In Texas, high schools bet on a bright future for oil and gas careers under Trump

From The Hechinger Report:

MIDLAND, Texas — Dylan Ruiz sat in front of a nearly 6-foot-tall structure, a jumble of pumps and valves that simulate the flow of liquids and pressure changes. He was working through a training scenario on preventing oil leaks during his class on pumps, compressors and mechanical drives at Midland College in Texas. In the oil and gas industry, even minor errors can have major consequences.

Ruiz, a 17-year-old senior at Legacy High School in Midland, is one of about 100 students earning dual high school and college credits by taking free courses on the basics of oil and gas production through Midland College’s Petroleum Energy Program.

“It’s a boom-and-bust economy, but you can see the profits undeniably,” said Ruiz, who wants to be a petroleum engineer to provide for his family. As a kid, he and his family felt the bust: His dad, who entered the industry without a college degree, was laid off a few times. But they’re betting on Donald Trump to help usher in a boom.

For more than a decade, as many oil and gas workers near retirement age, the industry has poured millions of dollars into Texas K-12 education to create programs designed to train students on the basics of the industry. The investment in recruiting and educating younger people was in danger of slowing as the country moved toward clean energy production. But some educators in Texas say the programs have been reinvigorated by the Trump administration’s pledge to ramp up fossil fuel extraction.

Oil and natural gas jobs pay among the highest wages in Texas, averaging about $86,298 in 2024, according to the latest figures from the Texas Workforce Commission. The Petroleum Energy Program primarily trains students for roles as technicians, supporting scientists and engineers in finding and extracting oil and gas.

“We need those workers,” said Kathy Shannon, a prominent oil and gas education advocate who retired in 2023 as the longtime executive director of the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, which works with the school district to promote STEM education and jobs in the industry. It’s necessary, she said, to “entice these kiddos and teach them about the industry and why it’s a great living.”

Texas is among a handful of states — including California, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania — that offer courses in the oil and gas industry for high school students. It’s part of a larger trend of companies working more closely with school districts to ensure the skills that students are learning line up with business needs. Critics worry about the oil and gas industry’s influence over students, though, as evidence mounts of its environmental harms.

“The oil and gas industry definitely wants voters and policymakers in the next generation to be sympathetic to the concerns of the fossil fuel industry,” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit that advocates for accurate and effective science instruction. “The industry has a long history of making a push into public schools” going back to as early as the 1940s.

Midland lies in the heart of the Permian Basin, a flat, largely dry landscape in West Texas, where the nearest natural body of water is more than an hour’s drive away. Residents here speak emotionally about their connection to the pumpjacks, symbols of prosperity for the town, that bow their bulky heads and pull oil from the earth.

In 2015, Midland Independent School District and Midland College worked with local oil and gas companies to create the Petroleum Energy Program, then known as the Petroleum Academy. Erick Gutierrez, a department chair at Midland College who helps lead the program, said the idea is to prepare the next generation of oil and gas workers who can be hired right after high school.

The program was founded after Texas lawmakers passed legislation in 2013 to expand career-oriented classes in high school and encourage students to pursue industry certifications. Since then state officials have passed two more bills, in 2023 and 2025, that further expand students’ access to career training programs and to classes that allow students to earn dual high school and college credit, while reducing the number of state standardized tests students are required to take to graduate.

Midland College has recorded 1,098 enrollments by high school students in its Petroleum Energy Program’s dual credit courses since 2018. The number of enrolled high school students peaked at 211 in 2020-21 and has since fallen to 93 this academic year; college administrators hope the renewed federal push around oil and gas will help boost the numbers.

Using a $1.4 billion bond approved by taxpayers, the Midland school district is building a new high school, set to open in August 2028, and has plans to expand STEM education on that campus through a partnership with Chevron. The company provided $145,000 to expand coursework and training to allow students more opportunities to work in the oil and gas industry.

The hallways at Midland College are lined with banners featuring Diamondback Energy, an oil and gas company headquartered in the city. Industry representatives also sit on the energy education program’s board, as well as hosting job fairs, workshops, field trips and presentations related to the field. Most faculty and staff of the Petroleum Energy Program are current or former oil and gas industry employees, said Gutierrez, who worked in Midland’s oil patch in the early 2000s before joining the school in 2012.

Industry representatives help to shape the school’s curriculum, designed to prepare students for entry-level oil and gas industry positions, such as lease operator, lease manager and general field service technician. Students learn how to maintain, repair and troubleshoot equipment using training simulators to prepare them for the high-risk environment of the oil and gas industry.

For students who want to continue their education in energy and gas production beyond high school, preparing for jobs as petroleum engineers, geologists, surveyors or other positions that require bachelor’s degrees, companies like Chevron help provide scholarships to cover costs.

Gutierrez said when he first started teaching at the school, many of the students dreamed of leaving Midland because of the challenging job market. But now, with Trump’s pledge to “drill, baby, drill,” more are deciding to stay.

“You don’t see as much of a boom and bust anymore, you see consistency,” he said. “Companies will run very lean in order to prevent layoffs.”

