Southwest Texas College Board Approves First Bachelor's in Organizational Management Fall 2026

Southwest Texas College trustees voted on Feb. 19 to move forward with the college’s first bachelor’s degree, approving a plan for a Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences in Organizational Management and Leadership and setting a target to begin as early as fall 2026. The program would be the first bachelor’s offered in Southwest Texas College’s roughly 80-year history and marks a formal step in the college’s multi-year transition toward four-year offerings initiated after mid-2023 changes to the institution’s name and mission.

College leaders said the program will be submitted to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges for a level-change approval to move from a Level 1 to a Level 2 institution authorized to offer bachelor’s degrees. Mark Underwood, vice president of special projects at Southwest Texas College, cautioned that approvals could affect timing: “Quite candidly, it’s an ambitious goal. We could certainly offer it in the spring of 2027 if we had to wait, but our goal is to offer it in fall 2026 to start.”

Officials described the degree as intentionally flexible and career-forward. Del Rio News characterized the business degree as one that "offers advanced instruction in organizational management and leadership, and is designed as a flexible, affordable track for technical students and those balancing a work schedule." College materials and campus leaders say the curriculum will be built to accept existing credit hours from a wide range of programs — examples explicitly cited include business, aviation and welding — enabling technical students and working adults to apply prior coursework toward the bachelor’s.

Local demand helped drive the move. Underwood told trustees during the presentation, "The community is hungry for it." Del Rio campus vice president Connie Buchanan said additional four-year degrees in education and nursing are in the works and tied those expansions to workforce needs in Del Rio’s business landscape; college materials project the bachelor’s in education could be available in Fall 2027 while nursing would follow later because of accreditation timelines.

The board’s Feb. 19 session included other operational votes: trustees approved contract extensions for the college’s vice presidents and chief of staff through 2027, shifted the board’s next meeting to March 26, and authorized $191,412 to improve the HVAC system in Garner Hall. Southwest Texas College announced the board action on its LinkedIn and Instagram pages and the college’s LinkedIn page showed 621 followers in the supplied excerpt.

Next steps are now procedural and regulatory: formal submissions to the coordinating board and SACSCOC, review windows and any required public comment periods. Officials have not released enrollment targets, tuition details or a course-by-course curriculum; those operational specifics will shape the program’s economic impact on Val Verde County employers and on statewide capacity for four-year applied management training.