The new $66 million Tarleton State University facility in Fort Worth is offering 24 different degrees this year with a strong focus on education and health sciences.
It's also opening doors to high schoolers who want a college future.
University offers opportunities to high school students
Born 28 weeks premature, Rose Jones has heard the stories.
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"My doctors, 48 hours after I was born, my body started turning down, and doctors told my parents, there's nothing more we can do," Jones said.
One doctor didn't give up, and Rose pulled through. Now she's a thriving, normal teenager excelling at Crowley High School, and as long as she can remember, she wanted to work in pediatric medicine to help babies like that one doctor who saved her life.
"I still took two classes, two high school classes my eighth-grade year so I could get ahead as much as I could. And then my freshman year, I did my first AP class. And then sophomore year was the year I started dual," she said.
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Dual enrollment has been around for a while in Texas. High schoolers leave campus and head to community college, working to get an associate's degree. It's a huge help, for many kids, but if you're like Rose, and want to go to big-name schools like Stanford or Columbia, students can run into some roadblocks.
Many of them don't take credits transferred from community college, and so all that extra work doesn't help much until now.
Tarleton State University opened a new campus in Fort Worth. They have two buildings up and running so far with plans to keep growing. Right now, school buses are familiar in the parking lot as Crowley ISD sends students to the campus for a dual credit program, and since Tarleton is a 4-year university the credits transfer, Rose is taking advantage of it.
"We did get a few looks like, 'Oh, they're high schoolers and they're not college students.' But they also looked at us like, they're like, 'Wow, you're high school students,'" said Jones.
Rachael Capua is the dean of Tarleton's Fort Worth campus, she says they have more than 260 high schoolers here, in class learning right next to college students.
"They can see themselves on a college campus. They can see themselves learning and thriving in these spaces and that for them, from an exposure standpoint, is our hope that they can see themselves here after high school in particular," said Capua.
Despite all the big-name Ivy League schools on Rose's list, and acceptance letters already rolling in, Tarleton is right there too. She's already there, and she likes the idea of staying and working in Fort Worth volunteering at Cook Children's the same place that trained the doctors who fought to save her life