Gutierrez acknowledged that some students have expressed concerns about working for an industry that harms the environment. He added that some of the program’s classes do discuss the ways the industry is making an effort to reduce its carbon footprint.

Under the Biden administration, jobs in renewable energy grew faster than the rest of the economy, while oil and gas employment fell. Federal green energy tax credits created a surge of new work and enticed young people to take part in the country’s energy transition. That boom has slowed with Trump’s deep cuts to those Biden-era clean energy incentives, although the growth in clean energy jobs is still outpacing the general economy.

Eight hours by car from Midland, at Houston’s Energy Institute High School, students can choose courses in engineering and alternative energy. Here, though, the focus goes beyond fossil fuel extraction to include nuclear power and renewable energy. The magnet school opened its doors in 2013 during an oil boom; donations from Phillips 66, BP and other energy companies supplement state funding for the high costs associated with the school’s required technology and teacher training.

Initially, Energy Institute was funded by a federal program that supports magnet schools and worked with the education arm of the lobbying group Independent Petroleum Association of America to create curriculum that prepares students to work with the energy industry as engineers, lobbyists, scientists and lawyers.

For Energy Institute principal Lori Lambropoulos, contributions from the oil and gas industry are key to providing high-quality, hands-on education. While she said competition for these donations has gotten tougher in recent years as more Houston public schools have opened STEM programs, BP is still a major funder of the school and sponsors its student lounge. The company’s logo is emblazoned on a wall near the school’s entrance.

That kind of money unlocks educational opportunities, regardless of what field students enter. Alexander Hernandez graduated from the high school in 2024. He was drawn to it not because he wanted to work in the oil and gas industry but because it was the best high school in the city’s Third Ward, where he lived.

“We do have a lot of those oil and gas very high up people that are just willing to spend money to build a new classroom or donate laptops,” he said in a 2023 interview. He’s now enrolled at Harvard University, where he is studying neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s.

This past fall, a group of students in teacher Calvin Mark’s senior capstone class at Energy Institute were in the early stages of designing a prototype of a flood protection system for Cheniere Energy. The liquefied natural gas company’s facility is near the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and routinely floods, Energy Institute senior Ramon Khattar Hatem explained.

“They’re really worried about the facility flooding, and they wanted teams at Energy to make and design a flood protection system,” Hatem said. Mark added that Cheniere Energy contacted him on LinkedIn to express interest in having students from the high school as interns.

Hatem, like many of the school’s students, wants to go to college to study engineering, maybe even environmental engineering.

Even as the oil and gas industry is pouring millions into efforts to expose students to job opportunities in the sector, opportunities are narrowing for students to learn in school about its environmental harms. The Republican-controlled Texas State Board of Education voted in 2023 to remove climate science lessons from most of its proposed textbooks for eighth graders. Board members expressed concern about how publishers depicted climate change, with some arguing that textbooks offered unfair portrayals of the oil and gas industry.

The state’s more than 1,000 public school districts are not required to use the board’s approved textbooks, but many do to ensure they’re in compliance with state curriculum standards.

More than a dozen oil and gas companies, lobbying groups for the industry and professional organizations also try to shape students’ career plans by funding statewide networks that support scholarships, pro-fossil-fuel curriculum and learning opportunities at museums and other institutions.

For example, one network, the Dallas-based nonprofit Texas Energy Council, offers college scholarships to students interested in energy-related fields. It also partners with industry-related museums across the state, including the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum, on industry job fairs, classroom speakers and other outreach.

Shannon, the museum’s former executive director, said these programs help children become interested in STEM at an early age — and develop positive associations with oil and gas that could lead them to enter the industry. “We have to have the dreamers, but we have to have the workers,” she said.

In 2025, the museum received a $50,000 grant from Exxon to provide free admission to local students. It also hosts free Family Science Nights four times a year that are staffed by volunteers from Chevron.

A Houston-based nonprofit, the Energy Education Foundation, offers free traveling exhibits designed to educate students in grades 5-8 about careers in oil and gas. Teachers can sign up online to bring the nonprofit to their schools. During its events, students receive a tablet with learning modules on what it’s like to work in the oil and gas industry. The foundation, which in 1997 opened an offshore drilling rig museum aimed at kids in nearby Galveston, has plans to further expand the exhibits.

“The east, west, north, wherever we can,” said Fernando Hinojosa, the foundation’s director of education and museum operations until late last year. “Energy is an international topic, so, yeah, maybe going international one day.”

Ruiz, the high school senior in Midland, has heard the industry is dangerous, but is confident that the safety classes he’s taken at the Petroleum Energy Program have prepared him for a job in the industry. He may stay on at Midland College and earn an associate’s degree (there are scholarships available) or enter the workforce right after graduation, maybe at Diamondback.

“I see them around campus a lot, both here and in Legacy, because they sponsor the equipment, the computers and whatnot,” he said.

Regardless of the company, Ruiz said, he wants to find a job with purpose.

“My dad, he’s always telling me, ‘Go to college, get a good degree, get a good job,’ and, ‘You could do better than me,’” said Ruiz. “He sees that I want to go into oil and gas around here, and he thinks it’s a good path.”