usually starts with percentages of a workforce. In Texas it makes more sense to start from the other end: Hispanic students are 53% of the state's high school enrollment (843,738 of 1.59 million in 2025), more than double the White share at 25%. Whatever their pipeline produces becomes the Texas workforce.
Here is what it produces today. 38 of 100 Hispanic third-graders meet grade level in math. By Algebra I it is 31. Of Hispanic graduates who take the SAT or ACT, 17 in 100 score college-ready, and 45 in 100 Hispanic graduates enroll in a Texas college, a number that has been falling since 2016.
The Hispanic and Black stories rhyme but are not the same. Hispanic exam participation rose at campuses where Black participation fell, and the Hispanic college-going decline tracks the statewide slide rather than diverging from it. What the two share is the ordering: at every gate both trail White and Asian students, widest at the test-score gates. 17 Hispanic and 15 Black test-takers per 100 score college-ready, versus 46 White and 74 Asian.
For a state whose school-age majority is Hispanic, these are not minority statistics. They are a forecast.