Austin is still booming. An estimated $25B in infrastructure projects in the region are creating thousands of good jobs that don’t require four-year degrees. And voters overwhelmingly support paying to expand training programs from Austin Community College, the region’s only two-year college.
But Austin also faces plenty of challenges, including expensive housing and a severe wealth gap, as well as horrible traffic and lackluster public transportation. Low-income residents won’t be able train for job opportunities if they can’t get to an ACC campus or find affordable childcare.
That’s why the community college just made a $130M bet on a new location in southeast Travis County. The 560K-square-foot complex will be home to its Infrastructure Academy, preparing students for careers in advanced manufacturing, construction, automotive, HVAC, and other high-growth industries across the skilled trades and applied technology. The workforce hub will be ACC’s second-largest campus.
Austin needs to train 10-15K workers a year for infrastructure jobs, up from the current level of about 6K. That will require tight partnerships between the community college and unions, employers, and the workforce board, says Russell Lowery-Hart, ACC’s chancellor.
“We’re trying to activate with urgency, gluing all these pieces together,” he says.
The project could be a national model for connecting educational pathways with workforce needs, says Lisa Larson, CEO of the Education Design Lab: “By repurposing space to create a hub, the college is effectively linking high-demand skills training to regional infrastructure projects.”
ACC expects to start offering classes at the campus this summer. It can move faster by renovating the existing complex rather than building a new one, saving $100M in the process. The first phase will serve up to 3K students at the campus, which is next to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, with room to expand.
Voters passed a $770M bond four years ago that funded the purchase. That money also can be tapped to help provide childcare, transportation, and other supports for students. A new “unified system” for wraparound supports is an improvement on the bureaucratic past, Lowery-Hart says, where services were spread around the city and available from various providers.
“The resources are here,” he says. “We’ve not had systems to access those resources in a collective manner.”
One Front Door: The Infrastructure Academy is a public-private partnership, involving the city, Workforce Solutions Capital Area, and other training providers besides ACC. And strong ties with employers, large and small, will be crucial to making the new campus succeed.
“There’s a deep need for infrastructure beyond what any individual partner can solve on their own,” says Lowery-Hart. “Need drives partnerships.”
The college is integrating the skills wanted by businesses across its education and training programs, he says. For example, Lowery-Hart points to Samsung and Tesla, which have co-created curricula with ACC. Meanwhile, the college is working with employers to develop pre-apprenticeships and other training pathways as the rapid development of local data centers drives demand for electrical roles and for workers across the building trades and construction technology.
Likewise, the Infrastructure Academy features a core curriculum from TradesFutures for a free short-term training program to prepare students for apprenticeships and careers in construction.
“They’re directly telling us what they need,” Lowery-Hart says of ACC’s corporate and union partners.
The college also is pursuing partnerships where businesses hire students and pay for their education in exchange for a commitment to work at the company—a model that has emerged in healthcare that ACC is applying to infrastructure roles.
“Employers understand they’re going to have to invest in ways they haven’t previously,” says Lowery-Hart.
Bringing many stakeholders together in a shared space is a smart move, says Larson, a former community college president.
“It puts these programs and models in one place with one front door,” she says, “where faculty, employers, and community partners can co-design new or retrofit programs, pathways, training, technology, and labs and key wraparound services to meet both learner and fast-changing employer needs.”
A growing number of community colleges are making strategic investments in workforce-aligned innovation hubs focused on emerging industries and regional economic development, says Erika Liodice, executive director of the Alliance for Innovation & Transformation, a membership group for higher ed CEOs, many of whom lead two-year colleges.
These hubs aren’t traditional workforce centers. Instead, she says, they are multidisciplinary innovation ecosystems that blend workforce training, applied learning, industry partnership, entrepreneurship, and tech commercialization under one roof. She cites these examples:
- Colorado’s Aims Community College’s Aims Workforce Innovation Center
- Wisconsin’s Western Technical College’s Wanek Center of Innovation
- Central New Mexico Community College’s Quantum Learning Lab
“Colleges can no longer afford to simply react to labor market shifts after they happen,” Liodice says. “Increasingly, they are attempting to shape regional economic futures by co-creating talent pipelines with employers in emerging sectors before workforce shortages become critical.”
Close ties with companies are particularly important for fast-changing industries, says Lowery-Hart. For example, he led Amarillo College before becoming ACC’s chancellor in 2023. The two-year college has worked to connect students with the fast-growing wind energy industry. But Lowery-Hart says the technology changed quickly and now requires fewer technicians to maintain wind turbines.
ACC wants the Infrastructure Academy’s new home to be a place where training evolves in tandem with jobs, so more people in greater Austin can benefit from the region’s economic boom.
The Kicker: “Central Texas is the heartbeat of the Texas Miracle,” says Lowery-Hart.